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The Book of Questions
Volume II [Yaël; Elya; Aely; El, or the Last Book]
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
Sales Date: 1991-09-01
YAËL
FORE-SPEECH
THE TIME BEFORE THE STORY
My Characters In and Out of the Book
The Light of the Sea
Fear of Time
The Long Dialogue of Centuries
The Three-paneled Mirror
The Garden
The Death of God
THE STORY
Yaël's Death
Journal I
Journal II
Journal III
The Book
ELYA
APPROACHING THE GROUND OF THE BOOK
THE GROUND OF THE BOOK
A Puddle of Water
The Broken Mirror of Words
From Day to the Shadow of Day
Counter-Test
Memory of a Dead Memory
The Book within the Book
Pledge of the Abyss
Birth of Self
In Bright Sunlight, the Gesture
The Transparency of Time
THE BOOK
Door I (The Margin)
Door II (The Name)
Door II (An Afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens)
Door IV (The Disciple)
AELY
BEFORE THE FORE-BOOK I
BEFORE THE FORE-BOOK II
(The Threshold of Glimmers
The Threshold of the Eye
The Threshold of the Void
THE FOREBOOK I
Nowhere
Writing
A Glimpse of the Book
THE FORE-BOOK II
In the Furrows of the Fore-Book I
In the Furrows of the Fore-Book II
Where the Word Answers to the Name Yaël
THE FOREBOOK III
The Empty Notebook
The Commentaries
The First Evening on Ben-Yehouda Street in Jerusalem
The Second Evening on Ben-Yehouda Street
Dialogue around Yaël and Elya
The Crisis or the Three Phases of Waiting for Death
WANDERING
First Approach to the Book (The Blank Page)
Second Approach to the Book (The Tie)
Third Approach to the Book (Answer to a Letter)
Fourth Approach to the Book (On the Nature of Obstacles)
Fifth Approach to the Book (Y.H.W.H. or the Unpronounceable Name)
Sixth Approach to the Book (The Ends and the Means)
Seventh Approach to the Book (Dead Space)
The Book Belongs Only to the Book
EL, OR THE LAST BOOK
IV
III
II
I
I
II
III
IV
EDMOND JABÈS died in Paris in 1991 at the age of 78. He settled in France after being expelled from his native Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. In 1987 he received France's National Grand Prize for Poetry. His other works available in English include The Book of Dialogue (1987), The Book of Resemblances (1990), and an anthology, From the Book to the Book (1991). ROSMARIE WALDROP's most recent books are a volume of poetry, Peculiar Motions (1990), and a novel, A Form / of Taking / It All (1990). Her translations of Jabès won a Columbia University Translation Center Award.
"Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work – as dazzling as it is difficult to define."
~Paul Auster, New York Review of Books
"Rosmarie Waldrop's superb translation of Jabès now makes broadly available the work of a writer whose concerns are close to those of some of the central American poetry and fiction of our present time. His is a poetry of interpretation, a madly belated midrash on the scripture of silence, a meditative mode in which scholia and commentaries animate the book of lifeHis questionings are those vast ones which can occur only when answers have already been given once and for all."
~John Hollander
""Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work – as dazzling as it is difficult to define.""
~Paul Auster, New York Review of Books
"The Book of Questions is "first of all a response to the problem of writing after the Holocaust, of speaking the unspeakable. To Theodor Adorno's assertion that 'one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz,' Mr. Jabès offers the poet's only possible reply: 'One must.' Mr. Jabès recognizes, though, that one can no longer write as before. His answer to this dilemma takes the form of a series of questions about book, word and sentence, speech and silence, God, justice and the law. Instead of one narrative voice, The Book of Questions offers a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. It is a work of great moral authority and urgency as well as beauty.""
~Michael Palmer, New York Times Book Review
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