TY  - CHAP
A1  - Dal Bo, Federico
T1  - 'My mother tongue is a foreign language' : on Edmond Jabès's writing in exile
T2  - Untying the mother tongue / ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo ; Cultural Inquiry ; 26
N2  - This chapter examines Edmond Jabès, who chose to write his oeuvre in French despite his Jewish-Arabic origins and his being conversant in both Hebrew and Arabic. French was never a true 'mother tongue' to him but rather 'a foreign one'. This poetical choice was also instrumental to his creation of a cosmos that is very clearly defined by 'la page blanche', or the 'blank page'. His writing develops this idea, both literally and metaphorically. A blank sheet is the only thing a writer has to work with at the start of every writing act, therefore it represents a kind of material opposition that all writers must overcome. It represents in this context an existential nothingness that precedes and simultaneously escapes both human and divine creation. In Jabès's writings, a blank page has two connotations at once: a condition for writing and nothingness. This ambivalent condition results in the paradoxical assumption that his 'mother tongue is a foreign language', because it cannot offer the same spiritual intimacy as another language, say, the Holy Language, and because the writer's 'mother tongue' - and, by extension, human language - is always impure and infiltrated by foreignness.
KW  - Jabès, Edmond
KW  - Muttersprache
KW  - Schreiben
KW  - Talmud
KW  - Mother tongue
Y1  - 2023
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/75511
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-755114
UR  - https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-26/dal_bo_edmond-jabess-writing-in-exile.pdf
SN  - 978-3-96558-050-3
SN  - 978-3-96558-051-0
SN  - 978-3-96558-049-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 45
EP  - 83
PB  - ICI Press
CY  - Berlin
ER  -