Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation Where Are the Trees Going? brings together some of the latest work of the poet and novelist Venus Khoury-Ghata in a manner that showcases her central concerns in a wholly novel and provocative format. Renowned translator Marilyn Hacker interleaves a full translation of Khoury-Ghata’s volume of poetry Où vont les arbres.with prose from La maison aux orties. The resulting interplay illuminates the poet’s contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.
Khoury-Ghata takes on perennial themes of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict. Characters take root in her memory as weathered trees and garden plants, lending grit and body to the imaginative collection. As bracing as the turn of seasons, Where Are the Trees Going? highlights a writer who has approached her most recent work with renewed urgency and maturity.

Where Are the Trees Going?

Literature & Fiction

Khoury-Ghata, Vénus

Poetry

Curbstone Books 2

The year is 1938. The great Russian poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam is forty-seven years old and is dying in a transit camp near Vladivostok after having been arrested by Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into exile with his wife. Stalin, "the Kremlin mountaineer, murderer, and peasant-slayer," is undoubtedly responsible for his fatal decline. From the depths of his prison cell, lost in a world full of ghosts, Mandelstam sees scenes from his life pass before him: constant hunger, living hand to mouth, relying on the assistance of sympathetic friends, shunned by others, four decades of creation and struggle, alongside his beloved wife Nadezhda, and his contemporaries Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and many others. With her sensitive prose and innate sense of drama, French-Lebanese writer Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings Mandelstam back to life and allows him to have the last word--proving that literature is one of the surest means to fight against barbarism. &nbsp;

The Last Days of Mandelstam (The French List)

Literary

Seagull Books

Award-winning American poet Marilyn Hacker offers the brilliance of Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata in an exquisite translation
She says the earth is so vast one can't help but be lost like water from a broken jug There is no fortress against the wind the winter wanderer must count on the compassion of walls-from "She Says"
Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata's She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like "a suitcase filled with alphabets." Sex, barrenness, grief, and death-the backdrop of a war-ravaged country-are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.

She Says: Bilingual Edition (French Edition)

Graywolf Press

The new collection by the Lebanese poet Vénus Khoury-Ghata, the author of She Says, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
it could only have been elsewhere the sun's anger overturned the country men who came from the wounded side of the river knocked on our borders I say men so as not to say locusts ―from "Nettles" In Nettles, Vénus Khoury-Ghata brings her impulses for lyric poetry and for stark narrative together into four enchanting sequences. Each confronts the realities of womanhood, immigration, and cultural conflict with an imagination and history born from both the Arabic and French languages. Masterfully translated by Marilyn Hacker, Nettles gives American readers this utterly original, indispensable poetry.

Nettles: Poems

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 (Pavilion Poetry)

HACKER, MARILYN

Pavilion Poetry

Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga (The French List)

Genre Fiction

A lyrical novel concerning belonging, foreignness, and ethnicity. &nbsp; Following the path of her late geneticist husband, Laure arrives in the town of Malaterra in the harsh mountains of Abruzzo in Italy, where her husband was studying the close-knit Albanian inhabitants. At first an intruder, she is gradually accepted by the population, which is made up of amusing, eccentric characters. Among them: Helena, who hanged her dishonored daughter from the fig tree in her garden, and who has been waiting for thirty years with her gun for her daughter's rapist to return; the Kosovar, a distrusted bookseller languishing in his dusty shop; Mourad, the baker, who proposes marriage to Laure and every other woman who enters his bakery; and Yussuf, the postman, who makes his rounds even if there is no mail to deliver. We also meet the unfortunate assailant who returns from his exile to reclaim and restore his family home. With humor and compassion, this book brings to life the inhabitants of a small, remote town in the mountains of Abruzzo. &nbsp;

The Postman of Abruzzo (The French List)

A lyrical novel with a poetic narrative about an overlooked individual in Arab African history. For two days the rabbi rides on a donkey to find the ideal fiancée. Legs and arms shaved, hands dyed with henna, a girl to be married must shine like a mirror. Every girl hopes to be the chosen one and ride off on a donkey to live in the city. The desert is the domain of men; they believe they see oases and palm trees sagging with fruit, while women see only sand on top of sand. A rapid look-around at the girls in the circle was enough for the traveling rabbi to find the right one. He chooses Yudah because of her name, a contraction of Yahuda, and because she lowered her eyes when he looked at her. The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey tells Yudah's story. Instead of experiencing her dream of being chosen and riding off on a donkey to live in a palace, she finds herself in an encampment of tents swaying in the wind. She also doesn't find the Emir, who is battling on other fronts and soon surrenders. Yudah and the rest of his followers are exiled to Ile Sainte-Marguerite, where she pursues a tireless quest for her future husband in France, seeking a man she has never seen. Will the fantastic destiny of the young girl from the desert ever be fulfilled? In lyrical novel after novel, Vénus Khoury-Ghata chooses overlooked individuals from history and brings them back to life on the page. Hauntingly unforgettable, The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey is yet another poetic narrative from one of the most respected French authors of our times. &nbsp;

The Fiancée Rode In on a Donkey (The French List)

In Khouf, a city on the windswept fringes of the Sahel desert, a woman named Noor has been sentenced to death for adultery. To the religious authorities, it makes no difference that she was actually raped. The stones that will wash away the family’s dishonour in blood are ready in a pile in the village square. Only forty days to go. Confronted with Noor’s resignation at her misguided fate, a French charity worker whose own life has begun to unravel, decides to take on Noor’s plight and fights to have the fatwa reversed, creating a powerful bond between the two women, one that transcends culture and religion.

Seven Stones

United States

Jacaranda Books

Quand en 1549, Joachim Du Bellay fait paraître La Défense et Illustration de la Langue française, il entend, on le sait, affirmer la "vénusté et dignité" du français face au grec et au latin, mais aussi combattre le "Monstre Ignorance" et surtout assigner aux poètes la tâche de refonder et d'enrichir une langue tenue pour "vulgaire et barbare". Autres temps, autres barbaries, autres combats mais peut-être même nécessité et même devoir : ne revient-il pas aujourd'hui aux écrivains, aux poètes, face à la domination d'une langue "moyenne" hâtive et désinvolte, asservie aux visées manipulatrices de la communication, de maintenir et de refonder sans cesse une langue affranchie, de revendiquer, par objection souvent, le droit à la nuance, au subtil, à la densité et à l'imprévu ? Dans cet ouvrage qui fait écho au manifeste de Du Bellay, onze poètes évoquent, analysent et confrontent en toute liberté leur attachement à la langue française : François Cheng, Jacques Roubaud, Michel Deguy, Alain Borer, Jacques Réda, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Michel Butor, Silvia Baron Supervielle, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marcel Moreau.

Défense et illustration de la langue française aujourd'hui (French Edition)

COLLECTIFS

Cheng, François

Roubaud, Jacques

BEN JELLOUN, Tahar

Réda, Jacques

Borer, Alain

BUTOR, MICHEL

Deguy, Michel

MOREAU, MARCEL

Bancquart, Marie-Claire

Baron Supervielle, Silvia

History & Criticism

Gallimard]

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Books by Khoury-Ghata, Vénus