Where Are the Trees Going?

by Venus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker (Translator)

Overview

Longlist finalist, 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation 

Bringing the work of acclaimed poet Venus Khoury-Ghata to a new generation of anglophone readers, renowned award-winning poet and translator Marilyn Hacker has rendered Khoury-Gata's highly praised collection Où vont les arbres? into unforgettable English verse. In it, 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 poet writing with renewed urgency and maturity.

Khoury-Ghata's collection has been translated into fifteen languages. In this special edition, Paris-resident Hacker has also included selections from Khoury-Ghata's short fiction collection La maison aux orties (The House of Nettles). The resulting interplay illuminates the poet’s contrasting and complementary drives toward surreal lyricism and stark narrative exposition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810130081
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	10/30/2014
Edition description:	Translatio
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese poet and novelist, resident in France since 1973, author of twenty-four novels and twenty collections of poems, translated into German, Arabic, Swedish, and other languages. Her most recent collection to appear in English, Nettles (2008), was also translated by Marilyn Hacker. Her awards include the Goncourt Prize for Poetry for Où vont les arbres. She is an Officier of the French Legion of Honor.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve collections of poems and twenty translations of books of poems from the French. She received the PEN Voelcker Award for her own work in 2010, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne in 2009.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface ix

What can be said about the women … 3

Tireless mother, worthy descendant … (from The House of Nettles) 4

Her eyes outlined with the stockpot's kohl 5

Our scribbles gave the mother a visible body 6

The mother attached arms to us 7

Sometimes we'd take turns standing … 8

The pen's sputtering didn't wake her 9

Books separated indoors from outdoors 10

Our hands outstretched through the openings 11

Darkness erased her pillow … 12

She went back to her roots … (from The House of Nettles) 13

As night became talkative 15

Often, when the sun swept the house front … (from The House of Nettles) 16

To unmake the mother 18

It was a November of bitter rain … 19

The mother swallowed up the logs 20

The walls came between us in all of our squabbles 21

The mother paraded her ancestors in front of us … (from The House of Nettles) 22

Strangers passing through the town … 23

How to find the mother when her face disappeared … 24

Dead 25

Hordes of trees with unpronounceable names … 26

We went through the whole forest … 28

God, the mother claimed … 29

The sky's perambulations made our houses … 30

When winter has wrung out its last cloud 31

When did their language mingle with ours 32

Her apron drawn on her skin 33

The source of the quarrel between … 34

The linden tree is dead 35

In the village of the mothers 36

If one moth left the lamp … 37

You count your life out by the books you've read 38

Our eyelashes and the passionflower's turned yellow 39

What became of the poplar trees that only swore by us? 40

The children were old and the slope was steep 41

She broke bread the way you'd open a book 42

In the evening, when I came home from school … (from The House of Nettles) 43

A bad omen three black umbrellas one after the other 44

The mountain's slightest leaning 45

The dead poet's voice bloated the pages 46

Those who have known you since winter … 47

The mother's red hair stained our sheets 48

House poised on the countryside in a groove of air 49

House lower than a cemetery in November 50

Our books were older than we were 51

Sun hung from the ceiling with a braid of garlic 52

You stop there where the sky shrinks down to a path 53

Mother who only trusts the things that walk upright 54

The wind ran faster than you did 55

Reading wastes words and makes concentration boil … 56

Pen suspended above the page … (from The House of Nettles) 57

As we hurried to get home before the rain 59

How to get to the facts now that the war has shrunk … 60

The stain on the black grass was God's face 61

Porous, holding back our silences 62

When summer was buried at the foot of the apple tree 63

In those days 64

All words were black at night 65

It was November all swaying and wavering 66

There were seven of us in times of insistence … 67

She closed her arms and her shutters … 68

She spoke like rain out of season 69

The cloud hanging over the valley … 70

They accused us of throwing stones … 71

It sometimes happened that we'd come across the devil … 72

The children born on the border of the seasons 73

We lived on a land another land had replaced 74

The gardens came into our house inadvertently 75

We spoke to him through the interstices 76

His skin as ample as a shepherd's greatcoat 77

The lack of a roof didn't disturb us 78

Our arms outstretched we gathered all the sky's castoffs 79

Married in a gown of diaphanous mud … 80

We would sometimes ask the mother the date of her death … 81

Born before the first egg 82

The children who wove their song … 83

Children hoisted onto the hilltops to hide … 84

How co explain the windows' weariness … 85

The cloud-controller climbed up our waterspout … 86

Descendants of a noble line of junipers 87

Twelve years old and the down still on our hearts 88

We were sure that we would never die 89

The mother had more confidence in proverbs … (from The House of Nettles) 90

Was it the man or the tree who had the last word? 92

Break the branch that can't hold you 93

Male odor of nameless trees and sweat of their bark 94

Inhabited uninhabited house subject to the air's structure 95

The earth in those days gathered up other earths 96

She went toward embraces the way one goes to pasture 97

The stale bread on the windowsill fed the ants … 98

The armies of dust raised by her broom ate the door … 99

The mother's fingers drew us out of the hearth … 100

A straight line the city seen by heart 101

Bare-chested 102

Ragged plane-tree harder to drive away … 103

Slept leaning on her own shoulder 104

Crazy Zarifé 105

Editorial Reviews

"Vénus Khoury-Ghata transforms memory into myth in this magical, heartbreaking book of longing and dislocation.  Where Are the Trees Going?, which Marilyn Hacker has so vividly translated into English, expands and enlarges our world, our imagination." —Edward Hirsch


"Venus Khoury-Ghata’s poetry in Marilyn Hacker's excellent translation grants us entry to a fierce, surreal world where mothers and trees, birds and stones, indeed flesh in its multifoliate forms coheres and splits into exquisite words, reclaiming a spiritual homeland, a mythic stay against chaos." —Meena Alexander, Author of Birthplace with Buried Stones


"Taken together, these stunning, at times surrealistic poems amount to an elegy of survival that takes the reader to new ontological depths." —World Literature Today 

From the Publisher

09/15/2014
Khoury-Ghata, a Lebanese poet who has lived in France since 1972, states that she "writes in Arabic through the French language," according to translator Hacker's intelligent preface. Khoury-Ghata has published 24 four novels and 20 collections of poems; this is the sixth translated by Hacker, who has actually combined two works here: the surreal lyrics of Where Are the Trees Going interspersed with short prose pieces from The House of Nettles. This strategy may help those who need to look beyond pure image into an identifiable landscape: "Why didn't they go back home, to their village destroyed by Israeli bulldozers…." But there is much to savor in the riddle of the lyric: "her apron drawn on her skin the mother sent us out in the street naked." Each poem returns to a pain-infused village, where trees, stones, and architecture assume a human aspect, as in this richly translated line, "the fence posts have phobias fat as quail in September." All of the work revolves around the mother, who is a blind destructive force (the father enters briefly, with a more intentional violence). VERDICT The translations are clear—almost transparent. But English is not French, and it is too bad that none of the original text is included. [See "Books for the Masses," Editors' BEA Picks, LJ 7/14, p. 30.]—Ellen Kaufman, New York

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