ABSTRACT
Vénus Khoury-Ghata (b. 1937) is the youngest of the three seminal Lebanese francophone poets—Georges Schéhadé (1905–1989) and Salah Stétié (b. 1929) are the other two—who have left their mark on contemporary French writing. As the title suggests, A House at the Edge of Tears (which was published as Une maison au bord des larmes in 1998) chronicles an unhappy coming of age. The wide-eyed narrator must find her bearings amidst this atmosphere of paternal cruelty, fear, inhibition, quarreling, and trickery. Ultimately, her will to write emerges from the chaos, which also includes the onset of the inter-religious strife in Beirut. The links from present to past traverse dreams, acute perceptions with mythical ramifications, and lyric or surrealistic flights of the imagination which encourage her to make the “imperceptible” perceptible through crafted words. The translation of She Says has received lavish praise, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, but close examination reveals a surprising number of errors.
