The Book of Questions: Book of Yukel, and Return to the Book

A meditative narrative of Jewish Experience and man's relation to the world.

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 Yaël, 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 Jabès 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?

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.