Letter from Paris (2)

In the second and final extract from her 'Letter from Paris', Marilyn Hacker relates a visit from 'J', who is a Syrian ex-pat and her Arabic teacher. She has changed his initial, in order to safeguard his privacy.

Marilyn Hacker

J was to come over at noon on Saturday to correct a letter I’d proposed to write in Arabic to his parents in Aleppo, and then have lunch. He had told me the same doctor who’d delivered their letters to me was returning, and he was seeing him off at the airport with packages for home (the international post is no longer functional). I’d drafted the letter, and bought packets of Lapsang Souchong and cinnamon tea they like from the new Damman Brothers tea emporium on the Place des Vosges. 

J wasn’t here at noon, or half-past; at a quarter to one, he called, and said he’d just woken up, having gotten home at 6am… 

"Tu as fait la fête, donc?"* No, not at all, he had been at his cousin’s, helping edit and translating a news release. He’d shower and explain when he got here… 

There had been a Syrian anti-government demonstration by expats the previous early evening at the Place du Châtelet; a family of seven pro-government people, in fact, in-laws of Maher al-Assad, arrived and began taunting the demonstrators; then the three adult sons of this group attacked three of the demonstrators, a woman and two men, with metal bars. The police arrived, all were taken to the commissariat where the injured people filed a complaint, but their attackers produced Syrian diplomatic passports and were released. When the demonstrators left the police station, they were grabbed into a car, then set upon and beaten so seriously that they ended up in the hospital, where one man was still. J and his cousin and a couple of others, including a young reporter, spent the night writing and sending releases in Arabic and French to blogs, Facebook pages and news services – I suggested we look and see if the story had made it into Le Monde, and it had, on the blog 'Un oeil sur la Syrie'**, along with a video taken at the spot. 

There was a certain irony in grammar-checking my somewhat lyrically polite letter (which made reference to the suffering and the eventual freedom of the Syrian people, but more like a diplomat than a demonstrator…) in this context, but we did, and, as it was pouring outside, I made scrambled eggs with Parma ham and salad, and opened a bottle of Brouilly, instead of going to the café for a late lunch. Then he left to go to the follow-up demonstration.

*"So, you were partying?"

** 'An eye on Syria'

Marilyn Hacker was born in New York City in 1942. She is the author of several books including Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006) and the following books of poetry, First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003); Squares and Courtyards (2000); Winter Numbers (1994), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Selected Poems 1965-1990 (1994), which received the Poets' Prize; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Assumptions (1985); Taking Notice (1980); Going Back to the River (1990), for which she received a Lambda Literary Award; Separations (1976); and Presentation Piece (1974), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. She also translated Venus Khoury-Ghata's poetry, published in She Says (2003), Here There Was Once a Country (2001) and Alphabets of Sand (2009). 

Hacker was editor of The Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994, and has received numerous honors, including the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. She received the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007 for Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen. She lives in Paris.



PN Review is one of the outstanding literary magazines of our time. For four decades it has been a place to discover new poems in English and in translation as well as interviews, news, essays, reviews and reports from around the world. Subscribers can explore the complete, uniquely rich digital archive.

A PN Review subscription makes an excellent gift, with a new magazine every two months and full access to the archive. Reduced rates are available for students; gift subscriptions to students are available at student rate. For more information, subscriptions, or to purchase an individual copy, click here.