| Lebanese writer
Venus Khoury-Ghata, who lives in France and has won many
of France's major literary prizes, blends French surrealism
with Arabic poetry's communal narrative mode in three stunning
poetic sequences, presented here in distinguished translations
by Marilyn Hacker.
"From the embers of loss and death, from childhood
and the moon, from villages and cemeteries and forests,
geography and God, Venus Khoury-Ghata has created a
dazzling, soaring, thrilling imagination. Brilliantly
translated by Marilyn Hacker, Here There Was Once
a Country is to poetry what One
Hundred Years of Solitude is to
fiction. Here is another world, another language, another
dimension to reality, which will never again be the same."
--Alicia
Ostriker
"We already know Marilyn Hacker as one of the poets
by whom our generation will be remembered, and as a brilliant
translator. Here she introduces us to a voice completely
other, an imagination with the power to make us gasp."
--Marilyn Nelson
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