JABÉS, Edmond

Nationality: French (originally Egyptian: immigrated to France, 1957, granted French citizenship, 1967). Born: Cairo, 16 April 1912. Education: College Saint-Jean Baptiste de la Salle and Lycee Francais du Caire, both during the 1920s; Sorbonne University of Paris, 1930-31. Family: Married Arlette Sarah Cohen in 1935; two children. Career: Lived in exile in Paris, beginning in 1957. Awards: Prix des Critiques, Editions du Pavois, 1970, for Elya; Prix des Arts, des Lettres, et des Sciences, Foundation for French Judaism, 1982, for entire body of work; Pasolini prize, 1983, for The Book of Questions; Citadella Eurotechnic prize, 1987; French Ministry of Culture grand prize in poetry, 1987. Officer of the French Legion of Honor and Commander of Arts and Letters. Died: 2 January 1991.

Publications

Poetry

Chansons pour le repas de l'ogre [Songs for the Ogre's Meal]. 1947.

Trois Filles de mon quartier [Three Girls of My Quarter]. 1948.

La Clef de voute [The Key of the Vault]. 1950.

Je batis ma demeure: Poems, 1943-1957 [I Built My House: Poems, 1943-1957]. 1959; revised edition, 1975; selections translated as A Share of Ink, 1979.

Le Livre des questions [The Book of Questions]:

Vol. I: Le Livre des questions. 1963; as The Book of Questions, 1976.

Vol. II: Le Livre de Yukel. 1964; as The Book of Yukel and published with Return to the Book (vol. III), 1978.

Vol. III: Le Retour au livre. 1965; as Return to the Book and published with The Book of Yukel (vol. II), 1978.

Vol. IV: Yael. 1967; translated as Yael and published with Elya (vol. V) and Aely (vol. VI), 1983.

Vol. V: Elya. 1969; translated as Elya and published with Yael (vol. IV) and Aely (vol. VI), 1983.

Vol. VI: Aely. 1972; translated as Aely and published with Yael (vol. IV) and Elya (vol. V), 1983.

Vol. VII: El; ou, Le Dernier Livre. 1973; as El; or, The Last Book, 1984.

La Memoire et la main [The Memory and the Hand]. 1974-89.

Ca suit son cours [It Follows Its Course]. 1975.

Le Livre des ressemblances [The Book of Resemblances]:

Vol. I: Le Livre des ressemblances. 1976; as The Book of Resemblances, 1990.

Vol. II: Le Soupcon, le desert. 1978; as Intimations, the Desert, 1991.

Vol. III: L'Ineffacable, l'inapercu. 1980; as The Ineffaceable, the Unperceived, 1992.

Recit. 1981.

Le Petit Livre de la subversion hors de soupcon. 1982; as The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, 1996.

Le Livre du dialogue. 1984; as The Book of Dialogue, 1986.

Le Parcours. 1985.

Le Livre du partage. 1987; as The Book of Shares, 1989.

If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabés (French and English). 1988.

Le Seuil, le sable: Poésies complétes 1943-1988. 1990.

Le Livre de l'hospitalité. 1991.

From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabés Reader (selections). 1991.

Désir d'un commencement; Angoisse d'une seule fin. 1991; as Desire for a Beginning; Dread of One Single End, 2001.

Petites poésies jours de pluie et de soleil (for children). 1991.

Other

Preface aux lettres de Max Jacob a Edmond Jabes [Introduction to Max Jacob's Letters to Edmond Jabés]. 1945.

Le Livre des Marges:

Le Livre des Marges. 1975; as The Book of Margins, 1993.

Dans la double dependance du dit. 1984.

Bâtir au quotidien. 1997.

Du desert au livre: Entretiens avec Marcel Cohen (interview). 1980; as From the Desert to the Book, 1990.

Un Etranger avec, sous le bras, un livre de petit format (aphorisms and reflections). 1989; as A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, 1993.

L'Enfer de Dante. 1987.

La Memoire des mots: Comment je lis Paul Celan/Worterinnerung: Wie ich Paul Celan lese (French and German). 1990.

Un Regard. 1992.

Cela a eu lieu. 1993.

Les Deux Livres; Suivi de, Aigle et chouette. 1995.

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Bibliography:

Edmond Jabés Bibliography, edited by Anthony Rudolph, 1974; Edmond Jabés: "Du blanc des mots et du noir des signes": First Notes of a Bibliographer, 1993, Edmond Jabés: "Du blanc des mots et du noir des signes": A Preliminary Record of the Printed Books, 1998, revised edition, 2001, and "Addenda and Corrigenda to the Bibliography of Edmond Jabés, Together with Lists of Fugitive Works in Journals and Books," in Australian Journal of French Studies, 37(2), 2000, p. 253, all by Roger Eliot Stoddard.

Critical Studies:

The Sin of the Book: Edmond Jabés, edited by Eric Gould, 1985; Questioning Edmond Jabés by Warren F. Motte Jr., 1990; "Edmond Jabes and the Poetry of the Jewish Unhappy Consciousness" by Joseph G. Kronick, in MLN, 106(5), December 1991, pp. 967-96; "Edmond Jabés: Sill and Sand" by Mary Ann Caws, in French Poetry Since the War: The Poetics of Presence and Passage, edited by Richard Stamelman, 1992; "Edmond Jabes and the Wound of Writing: The Traces of Auschwitz," in Orbis Litterarum (Denmark), 49(5), 1994, pp. 293-306, and Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabés: Figures of Estrangement, 1997, both by Gary D. Mole; "The Writing of Catastrophe: Jewish Memory and the Poetics of the Book in Edmond Jabés" by Richard Stamelman, in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, 1994; Edmond Jabés, the Poetry of the Nomad by William Kluback, 1998; "'Sharing the Unshareable': Jabes, Deconstruction, and the Thought of the 'Jews"' by Joan Brandt, in Borders, Exiles, Diasporas, edited by Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton, 1998.

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Edmond Jabés, born in Cairo in 1912, is a poet of exile, wandering, loss, and silence. A French-speaking Italian Jew, Jabés lived the experience of an outsider from childhood, disconnected from his Arab environment by both his religion and his language. Early on he began a correspondence with Max Jacob, who eventually became his literary and spiritual mentor. Although close to the surrealists, Jabés never officially adhered to the group. In 1957 he was exiled by Nasser and elected to live in Paris, leaving everything behind him including his family library. In Paris he published his first book of poetry and aphorisms, I Built My House (1959). He went on to write more than two dozen books before his death in 1991. His main works are The Book of Questions (1963-73), The Book of Resemblances (1976-80), and The Memory and the Hand (1974-89).

Jabés's experience of literal and psychic exile is the foundation for his global interrogation of the world and, more specifically, of the inability of language to represent the world. He finds an answer in the rich silence of the desert as well as in "The Book," the only place to which he can belong. Jabés's questioning of language and his obsession with "The Letter" connect him to a deeply rooted Judaic tradition and quest. Like music formed from the silence between notes, Jabés's deepest poetry is found in the silence of his suspended sentences and thoughts: "Any commentary is first a commentary of silence."

For Jabés the exile must be understood as the opposite of what he calls "The Being" and, as such, can only try to give expression to emptiness through the fullness of language. But this is an impossible task. The limitless cannot be expressed with a limited tool; Jabés can only suggest, in a paradoxical way, the existence of the nonexistent: silence becomes a language. In that sense the Jewish experience of wandering the earth is parallel to the wandering of language in its attempt at meaning: "Faced with the impossibility of writing that paralyzes any writer and the impossibility of being Jewish that, for two thousand years, has torn the people of that name, the writer chooses to write and the Jew to survive."

With an economy of means similar to the Japanese haiku, Jabés evokes the deepest experiences of the human condition. His sense of being deraciné (uprooted) allows him to express a universal experience of solitude and a desire for connection. This cruel perception of the solitude of the human condition gives a unique tone to his poetry—a poetry that suggests more than says, evokes more than describes—and inspires in the reader a consideration of his or her own experience of the existential loneliness we all share. Although a committed Jew, Jabés is open to a larger understanding of spirituality that touches on the universal. Jabés conceives of everything in an inverse way, however, and agrees with the Isaac Luria notion of tzimtzum, the fact that, to allow man to live, God retires from the world. Indeed, according to Jabés, if God withdraws from the world, is absent, then man's need for God becomes ever greater.

Jabés's paradoxical reading of the world leads us to a revision of our perceptions and indicates that the true life may be found in a new contemplation of "The Letter." "The Book" becomes "The Book of Life" in an inverted way—"God as extreme name of the abyss; Jew as a figure of exile, wandering, strangeness, and separation, which is also the writer's condition." Thus, to Adorno, who claims that after Auschwitz one cannot write poetry, Jabés gives the following answer: "Yes, one can. And furthermore, one has to. One has to write out of that break, out of the unceasingly revived wound."

—Alain Goldschlager

See the essay on The Book of Questions.