In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Sahar al-Beitounia
  • Marilyn Hacker (bio)

She lives in BeitouniaAnd her name is SaharHer name is the hourBetween sunrise and morning.

Her bougainvilleaOverlooks BeitouniaWhere a mango-bright bedspreadHangs over the railingLit by first lightThat reflects from a wall.

Not the wall of a houseOr her family's orchard.She can see the graffitiIch bin ein Berliner

Marwân had orchardsAl-zaytûn wa-l-ʿinabOlive trees, grapevines,Where they went out to workBetween sunrise and morning.

She is bint Marwân(and also bint Suʾâd).She is ukht Târiq,Ukht Mahmûd, ukht Asmâ.

When jeeps and bulldozersConverged on Beitounia [End Page 9] A hundred and twentyAll walked out at middayWere chased back with tear gasAnd rubberized bullets.

Seventeen thousand dunnamsOf orchards and wheatfieldsWith a wall thrust between themAnd the doors of Beitounia.

Her name is SaharAt dawn in BeitouniaWhere the first light reflectsOn the wall of a prison.

Ismuhâ SaharBayn al-fajr wa-l-subh—her name is Saharbetween sunrise and morning. [End Page 10]

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker lives in Paris and is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names and Desesperanto (Norton P), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan P). Her translations from the French include Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which received the 2009 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and Amina Saïd's The Present Tense of the World (Black Widow P). For her own work, she received the PEN Voelcker Award for poetry in 2010. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

...

pdf

Share