‘At the Threshold of the Book’

In 1972 a selection taken from the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot’s book “L’Amitie” was published in the journal “European Judaism.” Malke Morrell pointed me to the article. In the selection Blanchot discusses Edmond Jabes’ “Book of Questions.” (The translation into English was prepared by Paul Auster.) Below is a translation of one of Jabes’s best known poems, “At the Threshold of the Book,” cited on poemhunter.com where an audio version of the poem can also be found.

'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.'
 'Have they read the book?'
 'They are reading it.'
 'Did they happen by for the fun of it?'
 'They foresaw the book. They are prepared to encounter it.'
 'Do they know the characters?'
 'They know our martyrs.'
 'Where is the book set?'
 'In the book.'
 'Who are you?'
 'I am the keeper of the house.'
 'Where do you come from?'
 'I have wandered.'
 'Is Yukel your friend?'
 'I am like Yukel.'
 'What is your lot?'
 'To open the book.'
 'Are you in the book?'
 'My place is at the threshold.'
 'What have you tried to learn?'
 'I sometimes stop on the road to the sources and question the signs, the world of my ancestors.'
 'You examine recaptured words.'
 'The nights and mornings of the syllables which are mine, yes.'
 'Your mind is wandering.'
 'I have been wandering for two thousand years.'
 'I have trouble following you.'
 'I, too, have often tried to give up.'
 'Do we have a tale here?'
 'My story has been told so many times.'
 'What is your story?'
 'Ours, insofar as it is absent.'
 'I do not understand.'
 'Speaking tortures me.'
 'Where are you?'
 'In what I say.'
 'What is your truth?'
 'What lacerates me.'
 'And your salvation?'
 'Forgetting what I said.'
 'May I come in? It is getting dark.'
 'In each word there burns a wick.'
 'May I come in? It is getting dark around my soul.'
 'It is dark around me, too.'
 'What can you do for me?'
 'Your share of luck is in yourself.'
 'Writing for the sake of writing does nothing but show contempt.'
 'Man is a written bond and place.'
 'I hate what is said in place I have left behind.'
 'You trade in the future, which is immediately translated. What you have left is you without you.'
 'You oppose me to myself. How could I ever win this fight?'
 'Defeat is the price agreed on.'
 'You are a Jew, and you talk like one.'
 'The four letters JUIF which designate my origin are your four fingers. You can use your thumb to crush me.'
 'You are a Jew, and you talk like one. But I am cold. It is dark. Let me come into the house.'
 'There is a lamp on my table. And the house is in the book.'
 'So I will live in the house after all.'
 'You will follow the book, whose every page is an abyss where the wing shines with the name.'

Translated by: Rosmarie Waldrop

Blanchot himself was very comfortable in the same sort of reserve expressed by Jabes. Before speaking he felt the need to explain how he was able to overcome it and speak. “...in the end, there comes a moment when the austerity that is the centre of every important book, be it the most tender or the most painful, severs the ties and takes it from us. The book no longer belongs to anyone; it is this that consecrates the book.”

While in this paragraph the reference is clearly to the work of Jabes it applies so thoroughly to our scriptures, the Hebrew Bible. The qualities of Jewishness and of writerliness are intermingled for Jabes. Blanchot quotes Jabes on this: “I have spoken of the difficulty of being a Jew, which is inseparable from the difficulty of being a writer, for Judaism and writing are but the same hope, the same waiting, and the same usury.” This difficulty which one might also refer to as a quality of “being a Jew,” brings to mind the personality of the seeker, spiritual and otherwise.

Blanchot, in explicating Jabes goes directly to revelation and Jabes’s complicated feelings about it:

“...the Table of the Law were broken, when still barely touched by the divine hand, (a curse consistent with the removal of interdiction [Blanchot and Auster’s idiosyncratic translation of Mitzvah/ commandment], and were written again, but not in their originality, so that it is from an already destroyed word that man learns the demand that must speak to him: there is no real first understanding, no initial and unbroken word, as if one could never speak except the second time, after having refused to listen and having taken distance in regard to the origin [think of the Israelites’ abashed reaction to the theophany of the moment of revelation at Sinai].

...the written word, the scripture, is also, at the same time, a commented text that not only must be re-uttered in its identity, but learned in its inexhaustible difference. ‘The homeland of the Jew,’ says E. Jabes, ‘is a sacred text in the middle of the commentaries it inspired.’ … Thus the simultaneity of the first scriptural text, and the context of the second word that interprets it, introduces a new form, a new interval, in which it is now the sacred itself, in its too immediate power, that is held at a distance, …”

In Blanchot’s understanding of Jabes there is a direct access to revelation, but that direct access is always experienced in a mixture with the experience and response to that original revelation. -And that experience includes an element of the loneliness of the original.

The writing that Jabes is known for is the work he did after the Holocaust. He had been active in the post-war period for over twenty years before he began to become known in the English speaking world. Some translations began to appear by various translators in the early 1970s, among other places, in the journal Tree, which I have spoken about in other posts recently. Rosmarie Waldrop’s first complete volume of translations appeared in 1973 from Tree Books.

The place that Jabes has in American literature is different from the context that I held for Blanchot within the French context. For Blanchot, Jabes exists in the genealogy of poetry that has Mallarme at its root. Because of Blanchot’s long friendship with Emmanuel Levinas his ability to understand the Judaism in Jabes coincides with the relationship to Mallarme in a way that might not have been as widely shared. Jabes could also be seen as a part of the larger existentialist phenomenon. The strong presence of the Desert as an environment and a theme fits within that movement as well as the Jewish context. It was an available body of work for the radicals and seekers in 1960s France.

In the U.S. Jabes emerged out of the cloistered franco-phile literati readership through the translation project that unfolded over subsequent decades. The initial appeal for Meltzer to publish Rosmarie Waldrop’s translations of Jabes was as part of his interest in Kabbalistic literature. I am only guessing at the details, but the late 60s and 70s were a period of time where Meltzer and the Jewish community overall was experiencing a greater degree of communal pride. This period also saw the rise of ethnic liberation movements. Shaul Magid has made the point that the black pride movement and figures like Malcolm X were an influence on Jewish radicals in a turn towards exploring their relationship to their own ethnic heritage.

Meltzer had been involved in the circle around Wallace Berman that expressed interest in various mystical traditions with a strong interest in Kabbalah. The German-born Waldrop developed her interest in Jabes during a year spent in Paris studying in the early 1970s. I don’t know how Meltzer made the connection with Rosmarie Waldrop and Jabes, but Meltzer was ready for Jabes when the connection was made.

After the 1970s Meltzer was less involved with Jewish literature and kabbalah. The larger culture was changing and the syncretistic search for meaning through the broad corpus of mystical traditions was retreating. Nevertheless, interest in Jabes has only increased in the U.S. It may be that a more complex relationship to the syncretic search for meaning in mysticism has emerged in the Jewish community that finds support in the theology within Jabes’ writings. I will return to this next week in a discussion of the reissue of Zalman Schacter-Shalomi’s “Fragments of a Future Scroll: Hasidism for the Aquarian Age.”