Marilyn Hacker Research Articles

Introduction to Focus: Arab-American Literature after 9/11

Introduction to Focus:Arab-American Literature after 9/11 Philip Metres, Focus Editor (bio) Special thanks to all the reviewers and essayists who came forward in short order to contribute to this focus on Arab-American literature. I did not solicit reviews on particular books or authors; instead, I let the writers choose what they felt was best. What they chose were among the most celebrated recent works, though many others could also have been included. This is a moment of remarkable and unprecedented literary production among Arab Americans, and this focus could not be timelier; this selection amply demonstrates the breadth and diversity of Arab-American literature—which would include not only multiple generations of Arab Americans, but also figures who have contributed voluminously to Arab literature through translation and their own poetry, such as Marilyn Hacker. Though it is standard practice to provide a précis of the reviews that comprise the focus, I have woven the names of the reviewed writers throughout this introduction rather than explicate the reviews individually since the essays (and the essayists) stand sturdily on their own. In the very first Arab-American novel, the brilliant picaresque The Book of Khalid (1911), Ameen Rihani's eponymous character proclaims, "I am a citizen of two worlds—a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms." It is the dash between these two utterances that most intrigues me, a marker of the extra-linguistic leap from the well-worn notion of the immigrant's dual identity (threaded and tugging between the Old Country and the New World) to the idea of the immigrant as a proto-cosmopolite, one whose travel explodes the very idea of identity tethered inextricably and ultimately to nation. Yet even here, despite his leap, the problem of allegiance returns in the next utterance. "Where and to whom do I belong?" are questions that haunt immigrant and ethnic writing, and with a particular intensity under the pressures of empire and colonialism so evident throughout the Middle East. Arab-American literature and culture are many things, and perhaps its multitudes trace back to the slow breakup of the Ottoman Empire, whose various peoples and languages and cultures and faiths echo the dazzling diversity of the new Arab-American literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If the early heady cosmopolitanism of Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran strategically employed and occasionally reinforced Orientalist ideas in American culture, the energy and vision of their Ar Rabita al-Qalamiah ("The Pen League") was not fully realized until nearly a century later with the full flowering of civil rights, national liberation, and ethnic pride movements in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Arab Americans themselves—who legally had been considered "white" but who often faced discrimination based on immigrant status and religious/cultural difference—often chose the path of quiet assimilation. In the words of pioneering scholar Evelyn Shakir, "the first generation of Arab American writers (as might be expected of immigrants in an age of rampant xenophobia) dressed carefully for their encounter with the American public, putting on the guise of prophet, preacher, or man of letters. They could not hide their foreignness, but they could make it respectable." For nearly 50 years, the best Arab-American writers (among them William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist [1971], whose mother happened to be close friends with my Lebanese grandmother) only referred to their ethnicity in joking or minimizing ways (Blatty's memoir about his early years and war experience is called Which Way to Mecca, Jack? [1960]). Click for larger view View full resolution SeaWiFS image caputure of the Arabian Peninula (2000) It's emblematic, I think, that Arab-American poet D. H. Melhem focused her scholarship on Gwendolyn Brooks, whose career moved from the witty and empathic formalist portraits of Bronzeville residents to increasingly sympathetic poetic dialogues with Black Nationalism. Emboldened as well by the courageous work of Edward Said—whose landmark Orientalism (1978) was quickly followed by ground-breaking critiques of empire, Zionism, and representations of Islam—Arab-American writers such as Lawrence Joseph, Etel Adnan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sam Hazo, Elmaz Abinader, and others began...

Lot's Wife, and: The Great Ledger

Lot's Wife, and: The Great Ledger Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (bio) Translated by Marilyn Hacker (bio) Lot's Wife Serious Sodom boasted its budgets, its lawsFor neither war no prophecy had soiled the city.Housewifely Sodom took care of its temples, its roofsWith a fortitude earned by not praying for rainAnd remained unsullied by ecstasy, riot, and hope.Honest Sodom spreads its ramparts across the plain. I was born in a country of rocks and springs, far from the plainIn a goiterous village of folk with no silos, no laws.The cripple extends his cracked bowl, the idiot, grinning in hope,Sings and leaps under the mud shower skirting the cities.Hunger comes with winter; feast days follow rainAnd disguised as a sleepwalker, God sometimes walks on the roofs. The angel appeared as I languished one night on the roofWho had come to save me from the savage city of the plain.Now I return toward my homeland of stone and of rain.He showed me the hidden door in the wall of their law.On this path which rises above the cityI can smell on the wind the wide spaces of hope. Don't turn back. Don't listen. Abandon all hopeOf rescuing even that deaf-mute child and that dog. The roofsSeep beneath the foul cloud stagnating over the city.But who am I to be saved alone on the plain?An ass brays. A carter and his horse, knowing no law,Return toward what they believe is a promise of rain. The trees sleep dreamless, long deprived of rain.The trees in the dimming light make signs without hope.Dogs frolic. A cat gives birth. The law's [End Page 117] Base lava will wash over these roofsAnd the fountains dimly humming on the plain.Who am I to be saved in exchange for the loss of a city? One God, true God, God of all the cities,God who is prodigal with or who holds back rain,God who exiled me long ago on the plain,I do not want to survive without hope.These harmless palm trees, unloved children, roofsUndefended, all bear witness against your law. Lot's wife, the foreigner, looks down at the roofsOf all those loveless beings blinded on the plainAnd resigned, descends to be lost with the city. The Great Ledger They'll tell you that sunshine will follow the rain; they'll tell youThat a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Don't believe it.It is good that after the rain comes the deluge; it is excellentThat a bird in the hand brings two wolves out of the bushes; it is necessaryThat for not having gone often enough to the well The pitcher be broken. Erase and start again. They'll tell you that after two 9s there's often a 36 [End Page 118] And that last summer at Evian zero came up three times in a row. It's trueA colonel who'd gone to the École Polytechnique played the limit three times on a zero;Five hundred thousand francs; thank you from the employees, thank you sir fromThe accountants of the great ledger where your military service record has always Been noted down. Campaigns under Charles known as the Wise, under Pyrrhus, under Ramses II,Under Hammurabi; nine wounds; two dead on the scaffold; A suicide;A life wasted as a magistrate's wife. As decorationsA child raised to hate everyone, a word kept despite common sense,Three defeats by stubbornness against all evidence, Dishonor and fidelity. He says to her: So you stayed with him? Well, yes, sheStayed with him, got laid three times, of which the first Was spoiled for herAnd the third spoiled by him. But who knows on what grounds.That was part of her own service record. And by what rightDid he feel himself so magnanimous, so generous, for having forgiven her? She belongs to no one.I don't belong to myself. I don't know where I come from, I don't...

Poet Beyond Borders

Poet Beyond Borders Marilyne Bertoncini (bio) He and I. Emmanuel Moses. Translated by Marilyn Hacker. Oberlin College Press. http://www.oberlin.edu/ocpress. 80 pages; paper, $15.95. Not unlike other French poets translated by Marilyn Hacker and previously reviewed in these pages (Venus Khoury-Ghata and Guy Goffette, 30.2), Emmanuel Moses is a "citizen of two countries" and poet of margins and passages. He was born in French Morocco in 1959, a student in Israel, now living in Paris, a translator and editor, fluent in four languages, author of novels, short stories, and poems, he is a remarkable figure of the modern cosmopolitan "poète sans frontières," as Marilyn Hacker states in her useful introduction to this beautiful translation. Here is a poet beyond borders, but not without roots: his spirit moves from one geographical culture to another, from one past historical period to the present. The poems of He and I were culled from three different titles, two of which were published in 2006, 2009, and the final one is scheduled for 2010. The book is here organized in five sections. The first one, with the mirror title evoking both the writer and his double (who might also be his translator), brings us to reflect on the writing process. Recalling "Old Conversations," places (with the subtle irony of the messages written by tourists in the poem ending with the notice that "Tirelessly, distance plays / its melancholy minuet"), a question about "Ugliness" as a possible inspiration in a girl's travel journal, it ends on a wistful "Golden Age," which mood evokes Stéphane Mallarmé: "Memories of lace are rustling everywhere / and the swan's dawn cry / freezes forever." The second section introduces the reader to Mr. Nobody, an emblematic figure in Moses's work, who first appeared in 2003. Discovering him in Marilyn Hacker's translation makes me consider that this character, besides its being an echo of Henri Michaux's Monsieur Plume, in Un Certain Plume (1930), is still more a kin—a twin—to a very American urban and poetical figure—whose "saga"—Tony's World—has just been published by Barry Wallenstein. Both are modern, pensive, self-deprecating, and lonely characters, traveling, frequenting bars, motels, and hotel rooms—nowhere places in a way. This is a recurrent theme throughout the whole work for these who are as well Nobody as Everybody, as surely as they are a paper double of the poet, listening or talking to voices ("Mr. Nobody Speaks To His Voice"), fumbling for a notebook ("Mr. Nobody Joins The Broken Hearts' Club") in an empty unlit room where the waiters have left "just one ceiling lamp lit above his head / which shines on his glass his pen his hands with their bitten nails." Mr. Nobody's self-irony, brought forward by very simple words, which treat of petty human problems (the tragic-comical "heroe's" tuna allergy for one) is characteristic of the author's style. Moses makes of this falsely neutral writing on small items of life the basis of the highest poetical language, reminding us of the metaphysical poets such as George Herbert, the poet's choice for an epigraph. This inspiration is visible in rare and precious images such as this pictorial "eye-blue stained glass where a dove / spreads an enigma's wings / between two discreet roses!" Few images, but of a luminous effect (the efficient "how blonde the light is today / around him") bloom in fluid open forms where verses and narrative prose passages, lyric and conversational "terre à terre" considerations, dialogues or fragments, alternate. This construction weaves overlapping thoughts and memories which make the reader travel through ages (incarnating soldiers of various battles in "Riverbend Passage"—victim or executioner, as in "And I Killed Them All") or exploring lives, places, and "beings": I—we—clouds..................I was magical metamorphosedthe restless child. The whole selection, ending with two sections entitled "Etudes and Elegies" and "The Music That Set Him On This Road," illustrates the richness and versatility of Emmanuel Moses's work. It also underlines the strong autobiographical line of this inspiration: the memory of his father (an authority in Jewish tradition and philosophy, who studied...

Alphabets of Sand by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker

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...

Interview with Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker has published eleven collections of poetry including Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006) and Deseperanto (W.W. Norton, 2003). She is also an internationally renowned translator, former Editor- in-Chief of the Kenyon Review, and now serves on the editorial board of Siecle 21 in France and co-edits the University of Michigan Poets on Poetry series.

Plates from the Museum of Time and Other Poems by Amir Or

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...

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Etienne (review)

202Women in French Studies Cultural Studies seen through the lens of Accad's career, although the author should have elaborated on some points (for instance, what brought about the demise of Francophone Literature at her institution?). Vieille's piece could have provided an important account on the post-9/1 1 climate in academia, but unfortunately, as it stands, refusing to give specifics and casually written, it serves only to highlight Accad's courageous stance against the war on the occasion of one roundtable discussion. Next come "On Accad and Otherness," "Accad on Tradition and Modernity," "On Accad and Wellness, Trauma, and Mental and Physical Excision," "On Translating Accad," and "On Creative Writing: Accad-Inspired Works," the last section being out of place in a scholarly volume. A bibliography and scanty index close the collection. While the multi-faceted aspects of Accad's work are repeatedly mentioned, the volume focuses on her four novels while occasionally drawing on her two scholarly books. It is regrettable that her songs are not given any attention, although the importance of singing for Accad is mentioned several times. The best essays are the ones that focus on Accad's most accomplished text, Voyages en Cancer (Zupancic, Hottell) as well as DiLiberti's comparative essay on L'Excisée and Chedid's Le sommeil délivré, Solheim's piece on Coquelicot du massacre, and Hahn's on translating Accad's novels. Occasional gross errors seem to betray hasty and superficial readings. For instance, in one of the essays, the character known as P. throughout L'Excisée becomes "Samir," (268-271), quite puzzlingly especially in light of the symbolism of the main characters' names. I have never met Accad, but this collection seems to be a testimony to her kind mentoring and endearing personality, since many of the pieces pay tribute to her in one way or another. Overall, however, the volume fails to meet expectations as it does not offer a sustained scholarly examination of Accad's work. Carine BourgetUniversity of Arizona Translations Etienne, Marie. King ofa Hundred Horsemen. Trans. Marilyn Hacker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Pp [i]-xvii; 203. ISBN 0-374-181187 . $25.00 (Cloth). In King of a Hundred Horsemen, by Marie Etienne, Marilyn Hacker continues her laudable pursuits as a poet and translator closely involved with contemporary French writers. Already a winner of numerous literary awards, she gracefully presents here the first of Marie Etienne's titles to be published in English, an important work on numerous levels that received in 2007 the National Poetry Series' first Robert Fagles Translation Prize, through selection by Robert Hass. Book Reviews203 The Translator's Preface provides an invaluable introduction to Marie Etienne, whose background has closely informed this unusual "polyvocal text" (x). Having spent her life as a traveler between cultures, first during her childhood in Indochina, Europe and Africa and later as a writer assisting French theater director Antoine Vitez, the author enjoys bringing multiple perspectives to bear on her books, which include poetry, novels, an essay and several collections that, like King of a Hundred Horsemen (first published in French in 2002, as Roi des cent cavaliers), experiment with genre boundaries. King of a Hundred Horsemen brings to the fore a constant sense of mise-en-scène, including multiple narrative voices, dialogic structures and boldly juxtaposed sections—e.g., "Ocean / Emotion," "Proof by the Birds," "War Diary"—divided in a careful mathematical logic. Marilyn Hacker's comments situate Marie Etienne in French poetry today and highlight the relevance of the various tensions her style establishes. Hacker points out the author's convictions about writing as a space of controlled exploration, especially the potential for a "protean" lyric "I" to have "a voice marked as a woman's while engaged in quests and exploration rather than self-examination" (xiii). She offers insights on the "mosaic of shattered mirrors" (xvii) that King of a Hundred Horsemen could be said to represent, what with its disparate themes introduced by two protagonists, a first-person narrator, a reappearing child interlocutor, interpolations in famous writers' voices and descriptive evocations of painters, the whole within nine sequences whose ten sonnets per sequence contain...

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII trained in classical history as well as ancient and modern Greek. The magnitude of his achievement in these two volumes is dazzling. In addition toproviding richlydetailed notes to support the reader's under standing of the often obscure his torical contexts of the poems, he also sets the bar for authenticity in translatingunusually high. Mendelsohn demythologizes the popular notion that Cavafy's characteristically plain lines? which are freeof similes and meta phors?are actually a kind of prose masquerading as lyric poetry. He emphasizes the complex, intricately woven texture of the poet's lan guage, which combines the classic forms of vocabulary and grammar known as "Katharevousa" with demotic Greek. Unlike previous translators of Cavafy, not only do Mendelsohn's translations convey the mingling of archaic and modern Greek in the original, but they also restore the rhythm and visual for mat ofCavafy's metrically inventive "tango" poems, inwhich each line contains two fragmented half-lines of threebeats divided by an expanse of white space. To these substan tial innovations, Mendelsohn adds a faithful adherence to the poet's pattern ofwriting lines thatare often enjambed or end-rhymed, compen sating forthe latter with slant rhyme or assonance. The remarkable results give us the closest English equiva lence todate of theelegant Cavafian diction, tone, and music. As a young man of letters writ ing during the 1880s and 1890s, Cavafy was more active as a scholar thana poet, although hewas already writing and publishing poems. Then at some time early in the twentieth century, as his fellow poet George Seferis commented, "something extraordinary happens." Cavafy's MMIIIIIII 11 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIII Mill Illlllllllllll passion for history, invigorated by reading the eighteenth-century Enlightenment historian Gibbons and the nineteenth-century Roman tic historian Paparrigopoulos, merged with the poet's homosex ual passion. A lover of secrets and mysteries, Cavafy began to fusehis focus on marginal figures forgotten in thecracks ofpost-Hellenic history with his own secret homoerotic life conducted inAlexandria's less repu tablequarters.Now Cavafy's poems took on their hauntingly nostalgic tone?the voice of an advice-giver who isworld-weary yetdeeply sym pathetic to human weakness. The principal players in these poems are not the vulnerable his toric figures themselves but time and memory. Although Cavafy's speakers rue the passing of time, theyexalt in theway itperfects and revivifies desire. The older speaker of the exquisitely translated unfin ished poem "It Must Have Been theSpirits" feels a surge of freedom recalling a night of sensual plea sure: "My soul was released; the poor thing,it's / always constrained by the weight of years." Another iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiii aging lover savors anew his origi nal euphoric intensity in the act of remembering and poeticizing it: "as I write, after so many years have passed!, / in my solitaryhouse, I am drunk again." Yet memory doesn't simply evoke the force of love? it clarifies present experience. The pagan speaker in "Mires:Alexandria in 340 a.D." mourns the loss of his companion inpassional pursuits yet suddenly realizes in the midst of his friend's Christian funeral rites that Mires was less an intimate than a strangerwho had followed an alien god; he flees "before their Christian ity/ could get hold of, could alter, the memory ofMires." Although accomplished trans lations of Cavafy's collected poems already exist?notably those of Rae Dalven and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard?Mendelsohn has given us the firstEnglish transla tions of thepoet's thirty unfinished poems, which he continually refined during his lifetimebut never con sidered ready forpublication. While the poems are gracefully rendered, the reason why the poet consid ered them incomplete seems clear: they are essentially narrative and descriptive and, with the exception of "ItMust Have Been the Spirits," they lack the spark of philosophic transformationthattypifies Cavafy's most memorable verse. Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey Marie Etienne.King of a Hundred Horsemen. Marilyn Hacker, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008. xvii + 203 pages. $25. isbn978-0-374 Marilyn Hacker received the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize, established by theNational Poetry Series in 2007, for her translation 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 i^^^H 701World Literature Today , of Roi des cent cavaliers, by Marie 1 Etienne, the...

From Tales of a Severed Head

from Tales of a Severed Head* Rachida Madani (bio) Translated by Marilyn Hacker (bio) Third tale I See this love determined to turn loose spiders and prosecutions on the ceiling of forgetfulness. Alone I, woman of ebony heart and body given to the dark cries inside bottomless coffers where the hell of my name caws, where I am Emerald my green flames my cold hate and the whole horde of my dreams summed up on a scrap of paper where I am a freed slave liberated from royal courts and crowns henceforth free to find paid work for the price of a candlelit evening clandestine and anonymous, to be able, through white pages’ and carbon paper’s submission to type my new master’s knowledge my boss and lord till my scarlet nails wear down his assignations with death the business dinners where the eternal-absent-wife is replaced by the virgin-high-school-girl. A Martini for you, kid so these caresses will be less furtive [End Page 1163] and love will last as long as a spurt of sperm on your gazelle thigh golden sashes tightening on your hips in a noose of lunar solitude. I alone forever woman of ebony who wished to cross bubbles abscesses and battles to dissolve misunderstandings who wished to find the right words to locate my body for you in this sewer my tattered body in the maze of an accursed story in an accursed palace at the heart of a petrified country, kingdom of cloisters and walled gardens where, dripping and luxuriant carnivorous flora grow, stems lengthened by porn videos and petrodollars by a sun declared the official cause of all disasters from drought and water rationing, to speech movements to sunstroke-riots which explode above howling cities caught off-guard the blood-lust of carnivorous birds in flocks sowing terror and children’s corpses through the medinas coming back to pillage those same corpses so that History ah, History… Petrified country where Sharayar and genies daylight allies in total repression drive back, to take refuge in fear in cups of tea [End Page 1164] in football my whole famished people. Like Dinazarde we were witnesses silent and complicit of our own death of our bodies’ division into little stars whinnying with pleasure our heads thrown to the dogs: another bone to gnaw and nothing more. Enough has been said about my murdered people no prayer rises to my lips no tear dry well All my walls crack open from all the hoarded centuries and identical dynasties. Alone and woman of ebony eternally I am the curve of centuries pierced in search of clear water with which to wash your feet, Sheherezade before burying your henna-covered hands their jewels with them and their squalid songs of freed slaves. II Ah, how often she dreamed of nocturnal oceans bringing the taste of blood and salt back to our throats dreamed as if she knew all the words to assemble so that a door would open a people arise and the sea finally flood [End Page 1165] into our heads’ lit coals where there is so little space so that a woman keeps shouting a door keeps closing on a man being tortured a boy being raped dreamed of all the seas enraged as if a red continent would thrust up amidst the seas as if this continent could light up all the mirrors those squares of sorrow those lakes and once and for all wring the neck of the mangy serpent of death the Sultan of Abscesses visibly reptile and seductive —centuries of seduction and woven ruses in his triangular subtle and murderous head— Ah, how often she dreamed of nocturnal oceans at last to throw herself in that final infinity of No, the country before death the absolute dryness of livid spaces. [End Page 1166] Rachida Madani Rachida Madani lives in Tangiers, Morocco, where she works as a teacher of French language. She is author of Femme je suis, Blessures au vent, L’histoire peut attendre, and Contes d’une tête tranchée, which Marilyn Hacker translated into English as Tales of a Severed Head. Hacker has also translated...

1953: The Bus to Menton, and: For Despina

1953: The Bus to Menton, and: For Despina Marilyn Hacker (bio) 1953: The Bus to Menton Her own displacement seemed easy in comparison.She had been a reporter. She would be a novelistand her country (she'd write about it) seemed provincial.The war was over. Near the roadside, sheaveswere tied. Gossip behind her, a new dialect. She listened.Beyond sprawled olive terraces, unlike the farms of home, whose outbuildings circled like a garrison.Her notebook's lined page waited to be kissed.The noon heat condensed into a mortal chillup her spine. A blondish man with rolled-up sleeveshad pushed the bus window open. Sunlight glistenedon the long number tattooed on one of his sunburned arms. [End Page 64] For Despina Why is it I don't like closing the curtains?Even pinning panels of blue voile togethercuts me off too much from the winter morning'scomings and goings and the tall, reassuring neighbors' windowssome with window boxes, some with their shades downsome cracked open from last night, so cold air couldrefresh a sleeper. Pick the stitch up, there in the place I dropped it.Weave the raveled sides of the day togetherif December sun in a bedroom windowcalls for a garment. There are alphabets I could still decipher,learn to read a stanza, or write my name in.There are conjugations of verbs instructingspeech, song and silence. Fear or hope or both of them made of me achild who thought I'd probably be abandonedif I misbehaved, if I lied about myparents—or didn't. How are you a Jew? asked the young Greek woman.First, because I haven't the choice to not be.Those who thought they chose found the same unchosenbarbed wire and ashes. How am I a Jew? Through my mother's birthright,turned into a death warrant once; excuse toseize the farms and villages of a people"exiled by exiles." [End Page 65] You, the dead, my interlocutors, whetherfriends or strangers—child on a no-man's land, hersatchel and school uniform clear in gunsights,riddled with bullets— while I clutch the moment, with a safe childhoodas my history, no grandparents' village,no street where her father made shoes, his mothermeasured out barley. Strange that all I know of them is—religion?Not if they had land, sent their sons to cheder;not which ones spoke Yiddish, Hungarian, orPolish, or German. Not which child, renamed, fed the pigs and dug upfrozen mud for potatoes; not whose notebookbrowned insidea cupboard, while trains moaned through theGalician winter. Must a murdered child, after generations,be avenged by gunning down other childrenfar away from winter and pigs, potatoesand nameless railroads? If a Jew may not deconstruct the question(two Jews, didn't we say, and three opinions?)if they call the peacemakers anti-Semites,who are my cousins? Lost lands which I never would call my country. . . .How are you American? she might ask me.Language, economic determination. . . .Once, it was lucky. [End Page 66] Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books, including Desesperanto (W.W. Norton) and Winter Numbers, which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Leonore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1995. Her translations include Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says (Graywolf) and Claire Malroux's Birds and Bison (Sheep Meadow). Copyright © 2007 University of Nebraska Press

A Doorless Knocking Into Night (review)

Reviewed by: A Doorless Knocking Into Night Jehanne Dubrow (bio) Lexi Rudnitsky . A Doorless Knocking Into Night. Mid-List Press. As Richard Howard points out in his introduction, "there will be no more" work from Lexi Rudnitsky, the young poet who died in 2005 prior to the release of her first book. A Doorless Knocking into Night possesses the imagination, intelligence, and technical mastery that readers hope to see in a freshman collection but don't always find. Rudnitsky shifts between loosely formal poems and tightly constructed sonnets, creating an insistent narrative of desire and release; here is a text that maps out the geography of Eros and shows Rudnitsky to have been a poet of tremendous promise. Divided into five sections, the book uses travel as an allegory for the Self's search for its other half, a Platonic journey that reshapes the ubiquitous—and generally problematic—"travel poem" into literature that chooses not to exoticize the Other. Rudnitsky avoids this pitfall by fashioning a speaker who is out of place everywhere, be it the sensual dreamscape of Latin America, the temporary respite of American suburbia, or the gritty, urban setting of New York City. In Rudnitsky's work, the Other does not become an exotic; the Self is strange enough. The Self is contradictory and the speaker of these poems must continually maintain a distance from the world, even as she approaches it. In "Capodanno," the last poem of the opening section, the speaker describes fireworks and tries to understand their appeal, finally realizing she can "watch them from my hotel room, / high above the city." As with Baudelaire's metaphor of the poet as albatross, Rudnitsky's poet-speaker feels safest observing life from a great distance and elevation. This is not to say that the poems are cerebral or detached from the physical. Just the opposite. Beginning with "Malaria," the title poem of the book's first section, Rudnitsky establishes the sensual preoccupations of her work: "Mosquitoes gather by puddles / on the dirt floor. Rain warps / the splintered board I sleep on. / Outside: explosions or thunder, / murder or disease. / A doorless knocking into night." And in "Brazil," the first of many sonnets, Rudnitsky imagines a former lover with his new flame. I would like to hate that girl: her proprietary tonewhen I call one night to tell you good-bye.Perhaps her head rests on your collarbone;arachnine fingers creep up your thigh.But it takes years to learn how to touch you,and long before that you will have left her too. The girlfriend's spider-like hand on her lover's leg, the intimate knowledge contained by touch—these details reveal a link between intellect and the body. The book's second section, "Prudence Island," uses wordplay and associative leaps to establish a state of limbo. Jewish-themed poems like "The Word" and "Masada" present the speaker as an outsider to her own culture and religion. Lost, she waits for a new love affair, a new mode of thinking. An epigraph by Polish poet Wis™awa Szymborska contextual-izes the section's nonlinear, imagistic movements; "Mandatory Sentencing," with its disturbing lists and juxtapositions, could almost be mistaken for the work of Szymborska: "Dozens of manuals try to make Lacan comprehensible, but I can expose the original text. / If there are 54,000 impotent men and each penis averages six inches, how many miles of useless penis are we dealing with? // This is an open book exam." On the other hand, a four-lined, slant rhymed poem like "First Kiss" belongs unmistakably to Rudnitsky; the poem is an economical demonstration of her abilities as a formalist: "The night a boy's tongue / wriggled past my lips / the river ceased to run, / exposed a flopping fish." "Exurbia" and "The Banker's Apartment," respectively the book's third and fourth sections, use sonnet sequences as a means to express journeys that are simultaneously physical and emotional. Rudnitsky is not the first poet to recognize the benefits of using linked sonnets to build a narrative. In Annie Finch's anthology An Exaltation of Forms, Marilyn Hacker explains in her essay why so many poets are drawn to...

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (review)

Questions of Possibility:Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form Willard Spiegelman Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form. David Caplan . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 165. $35.00 (cloth). The wars among rival poetic factions in the U.S. raged more fiercely a decade ago than they do now, but David Caplan's judicious, sensible, and perceptive study of poetic form is as welcome and important today as it might have been during the so-called culture wars. In this maiden speech, a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, Caplan takes on the problems of tradition and inherited forms, and the ways in which a quite various selection of contemporary poets have handled their inheritance. Between a wise introduction that sets the terms and categories of his argument, and an equally wise conclusion ("Prosody After the Poetry Wars"), Caplan sets himself the task of examining the contemporary scene with specific reference to four traditional poetic forms: the sestina, the ghazal (a recent import to the States although long established in Islamic culture), the sonnet, and the ballad, as well as the heroic couplet (this last not so much a form as a style for other forms). The sanity of Caplan's argument and analyses is bolstered by the surprising catholicity of his taste. Rather than allying himself with the so-called "new formalists," a self-appointed band [End Page 597] of semi-reactionaries who have felt for several decades that only a return to metrical verse will signal a return to poetic essence, he picks as his main subjects for review the work of people often quite unlike one another. The first chapter ("The Age of the Sestina") has the usual suspects: Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Rita Dove, and Donald Justice—a fairly conventional choice of sestina-writers. Then the surprises begin. "The Ghazal in America" focuses on Adrienne Rich, Jim Harrison, Agha Shahid Ali—the late Indian-Kashmiri-American poet who popularized the form during the past decade—and several younger poets whom Ali included in his 2000 anthology of the ghazal (Ravishing DisUnities): John Haag, Heather McHugh, Daniel Hall, and Carole Stone. The chapter on the sonnet wonderfully treats the experiments in this once-dismissed form by gay poets (Marilyn Hacker, Henri Cole, and Rafael Campo), and thereby proves that a conventional poetics, at the hand of a gay poet, can become a radical or transformative act. In discussing the couplet ("Why Not the Heroic Couplet?" indeed!), Caplan skirts the predictable James Merrill, focusing instead on Thom Gunn, Derek Walcott, and Derek Mahon, none of whom (interestingly and importantly) is a native American. Looking at the ballad, Caplan includes the traditional Dana Gioia, and X. J. Kennedy, a man always associated as a father figure to the new formalists, but he also considers Rosemary Waldrop and the African-Americans Dudley Randall and Marilyn Nelson, as well as the left-leaning Charles Bernstein who has always eschewed aesthetic and political conservatism as being somehow equivalent. Caplan's summary of Bernstein's own "Rivulets of the Dead Jew" epitomizes his broadmindedness: "When Bernstein uses metrical verse forms familiar to the English literary history, he generally parodies them. His most interesting poems, though, draw an oddly moving resonance from the forms they mock" (120). Imitation, in other words, is indeed a form of flattery. This book succeeds on both the local and the more general level. It is a sign of Caplan's sanity and literary acumen that he can be both lucid and provocative at once. The book has a persuasive rhythm to it—ebbing and flowing between historical and theoretical speculation on one hand, and astute close readings on the other. The author begins by re-examining, and persuasively refuting, the various claims put forth over the past fifty years (and going back still further to Williams and Pound) that try to equate poetic formalism with political repression or social irrelevancy. He says that "our current understanding of poetic forms, especially contemporary metrical verse remains inadequate" (9–10), and, although he doesn't quote it, he would agree with Wallace Stevens's famous pronouncement that "all poetry is experimental," not merely that which...

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Questions of Possibility examines the particular forms that contemporary American poets favor and those they neglect. The poets' choices reveal both their ambitions and their limitations, the new possibilities they discover and the traditions they find unimaginable. By means of close attention to the sestina, ghazal, love sonnet, ballad, and heroic couplet, this study advances a new understanding of contemporary American poetry. Rather than pitting closed verse against open and traditional poetry against experimental, Questions of Possibility explores how poets associated with different movements inspire and inform each other's work. Discussing a range of authors, from Charles Bernstein, Derek Walcott, and Marilyn Hacker to Agha Shahid Ali, David Caplan treats these poets as contemporaries who share the language, not as partisans assigned to rival camps. The most interesting contemporary poetry crosses the boundaries that literary criticism draws, synthesizing diverse influences and establishing surprising affinities. In a series of lively readings, Caplan charts the diverse characteristics and accomplishments of modern poetry, from the gay and lesbian love sonnet to the currently popular sestina.

The Key

The Key Claire Malroux (bio) Translated by Marilyn Hacker (bio) For a long time, I've been searching for a key to this body of work. I remember having owned up to my inability when I stated, in the first introduction I wrote to Emily's poems, in the Belin edition of 1989: she alone has the key to this wild display. (Moi seul j'ai la clef de cette parade sauvage: Rimbaud.) I still endorse the method of reading which I proposed at that time: "If you want to grasp the profound unity of these scattered fragments, with no order to them but the chronological (and some are not even dated), you must place them in the context of a spiritual adventure, unique of its kind, of a hand-to-hand combat with the void, where poetry becomes a weapon, a means of salvation." But my proposal was still too vague. It sketched out a way, pointed to a door without showing an entry code to open it. I am still in search of the key, albeit with no illusions. I suspect that there is not a single one, but several, and as many as there are readers. From now on, I am in search of A key, my own, no longer of THE key. It would be something more like a pass-key, an instrument that would allow me to slip like a burglar into the vast dwelling that is Emily's work, and to move discreetly within it, opening now this door and now that, trusting a bit to chance. It is rather mad, anyway, to bring locks and keys into a dwelling whose owner has [End Page 8] left it deliberately wide open, without partitions to mark the separation between its various rooms. It's within time that I look for my own pass-key. I see nothing else that can adjust itself to the building's dimensions, this vast parenthesis of Emily's that was never closed. To begin with, I'll keep to my plan of moving with the current of almost-gratuitous chance. I'll push open a few familiar doors here and there before venturing further. Marilyn Hacker Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité (France: Éditions Gallimard, 2005. 127-128) Claire Malroux Claire Malroux, the most prominent French translator of Emily Dickinson's poetry and correspondence, is also the author of ten books of poems: the most recent, La Femme sans paroles, was published by Le Castor astral in 2006. The many other Anglophone poets she has translated include Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Carson. Three collections of Malroux's poems have been published in English in bilingual editions with Marilyn Hacker's translations: Edge (Wake Forest UP, 1996), A Long-Gone Sun (Sheep Meadow P, 2000) and Birds and Bison (Sheep Meadow P, 2004). Malroux received the Grand Prix National de la Traduction in 1995. Marilyn Hacker Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto (Norton, 2003) and Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Pres, U.K., 2006). She has also published six books of translations of work by Claire Malroux and by the Lebanese Francophone poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata. She received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004. La Rue palimpseste, a collection of Hacker's poems translated into French by Claire Malroux, received the Prix Max Jacob étranger in 2005. Hacker lives in New York and Paris, and teaches at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press

GLOSE

The Yale ReviewVolume 94, Issue 1 p. 31-32 GLOSE MARILYN HACKER, MARILYN HACKER Most recent collection of poems is Desesperanto: Poems, 1999—2002 (Norton, 2003). Her translation of the Franco-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata's novel A House at the Edge of Tears was published by Graywolf in 2005. She lives in New York City and Paris.Search for more papers by this author MARILYN HACKER, MARILYN HACKER Most recent collection of poems is Desesperanto: Poems, 1999—2002 (Norton, 2003). Her translation of the Franco-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata's novel A House at the Edge of Tears was published by Graywolf in 2005. She lives in New York City and Paris.Search for more papers by this author First published: 10 January 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9736.2006.00031.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume94, Issue1January 2006Pages 31-32 RelatedInformation

Women in Black, and: Unarmed Bodyguard: You Will Hear the Lutes

Women In Black for Marilyn Hacker We stand the wind in our black coats. We stand our vow. In furious love we stand the shoppers' logoed bags. A woman passes, wraps herself hand over hand in mink. She shuts us out: won't look. A boyman, blond, soft as a dandelion's seeding head, smiles his shyness. Guys drive by – and one leans out and makes a fist and yells: Nuke the dykes, Nuke Saddam, Nuke 'em all! Those hits quick slaps across a woman's face – and now admit the truth: I made that man from what I can't deny. Just as I made, beside the dandelion boy, a girl – who both slide into our line beside me. Unarmed Bodyguard: You Will Hear the Lutes for Dr. Saravanamuttu Because when they came for her son she saw their faces, I pulled on the tee with the logo in three languages and walked into the dirt street with this woman [End Page 100] they wanted to kill. We knew they were watching, they could shoot her and leave me alive, or shoot us both – either would prove they could kill anyone they wanted – and they needed that fleeting bit of power, they had so little. Blossoms of Plumeria opened their mouths. The perfume sang its faint song, and I heard and took her hand, a thing we didn't do – our hands might make them mad, anger's a drug and a turn on – and I said I'm scared. The world can tear. Our hands, the glare, that street so hot and white, the light a blare – and here a man with just one hand thrust out his begging bowl. Before you die, they say, give something away: the tinder of our coins flared up and caught, a fiery meal he'd eat with that one hand. And did they watch us linking hands again, passing the kiosk where they probably bought cigarettes? God, she said – she was Catholic – loves our courage and loves our fear. He loves both things. This woman who was not my lover but the Beloved – come to me in the flesh here on the earth.

An Exaltation of forms: contemporary poets celebrate the diversity of their art

At once handbook, reader, and guide to the literary tastes and wisdom of poets, An Exaltation of Forms is an indispensable resource certain to find a dedicated audience among poetry lovers. editors invited over fifty contemporary poets to select a poetic meter, stanza, or form, describe it, recount its history, and provide favorite examples. essays represent a remarkably diverse range of literary styles and approaches, and show how the forms of contemporary English-language poetry derive from a wealth of different traditions.The forms range from hendecasyllabics to prose poetry, haiku to procedural poetry, sonnets to blues, rap to fractal verse. range of poets included is equally impressive--from Amiri Baraka to John Frederick Nims, from Maxine Kumin to Marilyn Hacker, from Agha Shahid Ali to Pat Mora, from W. D. Snodgrass to Charles Bernstein. Achieving this level of eclecticism is a remarkable feat, especially given the strong opinions held by members of the various camps (e.g., the New Formalists, LANGUAGE poets, feminist and multicultural poets) that exist within today's poetry community. Poets who might never occupy the same room here occupy the same pages, perhaps for the first time. net effect is a book that will surprise, inform, and delight a wide range of readers, whether as reference book, pleasure reading, or classroom text.Poet, translator, and critic Annie Finch is director of the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. She is author of The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse, Eve, and Calendars. She is the winner of the eleventh annual Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award for scholars who have made a lasting contribution to the art and science of versification.Kathrine Varnes teaches English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She is the author of the book of poems, The Paragon. Her poems and essays have appeared in many books and journals.

Introducing Vénus Khoury-Ghata

1 6 Women in French Studies Introducing Vénus Khoury-Ghata Marilyn Hacker Vénus Khoury-Ghata was born in Lebanon in December, 1937. She has lived in France since 1972. Not the child of the intelligentsia or the diplomatic world like many literary émigrés, she was born to a Maronite Christian family, one of four children of a village policeman and a housewife she's described as "illiterate in two languages." It was the poet's younger brother who first aspired to a literary career; it was also her brother who was the tyrannical father's scapegoat, who turned to drugs in his teens and was paternally immured in a rudimentary mental hospital. This marking story was recounted lyrically by Khoury-Ghata in 1998 in Une Maison au borddes larmes— -the only one of her fourteen novels which eschews fictional invention for autobiographical material. This novel shares the counterpoint present in all of Khoury-Ghata's poetry, between the immediate lyric or narrative and the backdrop of contemporary history—the history of war-torn Lebanon. In the construction of the poet's personal myth of origins, it was the silencing of the gifted, vulnerable brother which gave his sister access to the written word. (In the same year that Khoury-Ghata published Une Maison au bord des larmes, her sister, the journalist May Ménassa, who stayed in Lebanon and writes in Arabic, published a novel on the same subject—neither sister knew of the other's project before the books appeared.) Khoury-Ghata's work bridges the anti-lyrical surrealist tradition which has informed modern French poetry since Baudelaire and the parabolic and communal narrative with its (we might say Homeric) repetitions of metaphors and semi-mythic tropes of Arabic poetry. Though there are many Francophone poets of Arab origin, including women poets such as Andrée Chedid, Joyce Mansour and Nadia Tueni, Khoury-Ghata's work is unique in its synthesis ofthe quotidian and the fantastic, its conciliation ofthe narrative and the lyric. Most ofher poems have for implicit backdrop the language and landscape ofthe poet's mother country. Though she was raised bilingual, her mother tongue was Arabic, and her earliest writings were in that language. She writes: "Nourished by the two languages, I write in Arabic through the French language." As she oscillates between French and Arabic, Khoury-Ghata moves with equal fluidity between poetry and fiction, and, in her poems especially, between life and death. Death becomes another mode of life, an ironic one carried on six feet below our surfaces, where the dead, according to the poet's own mythology, and once more not unlike Homeric shades, "nourish themselves on the smell ofour bread, drink the steam rising from our water, live on our noises." Death itself has a double register: as experienced on a personal Hacker1 7 level, but with the collective specter of200,000 people dead in Lebanon during the war that marked the poet's youth serving as a chorus in the intimate tragedy. According to Khoury-Ghata, the word "death" is a cornerstone of her work, making its way into several titles. This began for her "in 1975 with the unbearable images ofLebanon drowned in its own blood. Cadavers were laid out on wooden planks to be shoved into ditches for common burial with the same movement as a baker putting bread into the oven." Death: daily bread for the Lebanese. "I felt guilty about transforming the dead into words, lining them up like lead soldiers on my pages, but I was incapable of turning to another subject. Five years later, this collective death gave way to an individual death, that ofmy husband, the father ofmy daughter. Death which I'd picked up and examined barehanded blew up in my face." Much ofKhoury-Ghata's poetry, as well as Une Maison au borddes larmes, could be described by Audre Lorde's term "biomythography," which Lorde coined for her own narrative Zami. Lorde's book resembles the classical mem- ?'?t/bildungsroman more closely than does anything in Khoury-Ghata's work. What they have in common is at once their ex-centricity: the West Indian child in the Bronx...

Making friends? contemporary women poets' difficulties with friendship*

This article considers contemporary women poets' treatment of friendship. It notes the curious discrepancy between poets' acknowledgment of the importance of other women, and the absence of any reflection of this importance in their poetry. I argue that western culture's preoccupation with sexual and blood ties is reflected in both poetry and feminist theoretical writings. Any articulation of the complexity, significance and nuances of friendship is lacking in language, mythological materials and literary paradigms and, since it is out of these that poetry is created, the silence is perhaps not surprising. The few existing poems that do explore female friendship display anxiety over the close identification between poet and friend, a mirroring that is depicted as both desirable and claustrophobic. The article examines examples of these by Liz Lochhead and Jackie Kay, and compares the tensions therein to the tendency Nancy Chodorow and other “object relations” psychologists have noted in relationships between women, for “merged attachments.” Lesbian poets have done most to explore this difficult terrain, and the article discusses two poems (by Thylias Moss and Marilyn Hacker) that seem determined to reconceptualise non-sexual relations between women outside existing frameworks. It is thus that new configurations (poetic and actual) can be created. These new models of relationships between women, bear striking resemblance to the ideas of Luce Irigaray, which are also discussed.

The Education of the Poet: A Colloquy with Richard Howard and Marilyn Hacker

T e following conversation between Marilyn Hacker and Richard Howard occurred in August 1998, in Mr. Howard's office at Columbia University. Mr. Howard is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, most recently Trappings (1999), and over 150 translations from the French. In 1983 he received the American Book Award for his translation of the complete Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. In 1970 he received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and in 1984 he was made a Chevalier de 1' Ordre National du Merite by the French government. He is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters and serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and as poetry editor of the Paris Review. Ms. Hacker is the author of nine books, including Presentation Piece, which received the National Book Award in 1975, and Winter Numbers (1995), which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award from The Nation magazine and the Academy of American Poets. She has served as editor of 13th Moon and the Kenyon Review and was recently (that is, since this conversation) appointed the director of the M.A. program in English literature and creative writing at the City College of New York. Her most recent book, Squares and Courtyards, was published in January. Their conversation, which focused on the education of the poet, began when they remembered admiring each other's poems, years ago,