ABSTRACT
Edmond Jabes's answer to ceaseless violence and despair, to hate, to guilt, to collective and individual anguish, is to indefinitely postpone giving answers and providing ready-made solutions. Instead, by perpetual questioning he seeks to "revive the well" and make "the unsayable infinite somehow a legible, audible finite". "Once life stops questioning death, and death, questioning life", he adds, "there is no more hope". The Book of Questions exhibits a non-lyrical, methodical, abstract questioning in which poetry merges with philosophical inquiry. Jabes turns the archetypal themes of Judaism—the wandering, the respect for the written word and the "book", the constant self-interrogation, the Job-like questioning of God—into universal metaphors of the human condition. "The important thing", writes the poet, "is to know what we have become, into what universe we are moving, with what rhythm, along what road, through which appropriated life or death".
