ABSTRACT
Few writers are as qualified to write about Edmond Jabès (1912–1991) as Rosmarie Waldrop (b. 1935). Long an intimate of the Cairo-born Francophone poet, she has remained his painstaking and exacting American translator, with fourteen volumes rendered to date. She possesses the foreign languages and intellectual background necessary to penetrate Jabès’ unusual philosophical vision, which he termed “atheistic” yet which is nourished by Jewish mysticism. Having herself moved to the United States after a childhood spent in Nazi Germany, Waldrop is acutely sensitive to Jabès’ grappling with his Jewish heritage and multifaceted “foreignness”—both salient themes brought to the fore by a poet who, because he was a Jew, was forced to flee Egypt for Paris in 1957 and who later wrote A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of his Arm a Tiny Book (1989). Finally, Waldrop is a challenging poet in her own right who has thought deeply about the sources and implications of literary creativity, especially as it is practiced “after Auschwitz.”
