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She Says: Bilingual Edition (French Edition) Paperback – June 1, 2003

French Edition by Vénus Khoury-Ghata (Author), Marilyn Hacker (Translator)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 10 ratings
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Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation

She says
the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug
There is no fortress against the wind
the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls-from "She Says"

Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death-the backdrop of a war-ravaged country-are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.

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Previous page
  1. Print length
    160 pages
  2. Language
    French
  3. Publisher
    Graywolf Press
  4. Publication date
    June 1, 2003
  5. Dimensions
    6.1 x 0.54 x 9.02 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1555973833
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1555973834
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Living in Lebanon, I wouldn't have written books; I would have had children cooked" writes Parisian ex-pat Venus Khoury-Ghata as a partial answer to why she writes in French. She Says, translated and introduced by Marilyn Hacker, comprises two poem sequences, "She Says/ Elle Dit" and "Words/ Les Mots," presented with French en face, while "Their voices alone pass through all obstacles."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Khoury-Ghata effectively and convincingly leaves the language she lives in for the one that now lives in her." -- Pleiades

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Graywolf Press; Bilingual edition (June 1, 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ French
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 160 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1555973833
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1555973834
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.1 x 0.54 x 9.02 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

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Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

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Customer reviews

4.8 out of 5 stars
4.8 out of 5
10 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Rita in Portland
5.0 out of 5 stars Sensational Collection
Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2009
Verified Purchase
She is a master. Her poetry is so beautiful. As a bilingual reader I had a great time reading this book. Her poetry is so elegant that it can survive being translated to any language.
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Maya
5.0 out of 5 stars De(con)struction & (re)construction of words
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2004
On first reading of Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says I feared that I must somehow be intellectually stunted. I didn't get it and I mean that in the worse sense of the phrase. I found myself reading page after page wondering when I would get it. I then became angry at her for writing an entire collection of poems that I, an MFA student, did not get. I thought perhaps something crucial had been lost in the in the transition between Khoury-Ghata's maternal Arabic thoughts, her school-bred French écriture and Hacker's English. So I read the poems backwards, read the original French texts (I'm mostly bilingual) and still I was lost. So I had an herbal remedy. and a bubble bath. My mind began following the archipelago of bubbles floating in my tub water and I had an epiphany. I grabbed the book again. My mind had been tight, constricted and rigid, a state not conducive to playfulness. My very being had worked against the poet. This time I let her words play with me, rearrange me. And I got it.

Her poetry rests in a sacred place where words do not wish to be disturbed into order, where chaos reigns. And yet each poem resonates with a concreteness, a sadness. a stream draws a closed circle around her house/once stepped across the water turns like bad milk. (p. 73) I feel a sense of regret and mortality in her final lines. It's as if she knows the potentialities in our self-expression. The sadness I feel is our knowing that it can only exist here, confined within these pages.

At times I considered that English is too limiting a language to ever convey Khoury-Ghata's thoughts. This seams certainly true with the poem that begins "Les morts dit-elle/sont clos sur eux-mêmes comme le sang." (p. 64) "Morts" could easily be read as "mots" the French word for "Word," so that the English translation would read, " The words she says/are closed in upon themselves like blood," instead of "The dead she says." And yet there are places where the English translations resonate more strongly. On pgs 16-17, the sounds in "letters buried in their silicate vestments/become silenced sounds in the silenced silt" reveals more than in "des lettres enfouies dans leur vêtement de silice/devenues sons éteints dans la vase éteinte."

I envy Khoury-Ghata. Living in the space between two languages is in many ways a literary blessing. Her natural detachment from the French language allows her to play with words in a way that most of never could. I am reminded of Natalie Goldberg's thoughts on writing in her book Writing Down the Bones. She says that if we think "cut the daisy from my throat," then that is precisely what we should write down. But we censor ourselves, and in doing so we limit ourselves. Khoury-Ghata is consciously fighting against our urge to order and make sense of our words. She writes "One marries the words of one's own language/to settle down/ traveling is for the others/who borrow lines the way they take the train." It is this traveling that I envy, her ability to stay "single" when we are pressured to settle down with our language. Only through de(con)struction of our own language can we rebuild it in our own image, which might be feminine, androgynous, hyper-sexualized, depending on the creator. The idea is that it becomes our own and frees us. I realize now my anger was envy...of her ability and willingness to (re)construct herself.
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Sandra J. Macliammoir
5.0 out of 5 stars She Says
Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2004
For me, poet, Venus Khoury-Ghata is a revelation of the serendipitous union between the middle-Eastern imagination and the French sensibility, and I now can't imagine a library or a life without the cryptic, satiric, sad and fragmented dream world contained in this bilingual book

"Cold-bodied men are immured in her walls," she writes on page 59, " she retains their reproachful looks/ and that way of tilting their heads backwards/ as if they were discovering a new star...Their earthy names are strewn on her sheets which are blue with cold."

The poems of this Lebanese writer glitter with fabulist imagery that seems to roam far-reaching, mythic plains previously unvisited, even in fairy tales. Words, she says, used to be wolves, and "In her dreams she thinks she is awake/ a lame angel is sweeping her kitchen/ a herd of buffalo has been let loose in her lamp."

Khoury-Ghata is one in a distinguished line of Eastern-European and Middle-Eastern writers who use the French language as a refuge from the terrors of home, and in the process require it to accommodate their own cultural nuances of myth, aspiration and anxiety. Connecting her with the French surrealist tradition at the same time as setting her apart, translator, Marilyn Hacker, says in the introduction: "we are encouraged to take the surreal elements as given, not as representing something other than themselves."

And always through the elements, there is the disembodied, lone, dreaming figure of woman as survivor, as heroine and as creator, and always she fulfils her own magic, daring to turn tradition against itself: "Spitting in the wind brings happiness, she says/ and she calls down the wicked old winds on the winter."

The journey takes place in the universal imagination, and calls to mind at once the whole surrealist and magical tradition as well as the oldest myths and legends of civilization. On page 79, the poet writes, "The angels listening to her yawn politely behind their hands,/ convinced she's got the wrong plain and the wrong dream/ that she's knitting with an endless strand/ to the great despair of her listeners who leave quietly on their wing tips."

In an afterword, Khoury-Ghata says that her (prizewinning) novels, written in French, "served me as a mask behind which I could move through the fires which had emerged from my pen while my countrymen and women walked through gunfire with uncovered faces." Her absence from her mother country, "taking shelter behind a white page while shells rained down on Beirut," led her to use the pen as her weapon, she says, and in exile, "what I made up (became) more real than what had been buried under a weight of silence and omission."

Not surprisingly, her poems show a preoccupation with language, and in this book, her section, "Les Mots", or "Words," she questions the nature and origin of language, reverting to rewrite the beginning of the word. The first words she writes here are:

" In those days I know now words declaimed the wind."

(Les mots je le sais maintenant declamaient du vent a l'epoque).

I know now that in these days her words declaim the wind.
2 people found this helpful
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