8 November 2010 The question is life, the answer is death

The last day of this year's Conrad Festival was dominated by difficult questions about memory, the issue of responsibility and history in the shadow of border events. Yesterday's meeting at Synagoga Wysoka [High Synagogue] with two outstanding Polish translators – Ireneusz Kania and Adam Wodnicki – also focused around these issues. The discussion titled “Edmond Jabès – Dialogue about the Book” was dedicated to the works of the outstanding poet, born to a French-speaking Jewish family. As critics point out, no one could evoke the state of metaphysical exile in poetry like Jabès; the desert, absence, light, silence, nothingness – and above all the Book – became symbols of it. The invited guests are experts of his work. Wodnicki made a perfect translation of the seven volumes of Jabès' extraordinary “The Book of Questions”. “In his translation a peculiar aura of stoned despair and dark eschatology is preserved, which transcends the work,” Dariusz Czaja wrote about his translation.

A large part of the discussion was devoted to the issue of translation work – doubts and dilemmas that arise in contact with the text. Wodnicki talked about his perception of this poetry, of the would-be meeting with Jabès, as well as about the importance of the title motive of the book: “Man is a Book himself” he said. “He is sentenced to the Book. We write as we are written equally”. The panellists tried to convince that the French poet's work perfectly refutes Adorno's famous sentence that poetry after the Holocaust is no longer possible. “It is because there was a Holocaust that poetry is possible, even necessary” emphasized Ireneusz Kania. The outstanding translator also said that the chief motif of Jabes' work is the motif of the question, a specific motif of the trail of Jewish thought . “The question creates” said Kania. “The answer kills. The question is life, the answer is death”. The words in context of the ending of the 2nd Conrad Festival took on an additional meaning...