Outdated Browser

For the best experience using our website, we recommend upgrading your browser to a newer version or switching to a supported browser.

More Information

Contributor

Marilyn Hacker

Contributor

Marilyn Hacker

United States

Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, most recently A Stranger’s Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014 (Norton, 2015), and translator of sixteen collections from the French, including Preludes and Fugues by Emmanuel Moses (Oberlin, 2016) and Amina Saïd’s The Present Tense of the World (Black Widow Press, 2011). Her translations from the Arabic have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Agni, A Public Space, and Words Without Borders.

Articles by Marilyn Hacker

“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

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”

I hope and despair at the same moment

Translated from French by Marilyn Hacker

Stories from “The Hedgehog”

By Zakariya Tamer

My Invisible Friend My mother went to call on her neighbor Umm Baha’. She refused to take me with her, giving the excuse that women visit women and men visit men, and she left me at home alone,…

Translated from Arabic by Marilyn Hacker

Multilingual

In the Doorway of My Friend’s House

By Abdelkader al-Hosni

I stopped in the doorway of my friend’s house And my palm was glued to the doorbell But my finger trembled, too weak to arouse A desire to ring in its wires I wavered. The road to his house had…

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

When did their language mingle with ours

By Vénus Khoury-Ghata

so my brother spoke the words of the arbutusso the mother thickened her sauces with the ash tree’s black resin The female branches made off with the laundry on our linesthe young shoots leapt…

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

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

[class^="wpforms-"]

[class^="wpforms-"]