Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, Collaborations With Artists, and Interviews (58 page)

And will you banish me from death?

Perhaps man is unworthy even of hope.

Dry, too, the fountain of remorse?

What matters sin

If it no longer leads to purity?

The flesh can scarcely remember

That once it was strong.

Worn out and wild — the soul.

God, look upon our weakness.

We want a certainty.

Not satisfied to remain on safe ground, without the comfort of a “certainty,” he continually goads himself to the edge of the abyss, threatening himself with the image of his own extinction. But rather than inducing him to succumb to despair, these acts of metaphysical risk seem to be the source of an enduring strength. In poems such as “The Premeditated Death,” a sequence that serves as the hub to the whole of
Sentimento del Tempo
, and nearly all the poems in his following collection,
Il Dolore (The Grief)
(1936–47) — most notably the powerful poem written on the death of his young son, “You Shattered” — Ungaretti’s determination to situate himself at the extremes of his own consciousness is paradoxically what allows him to cure himself of the fear of these limits.

By the force and precision of his meditative insight, Ungaretti manages to transcend what in a lesser poet would amount to little more than an inventory of private griefs and fears: the poems stand as objects beyond the self for the very reason that the self within them is not treated as an example of all selves or the self in general. At all times one feels the presence of the man himself in the work. As Allen Mandelbaum notes in the preface to his translations: “Ungaretti’s I is grave and slow, intensive rather than far-ranging; and his longing gains its drama precisely because that I is not a random center of desperations, but a
soma
bound by weight, by earthly measure, a hard, resisting, substantial object, not wished but willed, not dreamt-upon but ‘excavated’.”

In the poems of his later years, Ungaretti’s work comes to an astonishing culmination in the single image of the promised land. It is the promised land of both Aeneas and the Bible, of both Rome and the desert, and the personal and historical overtones of these final major poems — “Canzone,” “Choruses Describing the States of Mind of Dido,” “Recitative of Palinurus,” and “Final Choruses for the Promised Land,” — refer back to all of Ungaretti’s previous work, as if to give it its final meaning. The return to a Virgilian setting represents a kind of poetic homecoming for him at the end of his career, just as the desert revives the landscape of his youth, only to leave him in a last and permanent exile:

We cross the desert with remnants

Of some earlier image in mind,

That is all a living man

Knows of the promised land.

Written between 1952 and 1960, the “Final Choruses” were published in
Il Taccuino del Vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook)
, and they reformulate all the essential themes of his work. Ungaretti’s universe remains the same, and in a language that differs very little from that of his earliest poems, he prepares himself for his death — his real death, the last death possible for him:

The kite hawk grips me in his azure talons

And, at the apex of the sun,

Lets me fall on the sand

As food for ravens.

I shall no longer bear mud on my shoulders,

The fire will find me clean,

The cackling beaks

The stinking jaws of jackals.

Then as he searches with his stick

Through the sand, the bedouin

Will point out

A white, white bone.

1976

*
All quotations are translated by Allen Mandelbaum and appear in his S
elected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti
, published by Cornell University Press in 1975.

Book of the Dead

During the past few years, no French writer has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Starobinski have all written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and Jacques Derrida has remarked, flatly and without self-consciousness, that “in the last ten years nothing has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the texts of Jabès.” Beginning with the first volume of
Le Livre des Questions
, which was published in 1963, and continuing on through the other volumes in the series,
*
Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work — as dazzling as it is difficult to define. Neither novel nor poem, neither essay nor play,
The Book of Questions
is a combination of all these forms, a mosaic of fragments, aphorisms, dialogues, songs, and commentaries that endlessly move around the central question of the book: how to speak what cannot be spoken. The question is the Jewish Holocaust, but it is also the question of literature itself. By a startling leap of the imagination, Jabès treats them as one and the same:

I talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out.

The son of wealthy Egyptian Jews, Jabès was born in 1912 and grew up in the French-speaking community of Cairo. His earliest literary friendships were with Max Jacob, Paul Eluard, and René Char, and in the forties and fifties he published several small books of poetry which were later collected in
Je bâtis ma demeure
(1959). Up to that point, his reputation as a poet was solid, but because he lived outside France, he was not very well known.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 changed everything for Jabès, both in his life and in his work. Forced by Nasser’s regime to leave Egypt and resettle in France — consequently losing his home and all his possessions — he experienced for the first time the burden of being Jewish. Until then, his Jewishness had been nothing more than a cultural fact, a contingent element of his life. But now that he had been made to suffer for no other reason than that he was a Jew, he had become the Other, and this sudden sense of exile was transformed into a basic, metaphysical self-description.

Difficult years followed. Jabès took a job in Paris and was forced to do most of his writing on the Metro to and from work. When, not long after his arrival, his collected poems were published by Gallimard, the book was not so much an announcement of things to come as a way of marking the boundaries between his new life and what was now an irretrievable past. Jabès began studying Jewish texts — the Talmud, the Kabbala — and though this reading did not initiate a return to the religious precepts of Judaism, it did provide a way for Jabès to affirm his ties with Jewish history and thought. More than the primary source of the Torah, it was the writings and rabbinical commentaries of the Diaspora that moved Jabès, and he began to see in these books a strength particular to the Jews, one that translated itself, almost literally, into a mode of survival. In the long interval between exile and the coming of the Messiah, the people of God had become the people of the Book. For Jabès, this meant that the Book had taken on all the weight and importance of a homeland.

The Jewish world is based on written law, on a logic of words one cannot deny. So the country of the Jews is on the scale of their world, because it is a book … The Jew’s fatherland is a sacred text amid the commentaries it has given rise to …

At the core of
The Book of Questions
there is a story — the separation of two young lovers, Sarah and Yukel, during the time of the Nazi deportations. Yukel is a writer — described as the “witness” — who serves as Jabès’s alter ego and whose words are often indistinguishable from his; Sarah is a young woman who is shipped to a concentration camp and who returns insane. But the story is never really told, and it in no way resembles a traditional narrative. Rather, it is alluded to, commented on, and now and then allowed to burst forth in the passionate and obsessive love letters exchanged between Sarah and Yukel — which seem to come from nowhere, like disembodied voices, articulating what Jabès calls “the collective scream … the everlasting scream.”

Sarah:
I wrote you. I write you. I wrote you. I write you. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. I join with each syllable to the point of being but a body of consonants, a soul of vowels. Is it magic? I write his name, and it becomes the man I love …

And Yukel, toward the end of the book:

And I read in you, through your dress and your skin, through your flesh and your blood. I read, Sarah, that you were mine through every word of our language, through all the wounds of our race. I read, as one reads the Bible, our history and the story which could only be yours and mine.

This story, which is the “central text” of the book, is submitted to extensive and elusive commentaries in Talmudic fashion. One of Jabès’s most original strokes is the invention of the imaginary rabbis who engage in those conversations and interpret the text with their sayings and poems. Their remarks, which most often refer to the problem of writing the book and the nature of the Word, are elliptical, metaphorical, and set in motion a beautiful and elaborate counterpoint with the rest of the work.

“He is a Jew,” said Reb Tolba. “He is leaning against a wall, watching the clouds go by.”

“The Jew has no use for clouds,” replied Reb Jale. “He is counting the steps between him and his life.”

Because the story of Sarah and Yukel is not fully told, because, as Jabès implies, it
cannot
be told, the commentaries are in some sense an investigation of a text that has not been written. Like the hidden God of classic Jewish theology, the text exists only by virtue of its absence.

“I know you, Lord, in the measure that I do not know you. For you are He who comes.”

Reb Lod

What happens in
The Book of Questions
, then, is the writing of
The Book of Questions
— or rather, the attempt to write it, a process that the reader is allowed to witness in all its gropings and hesitations. Like the narrator in Beckett’s
The Unnamable
, who is cursed by “the inability to speak [and] the inability to be silent,” Jabès’s narrative goes nowhere but around and around itself. As Maurice Blanchot has observed in his excellent essay on Jabès: “The writing … must be accomplished in the act of interrupting itself.” A typical page in
The Book of Questions
mirrors this sense of difficulty: isolated statements and paragraphs are separated by white spaces, then broken by parenthetical remarks, by italicized passages and italics within parentheses, so that the reader’s eye can never grow accustomed to a single, unbroken visual field. One reads the book by fits and starts — just as it was written.

At the same time, the book is highly structured, almost architectural in its design. Carefully divided into four parts, “At the Threshold of the Book,” “And You Shall Be in the Book,” “The Book of the Absent,” and “The Book of the Living,” it is treated by Jabès as if it were a physical place, and once we cross its threshold we pass into a kind of enchanted realm, an imaginary world that has been held in suspended animation. As Sarah writes at one point: “I no longer know where I am. I know. I am nowhere. Here.” Mythical in its dimensions, the book for Jabès is a place where the past and the present meet and dissolve into each other. There seems nothing strange about the fact that ancient rabbis can converse with a contemporary writer, that images of stunning beauty can stand beside descriptions of the greatest devastation, or that the visionary and the commonplace can coexist on the same page. From the very beginning, when the reader encounters the writer at the threshold of the book, we know that we are entering a space unlike any other.

“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.”

“What are you?”

“I am the keeper of the house.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I have wandered …”

The book “begins with difficulty — the difficulty of being and writing — and ends with difficulty.” It gives no answers. Nor can any answers ever be given — for the precise reason that the “Jew,” as one of the imaginary rabbis states, “answers every question with another question.” Jabès conveys these ideas with a wit and eloquence that often evoke the logical hairsplitting —
pilpul
— of the Talmud. But he never deludes himself into believing that his words are anything more than “grains of sand” thrown to the wind. At the heart of the book there is nothingness.