∎ Download She Says Bilingual Edition French Edition Vénus KhouryGhata Marilyn Hacker 9781555973834 Books

She Says Bilingual Edition French Edition Vénus KhouryGhata Marilyn Hacker 9781555973834 Books

Download As PDF : She Says Bilingual Edition French Edition Vénus KhouryGhata Marilyn Hacker 9781555973834 Books

She Says Bilingual Edition French Edition Vénus KhouryGhata Marilyn Hacker 9781555973834 Books

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.


Tags : She Says: Bilingual Edition (French Edition) [Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <b>Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation</b> She says</i> the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug</i> There is no fortress against the wind</i> the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls</i>-from She Says Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker,Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker,She Says: Bilingual Edition (French Edition),Graywolf Press,1555973833,European - French,European - General,031002 Graywolf TP,Middle Eastern,POETRY European French,POETRY European General,Poetry,Poetry Middle Eastern,Works by individual poets: from c 1900 -

She Says Bilingual Edition French Edition Vénus KhouryGhata Marilyn Hacker 9781555973834 Books Reviews

Venus Khoury-Ghata exemplifies a true denizen of a multilingual and polyphonic world with her ability to swing back and forth between languages and, thus, disparate modes of thought to establish a new and unique manner in utilizing language. Marilyn Hacker shares a similar space by being Khoury-Ghata's translator in She Says. As a renown poet, herself, Hacker is able to also inhabit a transliminal lingual and literary area by moving from American English to French to read Khoury-Ghata, but has to return to English with her subsequent translation of Khoury-Ghata's verse. She seems to do this seamlessly as her translations of the French follow as comfortably as possible and Hacker's voice remains a whisper in those transliterations.

In She Says, Khoury-Ghata moves in between languages and worlds, the real and the surreal, and she uses words and phrases that spark the imagination and disrupt our usual tropes. On p. 67, she writes -

"Because there's no shortage of summers

the days are like conceited generals

the nights like flashy women

the moon is the tool they work with

it regulates their urges and their blood"

"But it sometimes happens that they dream a bit of widowhood and darknesses

The sesame seeds sewn in their skirts weigh down their shadows

the lampposts bow gently as they pass by

and the fireflies part the air with their two hands"

Khoury-Ghata's lack of punctuation in She Says helps her verse to flow like billowing clouds. Her use of negative space is sparse and purposeful and serves as her only actual punctuation. I found her economic use of verse to be both fascinating and inspiring.

As Khoury-Ghata states in the proceeding section titled "Why I Write in French," she quotes Andre Brincourt who says that "`the Francophone culture is rich in the diversity of the tongues which nourish it.'" She is staggering in her ability to flow between languages and modes of thought and this I believe will help to strengthen the French language overall. She Says is a good portent for those of us who are still trying to deal with the imposition of colonizing languages and the resulting trauma in trying to reconcile maternal and former tongues with the new dominant language. Language must be dynamic to mutate and evolve, otherwise it becomes stagnant and dies. And along the lines of Brincourt and Khoury-Ghata, I believe that such tension between dominant and non-dominant languages can only serve to strengthen language in general and increase the level of communication among the human species. As Khoury-Ghata writes, "Writing in Arabic by means of French doesn't prevent me from listening attentively to the latter..." These are words to live by as someone who also seeks to broadcast the different cultural signals that every individual receives.
The publisher boosts that "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" (Publisher's comments from ).
The entire collection seems to have a female speaker, a survivor left to tell the story. This female voice acts as an interpreter and translator for the reader. Venus Khoury-Ghata deals with the female experiences and her perceptions of life revolving around ideas such as history, language, the material world and the world of ideas. Hacker comments in an Interview that, "Venus' last book of poems is entitled Elle Dit, and I've kept that assertive She Says as the title of the second translated collection. Having used the word `history,' it's apparent to me that she deals with the interpenetration of individual experience by those macro-events that we call `history'-changes in government, wars, migrations, changes in language itself."

In the She Says, portion of the collection, this female speaker is more ambiguous. "She is linked again and again, with trees-the larch, the cherry, the sycamore, the fig tree, as well as the clinging wisteria-with whom she holds contentious debates; there is a solider in her memory who reminds her of a war she would rather forget, of bombed buildings and displaces children; there is an angel who does household chores; there are the dead, who arrive like importune relative at her door" (Intro xiii). She is a woman "who has seized the word, written and spoken...She is not visibly a mother or a daughter, a lover, a spouse, or comrade, though sometimes she seems to be in mourning. She has the stature of a mythological figure, but comes from the author's own frame of reference, from her own annals of myth, which are neither European nor Middle Eastern but self-created, as this poet has, indeed, invented herself, and produced a body of work from a synthesis of multiple traditions and a unique imagination" (Intro xiii). Khoury-Ghata claims that, "my country of ink and paper got the upper hand over the one of earth, trees, and eater. I took shelter behind a white page while shells rained down on Beirut. What I made up had become more real than what had been buried under a weigh of silence and omission" (159). Her mourning during this time of war must have seeped into her work, without becoming confessional at all.
The poems are full of simple innocence and yet full of knowledge, they are trancelike, and yet real. There is little figurative language thorough out, and hardly any punctuation. Her poems embody the ideas of surrealism. They have the capacity to "suggest the dream and to express the irrational by effecting a synthesis out of opposite meanings, by freeing the signifiers congealed in stereotyped relationships with signifieds, by searching for `words without wrinkles'" (NPEPP 1234). This connects her work more to the French tradition than Arabic. "Its dominate tropes seem entirely her own, organic, with the logic of fables and fairy tales" (Intro xi).
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.