by Venus Khoury-Ghata | Translated by Marilyn Hacker
He told stories the way you peel a fruit
his tale unrolled in no time like an orange peel
Even his silences were recorded
The public scribe took them down in wobbly lines borrowed from the blind
The ears of his audience being all the same size
they sorted out the true from the false
hung the former from their ceiling alongside garlic braids
and threw the rest to dogs and beggars
Women who listened to him filled their jugs with his speech
and spilled it out in their beds wavering in the lamplight
certain that he’d speak for as long a time as they slept
Translated from the French
Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, resident in France since 1973. She is the author of many collections of poems and novels including Nettles, A House at the Edge of Tears and She Says. Her work has been translated into Italian, Russian, Dutch, German and Arabic, and she was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2000.
Marilyn Hacker (born 1942) is an American poet, critic, and reviewer. Her books of poetry include Going Back to the River (1990), Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986), and Presentation Piece (1975), which won the National Book Award. She was born in Bronx, New York and attended the Bronx High School of Science, where she met Samuel R. Delany. The two married and had a daughter, Iva, and later divorced. Hacker is an important contemporary lesbian writer and activist, and often employs strict poetic forms in her poetry, as with Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons, which is a verse novel in sonnets. She is also recognized as a master of “French forms,” particularly the villanelle. Hacker appears in Heavenly Breakfast, Delany’s memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love in 1967.