A Handful of Blue Earth

Poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Liverpool University Press

Pavilion Poetry LUP

This collection of poems by Venus Khoury-Ghata is translated into English for the first time
Translation is by the distinguished and award-winning American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker, who won the National Book Award for Presentation Piece (1974), as well as the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne (2009).
Venus Khoury-Ghata is a French-Lebanese poet and novelist, author of twenty-two novels as well as eighteen collections of poems. Recipient of the Académie Française prize in poetry in 2009, she was named an Officer of the Légion d>'honneur the following year

A Handful of Blue Earth

Poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Liverpool University Press

Description

In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as 'exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread'. Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice retuning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation.

A Handful of Blue Earth

Poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Liverpool University Press

Pavilion Poetry LUP

Author Information

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a French-Lebanese writer and celebrated poet, winning the 1992 Grand Prix de la Société des gens de lettres for Fables pour un people d'argile and the 2012 Poetry Prize Pierrette Micheloud for Où vont les arbres?. In 1959, she was Miss Beirut.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger's Mirror (Norton, 2015), Names (Norton, 2010), Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006), an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010), and fourteen collections of translations of French and Francophone poets including Emmanuel Moses, Marie Etienne, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Habib Tengour and Rachida Madani. DiaspoRenga, a collaborative sequence written with the Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in 2014. She lives in Paris.

A Handful of Blue Earth

Poems by Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Translated by Marilyn Hacker

Liverpool University Press

Pavilion Poetry LUP

Reviews and Awards

"In her preface the distinguished American poet and translator Marilyn Hacker describes the poems included here as 'exploded narratives, re-assembled in a mosaic or labyrinth in which the reader, like Ariadne, finds a connecting thread'. Khoury-Ghata's book, published in her eighty-first year, is testimony to this Lebanese poet's enduring brilliance. Earlier translations by Hacker were described by Alica Ostriker as emerging 'from the embers of loss and death, from childhood and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests, geography and God'. In two moving sequences, we find Khoury-Ghata's voice returning to familiar themes of death, intimacy, enforced silence and the surreal horror of war. Rendered faithfully and exquisitely by Hacker's concise eye, the poems mark an important contribution to world poetry in translation." --Grolier Poetry