JABÈS, Edmond.
L’Obscurité potable.
[Paris], G.L.M., 1936.
8vo, pp. [40], a fine copy, uncut in the original blue printed wrappers.
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L’Obscurité potable.
Rare first edition of this early collection of poems, published when Jabès was just 24: one of a limited edition of 212 copies, of which this is one of 12 on Hollande Pannekeok.
Edmond Jabès (1912-1991), the son of wealthy Egyptian Jews, was born and brought up in the French-speaking community of Cairo. His earliest literary friendships were with Max Jacob, Paul Éluard, and René Char, and he published several small volumes of poetry which were later collected in Je bâtis ma demeure in 1959. His reputation as a poet was solid, but he was not well known until he moved to Paris in 1956. He has long been regarded as a key figure in contemporary French literature, and with Sartre, Camus, and Lévi Strauss, he was one of four writers whose work represented France at Montreal’s Expo ‘67.
‘In 1936 the poet-printer Guy Lévis Mano published L’Oscurité potable, the first of three tightly designed pamphlets without illustration. Self-consciously modernist in the mixture of italics, both upper and lower case, with romans, the GLM pamphlets were an ideal vehicle for Jabès’s collections of short poems. Texts were advanced to the top of the page leaving plenty of space at the foot. In their reduced size, hardly 5 mm. in thickness, Trois filles de mon quartier, 1948, and La Clef de voûte, 1950, are model twentieth-century poème-plaquettes, slim enough to fit inside a cigarette case’ (Stoddard, p. 6).
Stoddard, Edmond Jabès in Bibliography, 6.
