The Water People

Vénus Khoury-Ghata is an outstanding figure in contemporary literature, with a prolific output in both poetry and prose. She is celebrated for her immersive landscapes and folkloric narratives, drawn from her upbringing in Lebanon but expressed in the language of France, where she has lived since 1972. In Khoury-Ghata’s poetry, Arabic and French literary traditions merge like water from the river and the waterfall. Her mesmeric sequences plunge us into a semi-surreal world where humans and trees, plants, animals and the elements themselves are intertwined and yet forever fluid – a world where we are urged to leave our ‘voices behind’, to ‘listen better’. This book presents an extended extract from her 2018 collection Gens de l’eau, and includes an afterword by Karen McCarthy Woolf.

"River-fresh and supple in Marilyn Hacker’s English translation, Khoury-Ghata’s voice has the authority and cadence of the practised story-teller. While morally alert, she avoids message-preaching, dodges abstraction. Symbols are never merely symbolic but tangible objects, weighed in the hands, felt under the feet. Readers will find themselves spellbound into a circle of enchanted childhood as they follow the narrative rhythms and shifting moods - sometimes joyous, sometimes elegiac, and sometimes expressing a fine defiance."

- Carol Rumens

Lebanese poet and novelist, long-time Paris resident Vénus Khoury-Ghata is the author of twenty-three novels, including Une Maison aux bord des larmes (translated by Marilyn Hacker as A House at the Edge of Tears, Graywolf Press, 2005 ) and La Femme qui ne savait pas garder les hommes, Les Derniers Jours de Mandelstam, an imaginative biography, and twenty-one collections of poems, including Eloignez-vous de ma fenêtre (Mercure de France, 2021) and Gens de l’eau (Mercure de France, 2018), from which the poems the PTC translated were taken. Other collections of her poems available in English in Marilyn Hacker’s translation, include Alphabets of Sand (Carcanet Press, 2008) and Where are the trees going? (Northwestern University Press, 2014). Recipient of the Académie Française prize in poetry in 2009, she was named an Officer of the Légion d’honneur the following year. She received the Prix Goncourt de poésie in 2011. Marilyn Hacker is the author of fourteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015) and Blazons, (Carcanet, 2019), an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices ( Michigan, 2010), and eighteen collections of translations of French and Francophone poets also including Samira Negrouche, Jean-Paul de Dadelsen and Claire Malroux. A Different Distance, a collaborative sequence written with Karthika Naïr, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2021. Her awards include the National Book Award, the 2009 American PEN award for poetry in translation, the 2010 PEN Voelcker Award and the international Argana Prize for Poetry from the Beit as-Sh’ir/ House of Poetry in Morocco in 2011. She lives in Paris.

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