"Tell me the landscape in which you live, and I'll tell you who you are." -- José Ortega y Gasset
Our Sunday Poem today, Amina Saïd's "Introduce Myself to the World," is a gorgeously resonant piece about the ways we are formed, body and soul, by the landscape of our birth. In Saïd's case, that land is Tunisia, where "earth and stone are remembrance / the saints rest in a half-light / propitious to magic spells." The poem comes from the September 2007 issue of Words Without Borders, and is translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker.
Amina Saïd was born in Tunisia in 1953, and now lives in Paris. She is the author of eleven poetry collections and two books of Tunisian folktales, among other works. Saïd has won the Prix Jean Malrieu, the Prix Charles Vildrac, and the Antonio Viccaro Prix International for her poetry.
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