Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès  
Rosemarie Waldrop (paper, 150 pages, Wesleyan University Press, 2002; $17.95)

In Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Rosemary Waldrop performs a feat of literary alchemy that would be unimaginable from another writer. Waldrop, a poet of rare gifts as well as a distinguished translator and critic, here successfully intertwines biography, autobiography and literary and critical creation. Lavish Absence at once describes her work as the main translator of Edmond Jabès into English, gives us samples of Jabès's writing and her commentary on it, and presents her experience of Jabès, the man. Waldrop is of course uniquely placed to produce such a volume: over a period of twenty years, the last twenty years of the writer's life, she was both his translator and his friend.

        Jabès (1912-1991), a major figure in French letters, authored fifteen poetic, philosophical texts, something between mystical books and novels by implication, beginning with The Book of Questions in 1963. These works make manifest, among other elements, the condition of exile that Jabès lived. Born and raised in Egypt, he was among those Jews expelled during the Suez crisis in 1956, and came to settle and write in France. It is the complex connection in Jabès between writing and being, word and existence that Waldrop explores in her meditations on the author and that she elegantly realizes in her juxtaposition of passages of his writing with prose portraits of him from life. She establishes from the very beginning of her book the importance of this connection for Jabès, evoking the role of writing in his everyday life and then citing and enlarging upon the words that open The Book of Questions: "You are the one who writes and is written":

        No matter where, in cafés, in the metro, while walking, at dinner, on little bits of paper, on matchbooks, napkins, on his memory, Edmond Jabès writes. Because life is a book that needs to be written at any moment.

        All his life he practices death, the death at the end of each book, each poem, when the work no longer needs the author and rejects him. Now absorbed into his books. With all his body.

        "The writer is nobody," he says.

        As if he would prepare us for his absence.

        Edmond Jabès walks, slowly, hands crossed in back, with the steady steps of the nomad, steps sown by the desire of words to come together, the rhythm of question and further question, the cadence of commentary.

*

          Man does not exist. God does not exist. The world alone exists through God and         man in the open book.

        Energy, matter. It exists, but becomes "world" only in the book, in language, which is created by man and at the same time creates him. "You are the one who writes and is written" stands at the beginning of The Book of Questions. Faced with an undecipherable world we set out to create language, a place where human discourse can arise, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the undecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak to it under the name of God . . .

        The opening of Waldrop's text lays out the design that will develop into the work as a whole: the book is organized as a sort of flow of segments, varying from one paragraph to several pages in length, including quotations from Jabès (in her translation, with the original text in notes at the end of the book), commentary by Waldrop, and short portraits of and anecdotes about the author. It mirrors the construction of Jabès's own spaciously segmented and multifaceted work, with its series of "rabbinical commentaries, poems, aphorisms, word-play with philosophical implications, and reflective, densely metaphorical prose," to use Waldrop's description of his writing "fragments" surrounded by blank space, by lavish absence itself, the void, the "interruption" that "acknowledges the elusive whole." Throughout the book, literally beside Waldrop's lyrical explications of Jabès's text, is the almost physical presence of Jabès, in Waldrop's descriptions of time spent with him and his wife, in word portraits and transcriptions of remembered conversations (including his favorite jokes) Waldrop's precious personal memories.

        Another subject to which Waldrop always returns is that of translation. She reflects upon the process both in theoretical terms and in its particularities, as far as her work on Jabès is concerned. In passage after fascinating passage, Waldrop reflects upon her "envy" of Jabès's text and the "pleasure in destruction" that translating it involves. It is an exploration of the territory between languages, she says, and at the same time an affirmation of their difference. She describes in detail how she is less concerned with individual words than with the whole work, with "syntax, juxtaposition, what happens between."

        Waldrop's text is permeable, open to a multiplicity of kinds of readers, or to readers with multiple interests. I enter her book on several levels: as one who has also translated literary works from French into English; as a reader of Jabès; and as one who briefly met the man and heard him speak at a 1980s reading similar to those that she describes in her text. I have felt both inside and outside of Jabès's writings: inside because his interrogation of the process of writing grabs me; somewhat outside of Jabès because Jewish history, including the Jewish intellectual tradition that his work reflects, is not part of my own experience. Waldrop makes evident how fundamentally the phenomena of inclusion and exclusion, wholeness and fragmentation are part of Jabès work, are the very phenomena that he illuminates in his writing. She carefully describes the importance of paradox in his work, paradox that involves constant displacement of the binary. After reading her text, I feel myself more in accord with the ever-questioning spirit of his work - and this is a generous gift. Waldrop examines the ways in which Jabès's writing and life manifest what she calls a "metaphorical Judaism" that connects the exile of the Jew with the more general human condition. Her book is inclusive in other ways as well. Even though one may almost certainly does -- lack Waldrop's exhaustive knowledge of Jabès's work, her abundant citations and analysis lead one into the participatory Jabèsian movement of sliding, creative reading that she describes so well. Waldrop's text invites further reading: of Jabès, certainly; of the philosophers and critics whose words she skillfully weaves into her own ruminations and arguments; and finally, of Waldrop's own poetry and lyrical prose. Through the rich energy created by the coming together of Jabès's work and her own, Waldrop, in this most generous book, movingly opens up to others the "lavish absence" of his texts and of his place in her life.

Reviewed by Cynthia Running-Johnson


Cynthia Running-Johnson is professor of French at Western Michigan University and writes on modern and contemporary literature in French.