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Contributor

Marilyn Hacker

Portrait of Marilyn Hacker
Contributor

Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Blazons (Carcanet, 2019), two collaborative books, Diaspo/Renga, written with Deema K. Shehabi (Holland Park Press, 2014), and A Different Distance, written with Karthika Naïr (Milkweed Editions, 2021), and an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010). She has translated eighteen books of French and Francophone poets. Her new collection, Calligraphies, will be published by W.W. Norton early in 2023. She lives in Paris.

Articles by Marilyn Hacker

sun setting behind a field of grass
Photo by Jake Givens on Unsplash
Anna
By Samira Negrouche
your mother like Mecca is a promised land—you must go there only once
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
MultimediaMultilingual
“I Write in French to Tell the French I Am Not French”: Algerian Francophone Poetry
By Marilyn Hacker
Algerian Francophone poetry was largely outside, and in contrast to, the post-World War II movement in French poetry of disengagement from political causes.
From “The Night Inside”
By Djamal Amrani
The slumber at the edge/ of my well of fever
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
Beneath a Pile of Rubble
By Djamal Amrani
Because death is stronger than hunger
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
Minus One
By Samira Negrouche
I would like/ in a faraway language/ to tell you what I don’t/ understand
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
MultimediaMultilingual
A shadowy orange canyon with twisting rock formations
Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash
In the Shadow of Grenada
By Samira Negrouche
She tells me not to be / a holy land / or a mine of tenderness
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
MultimediaMultilingual
Celebration of the Absent One
By Habib Tengour
The father’s house is a living language/ Open to guests passing through
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
MultimediaMultilingual
The Tartar from the Kremlin
By Habib Tengour
This particular Tartar is unbeatable at cards/ Except for whist (not a game for Tartars)
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
from “Clairvoyant in the City of the Blind”
By Amina Saïd
I hope and despair at the same moment
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Stories from “The Hedgehog”
By Zakariya Tamer
I asked my best friend, the black stone wall, about the latest news in our house.
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
In the Doorway of My Friend’s House
By Abdelkader al-Hosni
Come, I’ll show you two silences in the doorway.
Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
Dead
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
the mother looked like the linden tree in the square like the wood of the table on which she wrote our faces like the log that didn’t sweat or complain about the smoke dead she began to avoid us…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
As night became talkative
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
we were lent a window on a fragment of the world We we re the house and the road that led to the house The mother moved the door each time a train went by and at each procession toward     the…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Her apron drawn on her skin
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
the mother sent us out in the street naked Walnut husks served us for ink Fences we’d jumped were the pages we leafed through Euphoria in the evening when she multiplied her arms two to embrace…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
It was a November of bitter rain and snow blackened by use
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
we filed the dead leaves by size to ease the task of the forest that was absent for     reasons known only to itselfThe parents had left with the doorWe mistook puddles for creekspebbles…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
God, the mother claimed, is behind every tree in the forest
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
his right shoulder lower than his leftheavy with rocky snowfalls from such enduranceIt’s his motionless breath that fissures our walls in the night when one winter hands   power over to…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
Helicopter seeds on a maple tree
Photo by bales on Unsplash
When did their language mingle with ours
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
How to find the mother when her face disappeared behind the hills leaving us a body without contours two packets of cold for the armpits white grass for the pubis   Gone off with her friend the fire…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Multilingual
I Call You Tunisia
By Tahar Bekri
II heard your voice at daybreakLike a scarlet dawnGiving birth in darknessThe years’ turning backOn themselvesRocking the ebb and flowOn the shore of a seaAt once full and emptyI caught your lightLost…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Crazy Zarifé
By Vénus Khoury-Ghata
It was because of a star that appeared between the Great Bear and the Little Bear that the goats in a village in northern Lebanon ate the French essays of the eighth-grade primary class.Engrossed in watching…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
Tales of a Severed Head, I
By Rachida Madani
What city and what night since it's night in the city when a woman and a train-station argue over the same half of a man who is leaving. He is young, handsome he is leaving for a piece of white bread.…
Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker
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