Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès - Softcover

Waldrop, Rosmarie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819565806 ISBN 13: 9780819565808

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2003

Synopsis

An intimate portrait of one of France's most important writers by his translator.

Edmond Jabès (1912-1991) is widely regarded as one of France's most important writers of the 20th century. Born in Cairo, he settled in France after being expelled from Egypt with other Jews during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Rosmarie Waldrop is Jabès's primary English translator. Over the course of her long association and friendship with Jabès, Waldrop developed a very nuanced understanding of his work that in turn influenced her development as both writer and translator. Lavish Absence is a book-length essay with a triple focus: it is a memoir of Jabès as Waldrop knew him, it is both an homage to and an explication of Jabès's work, and it is a meditation on the process of translation. The writing interweaves these topics, evoking Jabès's own interest in the themes of exile and nomadism.

About this title

About the Author

Rosmarie Waldrop is a poet, translator and author of many books including A Key into the Language of America (1994), Reluctant Gravities (1999), and The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès (Wesleyan, 1996). Richard Stamelman is Professor of Romance Languages at Dartmouth College.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819565806
• ISBN 13: 9780819565808
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150