The Lighted Burrow – A Sanatorium Journal – Max Blecher
The Lighted Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal by Max Blecher, translated by Christina Tudor-Sideri / small 210-page paperback, 4.5 x 7 inches / ISBN 9781955190435 / published by Sublunary Editions
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“At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel.” This is how Max Blecher tells Mihail Sebastian that he is working on a book, the one that will be his final book, the one which, as Blecher biographer and scholar Doris Mironescu describes in the introduction, “is where Blecher formulates his declaration of war against the idea of the logical coherence of reality, not from the position of a marginalized being frustrated by his own failure, but as an individual who, because of the disease, has the advantage of looking beyond the shell of things, beyond the glistening peel called ‘life’.”
Max Blecher (September, 8 1909 – May, 31 1938) was a Romanian writer. While studying medicine in Paris, Blecher was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, a disease which kept him confined to hospitals and sanatoria for the remaining decade of his life. In spite of this, he produced a considerable amount of literature—including the novels Adventures in Immediate Unreality, Scarred Hearts, and the posthumously published The Lighted Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal—as well as keeping up correspodence with figures like André Breton, Mihail Sebastian, Ilarie Voronca, and Martin Heidegger.
Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator from Eastern Europe. She is the author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth and the forthcoming novel, Disembodied. Her translations include works by Mihail Sebastian, Magda Isanos, Max Blecher, Ilarie Voronca, and Anna de Noailles.
