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Poems from TALES OF A SEVERED HEAD (Contes d’une tête tranchée) translated into English for the first time by Marilyn Hacker.

Rachida Madani was born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1951, and still lives there. Contes d’une tête tranchée, from which this sequence of extracts is taken, is her second poetry collection. It was published in Morocco by Editions Al-forkane in 2001. A collection of her poems is forthcoming from Les Editions de la Différence, Paris.

Contes d’une tête tranchée is a modern re-working of the issues of women’s role in society explored a thousand years ago in the collection of tales known as the One Thousand and One Nights – in which the king Shahrayar, insanely distrustful of women, swears to marry a new wife each night, and kill her the next morning, to prevent her cuckolding him. According to the tales, it is only through the courage and wit of the young woman, Sherazade, and her thousand and one tales, that king Shahrayar is healed and the remaining virgins of his kingdom saved from death. In Contes d’une tête tranchée, Rachida Madani’s modern-day Sherazade is also fighting for her own life and the lives of her fellow sufferers. But in 2001 the threat comes as much from poverty as from the power still wielded so cruelly by individual men. This is a story of twenty first century resistance and once again language provides the weapon. “I am no one in Shahrayar’s city”, the poet says in canto XIX, “I am nothing. But I have words, pauper’s words… stolen from the dog’s cemetery”.

Marilyn Hacker is a renowned American poet, editor and translator. She published her first collection in 1974. Recent works include Desesperanto (2003) and First Cities (2003), and two volumes of translations of the poetry of Venus Khoury-Ghata, She Says (2003), and Here There Was Once a Country (2001). She lives in Paris and New York. Marilyn Hacker talked to Magma 28, Spring 2004, about her own writing and translating.