Ippolito, Christophe Editor. Translated from the French by Samuel Hazo and Paul B. Kelley. Nadia Tueni: Lebanon, Poems of Love and War/Liban, poemes d' amour et de guerre, A Bilingual Anthology.

Accad, Evelyne

Ippolito, Christophe Editor. Translated from the French by Samuel Hazo and Paul B. Kelley. Nadia Tueni: Lebanon, Poems of Love and War/Liban, poemes d' amour et de guerre, A Bilingual Anthology. New York: Syracuse University Press and Beirut: Dar An-Nahar Press, 2006. 122 pages. Paper $14.95.

It is really great to see this extraordinary Francophone Lebanese woman poet, Nadia Tueni, translated and presented by one of the best poetry translators in the United States, namely Samuel Hazo, McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English at Duquesne University, accompanied by Paul Kelley, French and Francophone literature Professor at Wake Forest University. The bilingual anthology is edited by Christophe Ippolito, Professor of French at the University of the Pacific in California, who gives it an excellent introduction, informative and sensitive to the person, the poet, the country and the literature of the region in general.

The volume contains Lebanon: Twenty Poems for One Love and Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon. They are drawn from two collections that were published during the Lebanese war in 1979 and 1982 respectively, and reflect the images, the words, the symbols, the atmosphere, the torments of a country torn apart by violence which the sensitive poet tries to give meaning to. Often, her lines transcend the horror of reality, illuminating us in their perspicacity, sometimes prophetic, most other times educational in their depiction of the complexities of Lebanon.

As Ippolito well points out in his introduction, although not "engaged" in a Sartrian definition of the term, or involved on the condition of women in a feminist way, nonetheless Nadia Tueni's work paints both a deep reflection on the woman's role in her society as well as a profound concern for the political situation ripping her country apart. "Nadia Tueni was a Lebanese poet who came to literature to mourn the premature death of her daughter (to cancer) and to sing of her love for her country from the perspective of a woman." (xiii)

The collection ends with two essays: one from Syrine Hout, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut, entitled "Home, Politics, and Exile," which analyzes the intricate connection between Nadia Tueni's poetry, her life and her country's political uproar; the other by Jad Hatem, Professor and former chair of philosophy at Saint-Joseph University in Beirut, entitled "The Night Sun," where he analyzes the seeming contradictory metaphor in terms of Nadia Tueni's work.

I have always been interested in how this incredible woman poet from my country talked about the connection between her body, cancer and its connection with war and the devastation of Lebanon. I refer to it in my own book on cancer where I quoted many passages to illustrate those themes, so I was pleased to see that the various authors of this collection were also making the parallel among these important issues. "I belong to a country that commits suicide every day, while it is being assassinated. As a matter of fact, I belong to a country that died several times. Why should I not die too of this gnawing, ugly, slow, and vicious death, of this Lebanese death?" (xxxv)

In his introduction Ippolito shows how the various languages and cultural context emerge from "can create communities beyond the barriers of religion and hatred" (xiv). Nadia Tuehi was not only influenced by the French language of LautrEamont, Rimbaud and the surrealist poets but by the Arabic language of avant-garde poets such as Adonis. There is even in her poetry influence from the English language, as Lebanon is trilingual, and Nadia Tueni lived in New York for several years when her husband Ghassan Tueni was the Lebanese representative at the United Nations. All these influences mark her poetry and make it a remarkable blend, reflection of the Lebanese multicultural identity.

The only criticism I would have of this excellent compilation is the title given to it as an Anthology. To my mind, an anthology is a much more exhaustive volume with many more excerpts of the work of an author as well as many more articles and analysis of the author presented, and this one contains only one hundred twenty two pages with only two critical articles in addition to the introduction. Nevertheless it is a good start and Ippolito must have been aware of this problem when he says that his "chief hope one day is to see the complete poems of Archives sentimentales d'une guerre au Liban and beyond that all of Nadia Tueni's works, prose and poetry, translated into English. May this happen soon!" (xii and xiii)

Reviewed by Evelyne Aeead

Evelyne Accad is Professor Emerita, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and the Lebanese American University, Beirut.