Thank you.
Thank you so much, Marilyn.
As you mentioned, we do have time for a few questions.
So if you have one, just raise your hand
and I will come to you.
And if not, you can ask questions
while books are being signed.
Yes.
Thank you so much Marilyn, what a blessing.
I'm just curious.
The energy, you've done so many translations, and so much
of your own work.
I'm wondering if the energy to write a book like Love, Death,
and the Changing of the Seasons, that cycle for me,
it feels like it cycles, is the same energy
that sustains working in translation and in the voice
and world of another writer.
Well first of all, I'd say that each book of my, even
of my own, or each poem, comes from,
often comes from a different kind of energy.
And the sort of energy that went into Love, Death,
and the Changing of the Seasons, which
is a kind of novel in verse, so it's
one impulse from the beginning to the end,
is perhaps different, well obviously different,
from writing a sequence of short poems
or writing a poem that talks back
to someone else's poems, someone else's voices, like the ones
about Dahlia Ravikovitch and Fadwa Tuqan.
But yeah, and translation is a different,
not necessarily a different impulse,
but it requires a different kind of energy.
It requires using all of the skills and tools one
has as a writer.
But at the same time, leaving your ego
somewhere in the closet while still keeping your hands
in the clay of language.
So although I think leaving your ego in the closet
is a good idea most of the time.
But even more so, when one is trying
to reproduce or bring across not just the words, but the style,
the form, the energy of somebody writing,
not only in a different language,
but in a very different way.
Could you just tell me the poet, I think a Palestinian-French
poet, who did the three poems that you read, called--
Oh, she's not, she's Lebanese, not Palestinian.
Venus Khoury-Ghata, Venus, like the goddess K-H-O-U-R-Y hyphen
G-H-A-T-A. Her name is on this.
And I've actually translated four
of her books, which are available in one
place or another.
Could you spell her last name?
K-H-O-U-R-Y hyphen G-H-A-T-A.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for that reading.
I'm really interested in how you translated from French
for so long and then, even just in the poems
you read tonight, translating from Arabic.
So at what point did you decide that you needed
to learn Arabic, and when did you
reach the point you felt you could translate?
Well it's still very, very, very, very hard.
But translation is one of the ways to learn a language.
I mean, not taken on lightly, and not
when you've been studying it for a year, for six months.
But after a few years, one of the things you're always,
at least I think, one is always doing in learning a languages,
reading texts of whatever kind and translating them into--
well, you translate them to know what they mean.
And so from that to taking a literary text, a poem,
or a poem, or a short story, and trying to translate,
and making an attempt to translate it,
seems it is a kind of natural next step.
And there are poets writing in Arabic,
it's sort of thrilling to be able finally
to see what they really, what those poems really sound like.
And not only to get them through an English translation
or a French translation.
So it's very much a work in progress,
but something I hope to be able to do better.
Thank you so much Marilyn.
I think we'll leave it there.
And please, do check out the books over on the table.
And Marilyn will be happy to sign some after this.
And thank you all for coming.