Collected Prose

will we get out of these questions? What will we get out of all the answers which only lead to more questions, since questions are born of unsatisfactory answers?” asked the second disciple.
    “The promise of a new question,” replied Reb Mendel.
    “There will be a moment,” the oldest disciple continued, “when we will have to stop interrogating. Either because there will be no answer possible, or because we will not be able to formulate any further questions. So why should we begin?”
    “You see,” said Reb Mendel, “at the end of an argument, there is always a decisive question unsettled.”
    “Questioning means taking the road to despair,” continued the second disciple. “We will never know what we are trying to learn.”

    Although Jabès’s imagery and sources are for the most part derived from Judaism, The Book of Questions is not a Jewish work in the same way that one can speak of Paradise Lost as a Christian work. While Jabès is, to my knowledge, the first modern poet consciously to assimilate the forms and idiosyncrasies of Jewish thought, his relationship to Jewish teaching is emotional and metaphorical rather than one of strict adherence. The Book is his central image — but it is not only the Book of the Jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the Midrash), but an allusion to Mallarmé’s ideal Book as well (the Book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). Finally, Jabès’s work must be considered as part of the on-going French poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. What Jabès has done is to fuse this tradition with a certain type of Jewish discourse, and he has done so with such conviction that the marriage between the two is almost imperceptible. The Book of Questions came into being because Jabès found himself as a writer in the act of discovering himself as a Jew. Similar in spirit to an idea expressed by Marina Tsvetaeva — “In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews” — this equation is located at the exact center of Jabès’s work, is the kernel from which everything else springs. To Jabès, nothing can be written about the Holocaust unless writing itself is first put into question. If language is to be pushed to the limit, then the writer must condemn himself to an exile of doubt, to a desert of uncertainty. What he must do, in effect, is create a poetics of absence. The dead cannot be brought back to life. But they can be heard, and their voices live in the Book.

    1976
    * Le Livre de Yukel (1964), Le Retour au Livre (1965), Yaël (1967), Elya (1969), Aély (1972), El, ou le dernier livre (1973), which are followed by three volumes of Le Livre des Resemblances . Four books are available in English, all of them admirably translated by Rosmarie Waldrop: The Book of Questions, The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book (Wesleyan University Press), and Elya (Tree Books).

Reznikoff ×2

    1. THE DECISIVE MOMENT

    Charles Reznikoff is a poet of the eye. To cross the threshold of his work is to penetrate the prehistory of matter, to find oneself exposed to a world in which language has not yet been invented. Seeing, in his poetry, always comes before speech. Each poetic utterance is an emanation of the eye, a transcription of the visible into the brute, undeciphered code of being. The act of writing, therefore, is not so much an ordering of the real as a discovery of it. It is a process by which one places oneself between things and the names of things, a way of standing watch in this interval of silence and allowing things to be seen — as if for the first time — and henceforth to be given their names. The poet, who is the first man to be born, is also the last. He is Adam, but he is also the end of all generations: the mute heir of the builders of Babel. For it is he who must learn to speak from his eye — and cure himself of seeing with his mouth.
    The poem, then, not as a telling, but as a taking hold. The world can never be assumed to exist. It comes into being only in the act of moving towards it. Esse est percipii: no American poet has ever adhered so faithfully to the Berkeleyan formula as Reznikoff. It is more than just the guiding principle of his work — it is embedded in the work, and it contains all the force of a moral dogma. To read Reznikoff is to understand that nothing can be taken for granted: we do not find ourselves in the midst of an already established world, we do not, as if by