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Edmond Jabès: Translation and Exile

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Edmond Jabès: Translation and Exile

“pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler”

Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg

“L’espérance est liée à l’ecriture”

Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions

The following should be considered an outline of what a reading of Edmond Jabès might
center on. I hint at ways to approach Jabès from the perspectives of translation and the
postcolonial concept “writing back.” My essay consists of three parts. First, I give a short
introduction to Jabès for those not familiar with him. Second, I read Jabès‟s poetry through
the concepts of translation and writing back. And third, I address the translation of Jabès‟s
poetry into English, and what possible relation it might have to the character of his poetry.
Furthermore, the essay is a reading of Jabès in translation. One could, perhaps, argue
that I am not reading Edmond Jabès, but a translation of his poetry. However, one of the aims
of my essay is, precisely, to point out how Jabès‟s poetry from its very beginning is placed in
translation, how it is structured as translations of fragments of a yet unwritten book, the book
yet to come. To read Jabès‟s poetry, then, means to follow the strange logic of resemblance,
to follow the law of the circle, the law of infinite translation(s), and of writing. In the end,
writing is the hope of reading, it is the hope of the final book, and the final question. Because
as Jabès writes: “Hope is bound to writing.”1
Edmond Jabès was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1912. He was educated in French schools in
Cairo and used the French language in his daily life. But because of his Jewish roots, his
nationality, or at least according to his passport, was Italian. Egyptian citizenship was not
instituted until 1929 and since the Egyptian authorities did not recognize citizenships issued
by religious authorities, Jabès was considered Italian because his grandfather had received
Italian citizenship in 1882. He was, in other words, a foreigner in his own country. His
language was French, his country of origin was Egypt, and a piece of paper was the only tie
between him and Italy. The Suez Crisis brought with it the exile of the Jews from Egypt and
generated an even more pronounced estrangement from his supposed origin. After being
harassed and threatened by imprisonment, Jabès moved to Paris in 1957, where he yet again
was faced with anti-Semitism. Walking home one evening he noticed some graffiti on a wall

1
Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) 220. (My translation)

1
lit up by the headlights of a car. The writing on the wall read “Mort au Juifs,” and “Jews go
home.” Later, in a poem with the title “And You Shall Be in the Book,” he writes: “A few
graffiti on a wall were enough for the dormant memories in my hand to take over my pen, for
my fingers to determine what I see.” 2 The state of being exiled and his sense of being a
stranger everywhere came to motivate his poetry and brought him closer to his Jewish roots
and the Diaspora. In Paris, one could say, he began recreating himself by creating a home in
writing. Asked what language he spoke in his childhood he responded: “My mother tongue is
a foreign language.”3 He died in 1991 and he never returned to Egypt.

Jabès’s Poetry

It was after his exile from Egypt and his move to Paris that Jabès‟s poetry took a new
direction, and it is this poetry for which he is most known, and which I will deal with here. In
his early poetry he had been greatly influenced by French culture and poetry, especially the
poetry of Max Jacob, a writer who had become Jabès‟s mentor and friend. But with the first
book published in France in 1963, The Book of Questions, he returned to the Orient, to Egypt,
and the desert. He also introduced Jewish thinking and culture into the poetry. The Book of
Questions evolved into seven volumes written between 1963 and 1973; it was followed by
The Book of Resemblances in three volumes written between 1976 and 1980. The Book of
Questions and The Book of Resemblances should, if we want to take Jabès‟s word for it, be
considered a single piece.
The themes that he introduces into his poetry after moving to Paris, such as the desert,
the book, God, Jew, Law, eye, name, word, question, and exile, to name a few, are closely
connected to his idea of language and poetry. For Jabès, language and exile are two words
that represent a similar experience. He sees an analogy between his experience of physical
exile and what he considers a form of exile inherent in language, and his poetry could be said
to translate his experience of exile into his idea of the exile of writing. Just like his experience
of homelessness in the world, we are all, he suggests, strangers in language, language belongs
to no one and everyone. That is to say, language, in the thought of Jabès, suffers from a
double bind, it is absolutely singular, but paradoxically also general and open to anyone, it is

2
Edmond Jabès, From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover and
London: University Press of New England, 1991) 35. Further references to this edition are identified by the
letters FBB, followed by the page number.
3
Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 2002) 155. Further references to this edition are identified by the letters LA, followed by the
page number.

2
what determines and limits the poet, the poet‟s law, so to speak. But, language is also the
poet‟s freedom by being the medium in and through which the poet can speak in order to
subvert the authority of and over language. To put it differently, language as the book is
necessarily limited and restricted, it is bound to itself, but at the same time it is a figure of
excess, and an overflowing its own boundaries. It is, to put it differently, a desert and as such
without border lines. The book carries with it the possibility of another book hidden within
the book. Consequently, the book is irreducible, yet depends on its own reduction, its re-
reading, and its translation.
In “The Cut of Time,” published in 1980, Jabès writes: “The letter is to being what
memory is to forgetting: at the same time the unscrolling of its history and the seal of its
eternal sleep.”4 This statement is reminiscent of Heidegger‟s analysis of metaphysics as the
forgetting of Being in the writing of its history. However, for Jabès the statement is also
existential and stems from the experience of writing as the only, even if inadequate, way of
remembering the history of the Jews and the Diaspora. The letter bears witness to the dignity
of Being, while it, at the same time, marks the wound after the loss of Being. Jabès also lets
one of his many imaginary rabbis open the first volume of The Book of Questions with the
words: “Mark the first page of the book with a red marker. For, in the beginning, the wound
is invisible.”5 This in turn leads up to the idea that “Being is a Grammar,” as Derrida puts it in
his essay “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.”6 What Derrida means by “Being is a
Grammar” is that being can only become accessible to us through writing, or what could be
called a grammatology of Being. It also ties in to the history of the Jews, traditionally seen as
“a race born of the book” as The Book of Questions has it.7
But what of the questions The Book of Questions pose? What do they imply? Once
again, they go back to Jabès‟s idea of the exile of language, the diaspora of writing. The

4
FBB 27.
5
FBB 31.
6
Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) 76.
7
Derrida comes to the phrase “Being is a Grammar” in the following way: “All historic anxiety, all poetic
anxiety, all Judaic anxiety thus torments this poem of the interminable question. All affirmations and all
negations, all contradictory questions are welcomed into the question within the unity of the book, in a logic like
none other, in Logic. Here we would have to say Grammar. But does not this anxiety and this war, this
unloosening of all the waters, rest upon the peaceful and silent basis of a nonquestion? …The nonquestion of
which we are speaking is the unpenetrated certainty that Being is a Grammar; and that the world is in all its parts
a cryptogram to be constituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering; that the book is original,
that everything belongs to the book before being and in order to come into the world; that any thing can be born
only by approaching the book, can die only by failing in sight of the book; and that always the impassable shore
of the book is first” (76-77). I will leave aside, here, the implied critique Derrida aims at Jabès‟s unquestioned
ground and origin of the book. Suffice it to say that Derrida had only read the first volume of The Book of
Questions at the time of writing his essay.

3
questions that he poses are questionings, critiques of indifference, they are questions without
answers because, for him, to answer them would be to give in to intolerance and racism. They
make up what could be called Jabès‟s ethics: “Being means to interrogate; it means to
interrogate oneself // within the labyrinth of the Question posed to // the other and to God and
which does in no way carry with it // and answer.”8 As the Jabès critic Richard Stamelman
writes: “More powerfully than answers, which represent immobility, sedentariness, stability,
closure, and completion, the question in its essential nomadism can open doors, point the way,
reveal the path to follow.”9 Accordingly, the questions in The Book of Questions are not really
answered, but are often followed by an image giving rise to yet another question, followed by
an image, and so on. I will give a few examples from how The Book of Questions begins. The
following is set up as a dialogue between the poet and “the keeper of the house”:

“What is going on behind this door?”

“A book is shedding its leaves.”
“What is the story of the book?”
“Becoming aware of a scream.”
“I saw rabbis go in.”
“They are privileged readers. They come in small groups to give us their comments.”
[…]
“Did they happen by for the fun of it?”
“They foresaw the book. They are prepared to encounter it.”
[…]
“Who are you?”
“I am the keeper of the house.”
“Where do you come from?”
“I have wandered.”
[…]
“What is your lot?”
“To open the book.”
“Are you in the book?”
“My place is at the threshold.”
[…]
“I hate what is said in places I have left behind.”
“You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have left is you without you.”
“So I will live in the house after all?”

8
Edmond Jabès, Le livre des questions 2, 218. (My translation)
9
Richard Stamelman, “The Graven Silence of Writing,” in Edmond Jabès, From the Book to the Book, trans.
Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1991) viii.

4
 “You will follow the book, whose every page is an abyss where the wing shines with the name.”10

The images that follow some of these questions can, I would like to suggest, be seen to
translate the questions. Not into simple, absolute answers, but into metaphors re-writing or
writing back into the questions, if we take metaphor in its etymological sense, stemming from
the Greek meta phorien, to put over, above. That is, as in the German übersetzen, as well as
the Swedish översätta, words that translate the English word translate. In this way, Jabès lets
his metaphors remain questioning, that is, not point to an answer in the form of an image.
Instead, he provides a place for translation, for difference, the foreign and strange, for the
wholly other, or others. Consequently, his metaphors are not really metaphors, rather they are
subversive metaphors that resist any single answer and any single truth.
In an interview with Paul Auster, Jabès addresses his idea of the question. He says: “I
don‟t presume to have any answers; I ask questions. If I give a special status to the question,
that is because I find something unsatisfactory about the nature of the answer…. [A]nswers
embody a certain form of power. Whereas the question is a form of non-power. But a
subversive kind of non-power, one that will be upsetting to power.”11
To put it differently, even though his imaginary rabbis and their disciples may
sometimes sound authoritative, they at the same time subvert authority with their questions
and subversive metaphors. I will give a few more examples from The Book of Questions. Reb
Léma pronounces this statement: “The Jew answers every question with another question.”
This circular statement is then commented on, or debated, by some of the imaginary rabbis:

“Our hope is for knowledge,” said Reb Mendel. But not all his disciples were of his opinion.
“We first have to agree on the sense you give to the word „knowledge‟,” said the oldest of them.
“Knowledge means questioning,” answered Reb Mendel.
“What will we get out of these questions? What will we get out of all the answers which only lead
to more questions, since questions are born of unsatisfactory answers?” asked the second disciple.
“The promise of a new question,” replied Reb Mendel.”12

Jabès‟s questions disqualify the answers; they defer meaning, the determination of a place and
a single truth. In The Book of Questions, it is in the exile of meaning (the white page, the

10
FBB 31-34.
11
LA 143.
12
FBB 47.

5
spaces between words, the desert) that signification emerges, and is translated and written
back into words.
To move on, the questions and comments of Jabès‟s imaginary rabbis are alternated by
prose fragments, aphorisms, short lyrical poems, and reflections. The following is an example
of one such prose fragment that I think has its place here:

[D]o I know, in my exile, what has driven me back through tears and time, back to the wells of the
desert where my ancestors had ventured? There is nothing at the threshold of the open page, it
seems, but this wound of a race born of the book, whose order and disorder are roads of suffering.
Nothing but this pain, whose past and whose permanence is also that of writing.13

By what Derrida calls “one long metonymy,”14 the Jew and the poet become, in The Book of
Questions, almost, analogous, but, at the same time, also put in contrast. They re-write, or
translate and write back into each other, but always leave a rest, something unanswered
behind. The exile from Egypt of Jabès the poet by metonymy translates into the exile of the
Jews from Egypt, and the exile of the Jews writes back into the word of all poets. But being
both a Jew and a poet means belonging entirely to neither of them. There is, despite their
metonymical similarity, a difference between them. In the part of The Book of Questions
called “The Return to the Book,” Jabès writes: “I have told of the desert through the
indestructible memory of the void whose every grain is a tiny mirror. // A stranger to my
brothers, // a stranger to myself, // to the world // in the rigorous chance of the book.”15 The
book, then, is the place, or non-place, where the poet and the Jew find their home, or as close
to home as they can get. But for Jabès the Book, with a capital B, is not yet written. In fact,
The Book of Questions is a book that comments on an unwritten Book, it is an interrogation
into itself and the roots, the origin of the book. In “Test and Book,” Jabès writes:

I have followed a book in its persistence, a book which is the story of a thousand stories as night
and day are the prow of a thousand poems…. The world is exiled in the name. Within it there is
the book of the world. Writing means having a passion for origins. It means trying to go down to
the roots…. So writing does not mean stopping at the goal, but always going beyond.16

13
FBB 35.
14
Derrida 65.
15
FBB 94-95.
16
FBB 79.

6
Jabès‟s project could be described as his attempt to write a book on the Book. As his English
translator Rosmarie Waldrop writes in her study of Jabès, Lavish Absence: Recalling and
Rereading Edmond Jabès, “Edmond Jabès does not write novels. Nor poems, for that matter.
He claims to write in a new genre, „the book‟. Not even books. He writes the book that all his
books are fragments of.”17 The book is one of Jabès‟s subversive metaphors that translates
one image into another, it does not have a fixed meaning but takes on different forms
throughout his work. In his conversation with Paul Auster, he says of the book: “The book
carries all books within itself, and each fragment is the beginning of the book, the book that is
created within the book and which at the same time is taken apart.”18 The book, then, is never
finished, it is constantly being written and rewritten, it is always yet to come. The book is a
desert, a non-place, where the writer finds him or herself lost. The desert and the book are
exile turned into home, or, again, as close to home as one can get without being at home.
Writing is the medium with which the writer can translate the experience of exile, the
wandering in the desert. Translation is, in other words, an integral part of what Jabès means
by writing as a wandering. Writing is always a writing back toward a lost homeland, a lost
language, and a lost self.
Now, Jabès‟s understanding of writing, the book, and the desert can be compared to
what Paul de Man says of translation in his essay on Walter Benjamin in The Resistance to
Theory: “What translation does,” de Man says, “is that it implies … the suffering of what one
thinks of as one‟s own – the suffering of the original language.”19 And a little later he sates
that “[t]his movement of the original is a wandering, an errance, a kind of permanent exile if
you wish, but it is not really an exile, for there is no homeland…. Now this motion, this
errancy of language which never reaches the mark, which is always displaced in relation to
what it meant to reach … this illusion of a life that is only an afterlife, that Benjamin calls
history.”20 Jabès‟s idea of the book is that the book is always writing back, it is a translation
of the book and of history, a translation of an unwritten book, and an unwritten history, for, as
de Man says, “there is no homeland,” only the wandering Jew in the desert, the errance of
writing. If we remember that Jabès claims that his mother tongue is a foreign language, it is
easy to imagine his writing as a form of translation. Or we could call it Jabès‟s way of writing
back into the desert, the place that is no-place, the white silence of the unwritten page, as well
as the physical experience of the limitlessness of the Egyptian desert.

17
LA 16.
18
LA 16.
19
Paul de Man, Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) 84.
20
de Man 92.

7
Translation
What does it take to translate Jabès into English, this writer who is from the beginning in
translation, who claims to have no mother tongue but a foreign language? This is the job that
Rosemarie Waldrop has undertaken. And I think it has not been an easy one. But, nevertheless,
to translate Jabès is to face the difficulties of translation itself and, also, the questions Jabès
himself asks of language. Waldrop‟s book, mentioned above, Lavish Absence: Recalling and
Rereading Edmond Jabès is a meditation on her work of translating Jabès, and her own theory
of translation has in many ways been inspired by Jabès‟s theory of writing. She also
acknowledges how the difficulties of translation, its inevitable incompleteness, itself
translates Jabès‟s poetic project. That is to say, the terms with which one can describe the
predicaments of translation, such as gap, lack, loss, silence, incompatibility, are also of major
importance in Jabès‟s poetry, a writing that tries to translate the Jewish experience of the
Diaspora, along with the writer‟s struggle with language and the book. In this way, translation
comes to mean more of a re-creation, a writing back, than a simple transference of one
language into another. But Waldrop also describes her translations as betrayals:

I have certainly betrayed him. And taken pleasure in it. Readers who read Edmond Jabès in
English do not read Edmond Jabès. They do not read Rosemarie Waldrop either, but our dialogue
and collaboration. A necessarily imperfect approximation trying to locate itself on that fine line
that is as close as possible to the French yet as remote from it as necessary for the text to stand on
its English feet, as it were.21

Moreover, Waldrop writes about otherness and identity in her translations, quoting Maurice
Blanchot, whom she thinks might be too optimistic: “Not resemblance, but identity on the
basis of otherness.”22 Consequently, both Jabès and Waldrop take otherness, the foreign, and
the strange into account. Translation, it could be said, is the voice of the displaced, the voice
of writing doomed to miss the mark, doomed to permanent exile. Translation, for both
Waldrop and Jabès, in this way, becomes a form of writing back, a struggle with language to
express what in essence cannot be expressed, it means writing back and re-creating, in
translation, the voice of exile.

21
LA 63.
22
LA 63.

8
 For Jabès, as for Novalis and Valèry, Waldrop says, poetry is a form of translation.23
For Novalis poetry translates natural language into the language of art, but for Jabès the
reverse is true. As Waldrop says:

Jabès starts out from the infinite, which is the ultimate goal of poetry in German Romantic
theory…. So, instead of elevating natural language into the “language of the gods,” with Jabès, we
translate the “language of the gods,” the Name of God, the “book” of the infinite, into our more
limited actual idiom. Writing/translating does not exalt, it narrows, as any passage from the
potential to the actual must.24

Waldrop‟s translation of Jabès and Jabès‟s writing as a writing back in translation stages
the conflict between interpretation and poetry, that is, the commentaries of the rabbis and the
poet‟s writing. This is also something that Derrida analyses in Writing and Difference under
the name “the interpretation of interpretation.” Alan Bass, Derrida‟s translator, says of “the
interpretation of interpretation” that “[t]he „rabbinical‟ interpretation of interpretation is the
one which seeks a final truth, which sees interpretation as an unfortunately necessary road
back to an original truth. The „poetical‟ interpretation of interpretation does not seek truth or
origin, but affirms the play of interpretation.”25 In Jabès, this, again, goes back to his sense of
being neither a Jew nor a poet entirely, but something in between, a stranger to both. In
consequence, translation and writing back becomes, for Jabès, a wandering errancy of
language in search of a path between interpretation and poetry. In the same way, by way of
metonymy, Waldrop‟s translations of Jabès take the same path of necessarily missing the
mark, failing in order to succeed.
In “Elya,” Jabès says on the subject of Jewishness, exile, and writing that: “So, with
God dead, I found my Jewishness confirmed in the book, at the predestined spot where it
came upon its face, the saddest, most unconsoled that man can have. Because being Jewish
means exiling yourself in the word and, at the same time, weeping for your exile.”26 Writing
back from exile, then, translating the suffering and sorrow of exile. The same thing could,
perhaps, also be said of Rosemarie Waldrop. She translates from one language that is not her
own into another foreign language. Her mother tongue is German. What would cause a
German to translate a Jewish poet like Jabès? Atonement? She answers no, but she is not
entirely sure. She says: “After all, I am German. Was. I was taught the Nazi salute along with
23
LA 60.
24
LA 61.
25
WD 311, note 3.
26
FBB 124.

9
the alphabet. But this is not it…. It would be presumptious [sic] to think that I, that any one
individual could.”27 But “[o]n the other hand,” she continues, “who knows what motives play
into our actions. I do not know what pulls me to the place where I must, and want to, speak.”28
In any case, her use of a foreign language to translate Jabès fits well into his project, gives it a
new dimension, and accentuates his focus on the foreign and strange. Her translations become
yet another book to be read and reread. Or as Jabès says of his writing: “Circular work; you
must tackle my work in its circles. // And each of them will demand a new reading.”29 To read
Jabès, even in translation, would then perhaps be to write back, to find refuge, even if just for
a moment, in the desert of language, or in the question without an answer.

Coda

There is a lot more to be said of the work of Jabès, of course. I have left many things aside.
For example, I have not commented on the place of word play in his poetry. But that, I think,
would require paying close attention to Jabès‟s French, and how he uses words to translate
words, to give them new meanings and nuances. And there are other things; I have not
mentioned The Book of Resemblances and what Jabès means by resemblance, in relation, for
example, to God, Book, Jew, memory, and even translation. I have not addressed the question
of God, if Jabès can be considered a religious poet. All these themes, even the ones I have
hinted at in this essay, demand a lot of work, a lot of reading and rereading, of writing and
rewriting. Because if there is something that Jabès can teach us today, it is the art of asking
questions, and of always being suspicious of too easy and too quick answers. As he writes in
“The Cut of Time”: “The question has always been, is, and will remain our best political
weapon.”30

27
LA 151.
28
LA 151.
29
FBB 124.
30
FBB 26.

10
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

de Man, Paul. Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book.” Writing and Difference.
Trans. Alan Bass. London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

Jabès, Edmond. From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader. Trans. Rosmarie
Waldrop. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1991.

. Le livre des questions 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Stamelman, Richard. “The Graven Silence of Writing.” From the Book to the Book.
By Edmond Jabès. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Hanover and London: University
Press of New England, 1991, ix-xxiii.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès.

Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

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