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Lavish Absence
Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès
Sales Date: 2003-01-02
150 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
An intimate portrait of one of France's most important writers by his translator.
Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of France's most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jabès's primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jabès, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jabès as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jabès's work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jabès's own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism.
Foreword by Richard Stamelman
Man, God, world, book
A Book sui generis. The word between scream and silence
The wound of individualism
Metaphorical Judaism 1971: Meeting Edmond Jabés
Aphorism and breath
Translation: Betrayal, usurpation, "transluciferation" (de Campos), Benjamin's Art des Meinens,
Meta-story. Discontinuity. Music
Erasure: J. Cohen, Groborne
Rhythm. Poetry after Auschwitz. Paul Celan
"God is a word my culture has given me" Potentiality
Breaking open words, "mobilization of the letter" (Guglielmi)
Language, life, Winnicott's "intermediate area"
"Book" vs. novel (Jabés), vs. writing (Derrida)
Aphorism, fragment, exploded book
Breaking of the Tablets, the Vessels. Diaspora
Translation: envy and pleasure in destruction
The Genetic Code
Writing, reading, interpretation
Commentary
Translation: nouns, verbs, copulas
Translation: its three stages, Goethe, Novalis, Benjamin, Berman
7,rue de l"Epee de Bois
Faces n pebbles
Involution (Bounoure) rather than dialectic
Te missing center
Questioning vs. synthesis
The order of the questions, syntax
before-birth, after-death
Arriere-absence (Daive). Approaches of the Book
Subjunctive and Uncertainty
Avatars of the desert. Petlin
Topography of writing
Max Jacob
Translation: te challenge of mismatch, of silence
Oriental technique of answering a question
Origins in and ut of the book
The "non-place" of the book
Picasso and Jacob
Translation: both meanings are more important
Je Suis le livre
Ecriture feminine
The present of friendship
Streets. Names
Translation: displacement. "The whole surround" (C.D. Wright)
Translation: Statement. Vs song. "Motivational space" (Gadamer)
Kabbalah and Arabic literature
Edmond Jabes, Italian citizen
Language and being (Celan, Agamben)
Writer and word
Poetry as translation, "natural language" vs "language of the God"
Writer and word, continued
Translation as dialogue, as mirror
Translation: mot, parole, vocable
The Egypt talked about or not
Dialogue
The words' "law of their own"
Surrealism, Concrete Poetry. Relation of sound an sense.
Figures of speech, figures of thought
Translation: The Zukofsky Catallus
Three rhythms. Or maybe four
"le couscous arabe est superior"
Travel anxieties
The question of resemblance
1976: first readings in the U.S.
The "text of origin"
The "non-question: being is a grammar" (Derrida)
Self-reference
Banchot and others
Commentary, metaphor, the gesture of significance "If I were not a writer I would be a plumber"
First years in Paris. Painters (Bacon, Still)
1986: Rabbi Braude, Amherst, jokes
"Mirror and Scarf": an exemplary chapter
The chorus of rabbis
The "Book of Torment"
1979: Cambridge Poetry Festival
Color. Two Kinds of transparency
Translation: luck and despair
Working with Jabes. The nit of translation (Benjamn. De Campos)
Jabés silence vs. Gadamer's
Clause Royet-Journoud, Roger Laporte
Leitwort style
Music. Funeral
"Black fir on white fire"
Cousins. Typos
Theory vs. experience
Beckett. "Life." Death
1981: Tufts, Boston, Wesleyan Universities
Rue de l'Epee de Bois
A Foreigner… vs. a single line of discourse
Word-play, word-work
Beckette vs. Batille
Morandi
Self-reference. The genetic paradox
Mysticism, Kabbalah, Plotinus
"God"
Yael, an allegory of word and writer
Borges. Winnicott's "intermediate area"
March 1983: San Diego
San Francisco. Oppen
Translation: le livre, dans son actualite
Leiris in the rain
Reb Wolgamot, Reb Av, Reb Fu
Langue vs. parole, folklore vs. literature (Jakobson)
Authoria power
Images: little taste for vs. their power
The poetry of science
1983: Innauguration of the Centre Rachi
Translation: Recit
Between Cairo and Paris
Why do I translate Jabes?
"Mrs. Finkelstein." Photos
Michael Gizzi
Vieira da Silva
"My mother tongue is foreign language"
Notes
Bibliography
Rosmarie Waldrop is a poet, translator and author of many books including A Key into the Language of America (1994), Reluctant Gravities (1999), and The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès (Wesleyan, 1996). Richard Stamelman is Professor of Romance Languages at Dartmouth College.
"...a moving and often brilliantly insightful act of homage...Throughout this important and original book, she brings her critical acumen – as well as respect and affection – to bear on the achievement of her friend and mentor. Any reader who has not yet entered Jabès' unique oeuvre – too often reputed to be abstruse – now has the key."
~John Taylor, Paths to Contemporary French Literature
"Lavish Absence is a comprehensive yet intimate introduction to the writing and thought of Edmond Jabès, a critical figure for 20th-century poetry and philosophy. It is also a welcome articulation of Rosmarie Waldrop's own poetics, which are among the most influential in contemporary American poetry."
~Charles Bernstein, Director of the Poetics Program, State University of New York at Buffalo
"Lavish Absence is a comprehensive yet intimate introduction to the writing and thought of Edmond Jabès, a critical figure for 20th-century poetry and philosophy. It is also a welcome articulation of Rosmarie Waldrop's own poetics, which are among the most influential in contemporary American poetry."
~Charles Bernstein, Director of the Poetics Program, State University of New York at Buffalo
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