Jabes has found a truth beyond words, the act between two thoughts, maybe all that is left to man when reflecting on Shoa. This book reminds me of Feynman diagrams; a dialogue of dreams between the finality of two sentences. The possibilities within these two finalities,if not hope, provide the comfort that being alive is not necesarily knowing or understading; it starts with breathing and reaching to the other..the rest, as in physics, is a phenomenum of the moment. Read it, it will help you write your book among the authority of shared words.

this book changed my life forever. it changed the way i see life, religion, my culture, and writing. if you haven't read it yet, you don't know the feeling of suddenly falling but remaining in the same place.

Lavish Absence: Recalling And Rereading Edmond Jabes is a blend of Rosmarie Waldrop's thoughtful and personal biography (combined with her personal meditations) of Edmond Jabes (1912-1991), a French poet and writer of cherished and insightful works. Written by his close friend and primary English translator Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence recalls Jabes' life and work with special consideration for Jabes' themes of exile and nomadism. Lavish Absence is a "must-read" combination of memoir and literary criticism which is especially recommended for poetry enthusiasts who enjoy Edmond Jabes' writings.

Rosmarie Waldrop presents small, various accounts of the relationship she has had with the French poet Edmond Jabes. The relationship is manifold for her as she recounts, first as a poet and reader, then as a translator and friend to Jabes. These sparks of recollection accumulate unpredictably and gently.

Waldrop generously shares her intelligent courses of reading Jabes, her nearly vertiginous trials, translating the rhythms and puns of his books, as well as some amusing events and anecdotes about the life of the poet. Of course, Jabes is not present on account of such a mixture of sharings, but Waldrop's book enriches one's idea of Jabes. It is most difficult to find an assemblage as rich about Jabes' life and work in English, let alone one as touching and pleasant. I read this book in an evening and found myself popping all about, in the notes seeking the French versions of the poetry translated in the text, the bibliography out back, and front again to review a joke or echo of sentence at hand.

In addition to the pleasure one might have reading about the Jabeses and their milieu, this book may be welcomed for its candid discussion of translation, its goals and methods. Some of Waldrop's solutions to vexing passages are ingenious and exciting.

There are very few books of this nature. Illuminating translator's tales are rare and rarer still are the anecdotal sharings of the translator's interactions and impressions of her source. I recommend this book highly to those with an interest in Edmond Jabes, poetry after WWII, translation or writers in exile. It also allows part of the author's own life to develop in front of the poetry on view.

This book made me a Edmond Jabes fan - I doubt that any other of his books would have for this is by far the most accessible. Jabes is an Egyptian Jew in exile in France writing primarily after the Holocaust. His writing style is a series of snippets - fiction, poetry, aphorisms - that explore the limits of language and the role of the blank, the silence, the desert, the unwritten. In The Books of Shares each of these snippets stands on its own - that is not true, for example, of the multi-volume Book of Questions. The result is a truly post-modern reflection on theology and philosophy - and post-modern without pretention.

When I read this book on a silent retreat, I found passage after passage that I wanted to hear, to memorize, to enter into my journal.

An example: "Out of the words of his language, a writer forges new words, not neologisms, but words irrigated with his blood. He founds a second language which, to be sure, is rooted in the first with all its fibers, but which henceforth, being his own - O paradox - is nobody's. Because the writer's language wants to be only of the book, of the instant and duration of a liberated word."

If you enjoy the Books of Shares, there are many wonderful volumes of Jabes to follow. If you do not enjoy this, you may safely assume that Jabes is not your reading choice.

A collection of prose, some unbelievably brief in length, by Paul Celan, one of Europe's foremost poets. Celan, who was scarred by the concentration camps, pushed language to its every edge -- and beyond -- in his poems. The essay "Meridian," in this volume, is his longest commentary on what poetry is, and what it does. It is a remarkable essay, dense yet readable, provocative, erudite, astonishingly full of insights on the relation between poet and history, between poetry and the "altogether other" (as Celan puts it). "The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of the encounter?" I find I can meditate on what he says at great length, and with great richness. As a teacher of literature, I cannot think of an essay that blows me away as powerfully as this one. Although it claims to be about poems, it is about living in a social world, a world that exists in historical time; it is likewise about how each of us faces into language, how we face ourselves, how we face the other human beings who live around us and whom we contact through language. Here is Celan at his richest and best: if this excites you, you will want to read this book. And if not, not. "The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls iself back from an 'already-no-more' into a 'still-here.' This 'still-here' can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and--not just verbally--'corresponding' to something."

Jabes is rarely easy to read - his demands on the reader are too high. In this slim volume, this is even more true for, if one has not read other works by Jabes, it would be difficult to place his primary vocabulary - page, book, Nothingness, etc. - in the intended context.

If you are familiar with his work, however, you will find all the usual reasons for loving the book. An example of an unforgettable image: "Serpent may be a word so drawn out that it cannot help crawling along its own shadow".

His look at death and freedom is etched in thought provoking images of frail birds that provokes a deep melancholy, an emotional thread much stronger than in his other works.

There is a mention of Auschwitz as a formative moment for those living in the second half of the twentieth century, but the Holocaust does not inform the whole work as it does in the Book of Questions. Rather, these aphorisms reflect on the inevitable, individual death in the face of the only truth known to us - Unknowability.

An absolutely brilliant book that marketed as his "last substantial work" reminds one how great a writer was lost in his death.

Please, please don't hesitate if you are considering buying this book. If you love words and have any sense of humor & pleasure in pure wordplay, you will be enthralled. I picked it up & couldn't put it down, have spent many hours now trying to duplicate some of the odd & challenging forms Jandl invents/uses. His poetry is a little like an intellectualized version of the jazz riff - he goes spiraling out with word sounds & lets his wit take him, and us, on quite a journey. Then he goes with the way a word is spelled, how it echoes other words, how they morph into each other. All that might sound boringly post-modern to you & just too hip & cheap, but it's not, it's really exciting. One other great thing: the editors very wisely let several translators have a go at the same poem - Jandl's original German is followed by at least three or four individual translations by various translators, trying to work the same alchemical magic on English words. Brilliant stuff, lots of fun, great play. More poets should be experimenting & playing this way, instead of getting bogged down in emotional treacle - (i.e Me-Me-Me-Me poems.) Jandl desrves a wide following. Buy this book!

Having read Fowlie, Miller, Starkie, as well as the more recent British biographies, I still come back to this timeless, intricate, beautifully written (and translated) meditation on Rimbaud. Borer succeeds in linking the adult tradesman and adventurer with the child poet and voyeur. He also does a brilliant job defending Rimbaud from Enid Starkie's mid-20th century libel, proving that the "poet turned slave trader" is not only a myth, but a horrible lie. Most of all, Borer, more than any other biographer, asks the most important questions, the kind of questions meant to remain open, mysterious, unanswered. A must-read for anyone who treasures Arthur Rimbaud (and the mystery that was his last 17 years).

This is not a narrative but a series of aphorisms which occasionally grow into more precise prose meditations. Aphorisms however sometimes sound like clever twists of logic which prove nothing but verbal dexterity though and that is one problem with Jabes work. But that weakness is also sometimes a strength as Jabes makes use of the malleability inherent in language to stress the malleability in individual identity which is his main theme in this, his last, book. The book is a meditation on what it means to be a foreigner. For Jabes who was forced out of his homeland Egypt in 1956 because he was a Jew and who lived in exile until his death in 1991 being a foreigner was something with which he was well acquainted. Through all of his aphorisms and twists of logic Jabes seeks a higher truth whereby contact with the foreigner or "other" leads to greater self-knowledge which in turn leads to the knowledge that we are all one and the same separated only by the biases of the age in which we live. The language is distinctly existential but the content is humanist.

Reluctant Gravities gives the reader a series of two voice conversations of debate that fashions concrete images and manages to also puzzle in the same instant. Each conversation is interrupted by poetic interludes that are often lovely breaks from the witty and often enigmatic conversations about "Aging," "Desire," and "Depression," among other topics. Reluctant Gravities is indeed "reluctant" to allow itself to be fully understood by the reader and refuses conclusion.