Edmond Jabès

Edmond Jabes

This book is the first bilingual selection from the poetic works of Edmund Jabes, long acknowledged for the mastery of his work in the unique prose genre invented by him. "Jabes lives in the French language as if it were the Sea," writes Robert Duncan in the afterword, a truth accessible here both in the French originals and Keith Waldrop's extraordinary translations, drawn from Jabes' earliest and most recent poems. "Poetry was Jabes' proving ground," writes Paul Auster in the Introduction, "and as a careful reader of Keith Waldrop's translations will observe, the styles and themes that characterize The Book of Questions and The Book of Resemblances were already being explored by Jabes in the poems he wrote as a young man. One finds the same economy of reference, the same passionate lyricism, the same tendency toward aphorism, and the same preoccupation with the act of writing itself. Even the theme of exile, which plays such a vital part in the later prose books, is already present in these early poems: 'Always in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry as an interpreter.'" It is impressive to see how much the whole oeuvre of Jabes stands as a continuity and a completion from its first moments to these very recent poems, an inquiry into the nature of writing and being.

The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

If There Were Anywhere But Desert

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Yael, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabes every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?

El, Or, The Last Book

The Book of Questions

A meditative narrative of Jewish Experience and man's relation to the world.

Edmond Jabes

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