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The fate of the individual among disintegrating tradition is a major theme of Edmund Jabes. In this book of literary and philosophical conversations, France's leading Jewish writer adds an intimate, personal dimension to his formidable 40-year career. Compelling in its inquiry into the fate of reading and writing in our time, it is also profoundly ambiguous, open to a multiplicity of possible readings. This work offers insight of a new kind into this major writer's growing canon in English--thoughts on his own works combine with stories of his youth in Egypt, his exile in 1956, other writers and artists, the Kabbalah, and projections for a postmodern world.
"The texts that Edmond Jabes has assembled here span seventeen books and the years between 1943 and 1985. They form a carefully composed jo.
The death of Edmond Jabès in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabès's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style—combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms—holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities. In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabès is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabès considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Cai...
Artwork by Edmond Jabes. Rosmarie WaldropContributions by Ed Epping. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.
This book offers a fresh reflection on The Book of Questions by the French-Egyptian Jewish writer Edmond Jabès and its readings, and proposes to re-contextualize Jabès' enigmatic prose through the lens of the author’s manuscripts. Addressed are the main prisms through which Jabès’ oeuvre has been read since its publication in 1963: Jewishness, the Shoah, intertextuality with Midrash and Kabbalah, hermeticism and interpretation. It analyzes their shapes and their becoming in the work-in-progress, reveals the dynamics and the contexts of their evolution from the pre-texts to the text and beyond, and reflects on the relationship between creation, interpretation, and writing as a process. It seeks to rethink our reading of The Book of Questions and the poetics and hermeneutics of enigmatic writing.
"For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live (Theodor Adorno). The Jewish writer Edmond Jabes, born in Cairo in 1912, wrote explicitly from the perspective of exile once he arrived in France after the Suez crisis. However, Jaron argues, exile was a predominant theme even before Jabes left Egypt. He brings to light the author's associations with other francophone writers in Egypt, especially those affiliated with the Surrealists, but shows that metropolitan France exerted a greater pull. Drawing on unpublished archival and rare printed sources, Jaron examines how Jabes opposed anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and later placed the Shoah at the heart of his acclaimed ""Livres des Questions"" (1963-73)."
The late Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida)
Poems make use of aphorisms, meditation, narrative, and questions to consider the nature of God, silence, death, and human relationships
An intimate portrait of one of France’s most important writers by his translator.