Edmond Jabès
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, and he was one of the most significant thinkers of what one might call poetical alienation. 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. (This is summarized from the reader's description in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier.) Very many of Jabes's books of prose and poetry have been translated into English, including The Book of Dialogue ( Wesleyan, 1987) and The Book of Margins (Chicago, 1993), both translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.
“We will gather images and images of images up till the last, which is blank. This one we will agree on. (Reb Carasso)”
Edmond Jabès
“At an early age I found myself facing the incomprehensible, the unthinkable, death. Ever since, I have known nothing on this earth can be shared because we own nothing. There is a word inside us stronger than all others - and more personal. A word of solitude and certainty, so buried in its night that it is barely audible to itself. A word of refusal, but also of absolute commitment, forging its bonds of silence in the emfathomable silence of the bond. This word cannot be shared. Only sacrificed.”
Edmond Jabès
“WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.”
Edmond Jabès
“Only what touches us closely preoccupies us. We prepare in solitude to face it. (The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion)”
Edmond Jabès
“What is not grasped has all the chances to become real.”
Edmond Jabès
“the soul has words as petals”
Edmond Jabès
“It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.”
Edmond Jabès
“The hand opens to the word, opens to distance.”
Edmond Jabès