The late 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. 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. Jabes's unique mode of expression has been variously described: "a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define", "cascading aphorisms", "a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms". The manner of his writing rigorously embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida).

The late 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. 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. Jabes's unique mode of expression has been variously described: "a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define", "cascading aphorisms", "a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms". The manner of his writing rigorously embodies the meaning of his writing. Jabes's book is a manifesto not only of his own poetry, but of the most advanced critical poetry written during this century, one in which he engages in dialogue with some of its outstanding philosophers (Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida).

The death of Edmond Jabes in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabes's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style--combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms--holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities.
In "The Book of Margins," his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabes is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabes considers the work of several of his contemporaries, including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Paul Celan, Jacques Derrida, Michel Leiris, Emmanuel Levinas, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and his translator, Rosmarie Waldrop. This book will be important reading for students of Jewish literature, French literature, and literature of the modern and postmodern ages.
Born in Cairo in 1912, Edmond Jabes lived in France from 1956 until his death in 1991. His extensively translated and widely honored works include "The Book of Questions" and "The Book of Shares," Both of these were translated into English by Rosmarie Waldrop, who is also a poet.
Religion and Postmodernism series

"To take the wrong door means indeed to go against the order that presided over the plan of the house, over the layout of the rooms, over the beauty and rationality of the whole. But what discoveries are made possible for the visitor! The new path permits him to see what no one other than himself could have perceived from that angle. All the more so because I am not sure that one can enter a written work without having forced one's own way in first." - from In Place of a Foreword

'Advice to a Young Poet' is an English translation, first published on the centenary of the author's birth in 1967, of Max Jacob's posthumous 'Conseils a un jeune poete'. This was Jacob's last major statement on poetry, the culmination of a lifetime's reflection on and practice of the art. This book makes his great personal as well as literary influence on many poets and writers easier to understand. The translator, John Adlard, supplies an introduction which is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Jacob. The book is completed by a deeply personal preface from the pen of Edmond Jabès, and a historically important afterword by the "young poet" himself, Jacques Evrard, the first time he had expressed himself on the subject. "In 'Advice to a Young Poet' Max sets out to answer a question posed by the young man's father: 'What is a lyrical line?' It is his last major statement on poetry, the final development of the thinking of twenty-five years. 'Men used to believe,' he wrote in the 1916 preface to 'Le Cornet a Des', 'that artists are inspired by angels and that there are different categories of angels.' By 1941, after the years of prayer and contemplation at Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, this is no longer what 'men used to believe', but a fact in the interior life of a poet, the interior life without which a poet cannot be permeable. Only in a mind that is permeable is that conflagration possible ('the conflagration,' he called it in his 'Art Poetique' of 1922, 'after the encounter of a harmonious man with himself') which produces the lyrical line, the 'consecrated line' identified by its euphoria and its euphony." —from John Adlard's introduction

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Ya l, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jab s every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Yael, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabes every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?