Passion and Craft

Born in Lebanon and currently living in Paris and writing in French, Venus Khoury-Ghata is a rare poet, one able to bring together the Western and Arabic imaginations, to not just extend boundaries of different literary traditions, but to begin one of her own, a complex tapestry of image-laden poetics where "women hunt down darkness with their dishtowels / children put their noises away in their pencil-cases," and fig trees are known for their "opulent hips" while "walls protect us from knowledge that whitens your hair."

So she creates the world in which her craft rivals that of Vaska Popa and Edmond Jabes, two post-war European poets of mythos, of re-imagining the Genesis, and the poetics of place, in the face of very real political violence of our own moment. She creates a language where "mother wanted us illiterate as a pebble" while "armies of dust raised by her broom ate our notebooks." Khoury-Ghata here gives us a book-long sequence of almost epical proportions, where her mother becomes everyone's mother, while the focus and texture remain local, detail-oriented, and very sensual.

Khoury-Ghata once said in an interview, "I write in Arabic through the French," and doing so, she builds a village recognizably Middle Eastern and yet also somehow all-embracing in its humanity, its depiction of natural elements ("a village rain that went barefoot") and familial connection ("the mother's skirt wiped away the soot of errors"). This is a village where "mother sprinkled the doorstep with soot...her kitchen utensils fled after the last guest deserted her / I try to imagine that departure and find only lines crossed out in a notebook." The world of Chagall and the world of Arabic imagination are joined here: Western-style surrealism and the Middle-Eastern fable. But this is certainly not a mere dream world. The many examples of extreme poverty here are real: "They must have been very poor to come with a cart instead of a truck...bring with them only three mattresses bound together with a rope, as many pots, and a wooden cupboard grubby as a chicken-coop." This is a political poetry, yes. It is also a timeless fable that comes from far away and is unafraid to tell us the story of a world both real and metaphorical, where "the speech...is a pebble." In the center of this village, we see a powerful, magical figure of a woman: "the blue-hipped mother."

Marilyn Hacker has translated Khoury-Ghata's work for years, always with incredible attention to the sensual detail, and this translation continues to be extremely effective in bringing Khoury-Ghata's delicate metaphorical structures and textures into English. Hacker, one of our best poets, is also (I can say this without any hesitation; I am sure many others would agree with me) probably the best translator at work in English at the present moment.

What Khoury-Ghata teaches us is that language is not separate from the sensual world, does not exist outside of the pain of our historical moment, is not located outside of the magical element of our daily existence. "Trees," in her work, "have opulent hips."

And so she attempts to remake the world—into a place of memory, yes, but also of imagination, where "women hunt darkness with their dishtowels." Why? To bring us back to smells, images, sounds of the earth around us, to bring us back to Lorca's belief that "the poet is professor of five bodily senses." This is how the poet writing in "Arabic through French" re-freshens the Western tradition, expands it. She does so not through conceptual constructions which have become, for better or worse—but most likely for worse—the fashion in our literature, but through unmistakable passion and craft, through compassionate lines which capture human moments and make them into an art.

There is a great sense of empathy in her work. There is also, in the end, the ability to...