Present Tense of the World: Poems of Amina Said
SynopsisPlot
This collection brings together Tunisian poet Amina Said’s meditative, lyrical poems that explore identity, memory, love, exile, and the search for spiritual grounding. Her verses move between intimacy and universality, weaving images of the natural world with reflections on displacement and belonging. The poems often carry a quiet intensity, evoking longing and resilience while confronting political and personal ruptures. Through spare yet evocative language, Said captures the experience of living between cultures and histories, always attentive to the “present tense” as a place where memory and desire coexist.
Story
About this book
Amina Said was born in Tunis, the Tunisian capital, and settled in Paris in 1978, where she has lived since. Readers of German, Turkish, Italian, and Arabic have long had her poems in translation, while English versions remained scattered fragments. This bilingual anthology, edited and translated by the poet Marilyn Hacker, gathers work from her previous ten years and is her first English-language survey.
Said's poems move between the intimate and the wide-angled, often placing images from the natural world alongside reflections on displacement and belonging. The experience of living between cultures and histories runs through much of the writing. Memory, exile, love, and the effort to find steady ground in a shifting present appear as recurring concerns. Her language tends toward the spare and precise, building its effects through quiet accumulation rather than dramatic gesture.
The bilingual format sets the French text on facing pages, so readers with some French can follow the original phrasing. Hacker, a poet and an established translator from French, shaped the English versions. The title points to a central idea in the collection: that recollection and present experience share one space, neither fully separable from the other.
