Alphabets of Sand by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker

Abstract

in the short poem "Betrayal/' the speaker admits, "Every man I ever knew / Iutterlybetrayed /with my joy in freedom." Poetry in translation is always problematic. Poet Jane Hoogestraat believes that "nuances are going to be lost inevitably; even so it is still important that theEnglish-speaking world has exposure to poetry writ ing inArabic." Helmy herself admits that "I believe that you cannot trans late poetry. . . .The translators must be creative people and know the play of words because poetry is about playing with words." Traveling into the Impossible is beautifully presented with the poems appearing in both the origi nal Arabic and the English transla tion. It also features allusions to familiar figures in Arabic culture: Nizar Qabbani, Abdel Wahab, and Syrian Druze, among others. Trav eling into the impossible, the poet advises, involves abandoning the "mold." In the final poem of the collection "Belonging," the speaker declares: "My heart is my own. / My mind ismy own, and my body / and my head / does not / know how to bow." Adele S. Newson-Horst Missouri StateUniversity IVenus Khoury-Ghata.Alphabets of Sand. Marilyn Hacker, tr.& intro. Man chester, United Kingdom. Carcanet. 2009. xii + 88 pages. ?12.95. isbn978 1-85754-977-5 Lebanese-born writer Venus Khoury-Ghata, who has lived in France since 1972, shares the same birthplace with Khalil Gibran, a vil lage in northern Lebanon named Beharre. She has authored sixteen collections of poems and twenty novels, and she was named a Cheva lierde laLegion d'Honneur in2000. In the translator's preface,Marilyn Hacker observes that "Khoury-Gha ta's work bridges the anti-lyrical sur realist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baude laire, and the parabolic and commu nal narrativewith its (wemight say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of Arabic poetry." Alphabets of Sand judiciously collects poems by Khoury-Ghata (and translations byMarilyn Hack er) that have appeared elsewhere: "Widow," "The Seven Honeysuck le Sprigs ofWisdom," and "Early Childhood" fromHere There Was Once a Country (2001); and "Words," "The Darkened Ones," and "The Cherry Tree's Journey" from She Says (2003) and Nettles (2008). The titleof the present collection aptly evokes thegrain of thepoet's voice throughout, that "eroticmixture of timbre and language," in Roland Barthes's phrase. Fittingly, "the first written alphabet is said to have originat ed with the Phoenicians, ancestors of the Lebanese," but the poet's alphabet is more wide-ranging. For Khoury-Ghata, words "broke up into alphabets / ate a differ ent earth on each continent." Some alphabets were read from right to left, others from left to right; some alphabets did not survive. In a poem dedicated to her sister May Menassa, Khoury-Ghata tells us that as young girls they had "vanquished the alphabet" when they wrote theword "goat" inboth directions. The poems inAlphabets ofSand return words to theirsource, towhat Barthes called "the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels." In answer to her own question?"Where do words come from?"?Venus Khoury-Ghata gives us a universe inwhich dif ference ismade visible, where loss Ilf?H becomes memory, and the familiar HHH changed into the marvelous. HB Maryann De Julio H^H Kent StateUniversity HHH Amir Or. Plates from the Museum BMW of Time and Other Poems. London / HHH New Delhi /New York /Toronto.Aark ^^^H Arts.2009. 28 pages. ?3.99. isbn 978-1-|H 899179-31-3 iH The half-dozen "other poems" in B?? Amir Or's Plates from the Museum llBH ofTime have been translated from H^H Hebrew, but the author, like some HH emerging world poets, has written ^^^H the rest inEnglish. Absent the transHH lators' credit lines,even thediscernHHH ing readerwould find ithard to see ^^^H a difference. Both groups contain|H^H direct, spare language, lines with fl^H significant internal hesitations to isolate a clause or image, and a fl^I reflected,understated tone. HH The six translated poems tend HhI toward narrative: an unrepentant Ki^l Nazi reflects on "the perfectmurH ^l der" in "A Glass of Beer"; cooks follow a master's detailed recipe M?H in "Immortality"; barbarians sink MBB seamlessly into theconquered city in ?H Or's variation on...