“Although I write about the world of the eternal, please do not get the impression that I have been there myself.” (found in an old Romanian magazine from the 1930s; author name indecipherable)

“Charlotte Mandell had written the English words I was reading, whose power and beauty left me gasping and stunned.” Bryan Alistair Charles discusses Proust in translation with translator and ALTA member Charlotte Mandell at Lit Hub: @literaryhub.bsky.social

For whom does the nothing noth?

’What would be a reasonable assumption? English to Korean, or Korean to English? Is translation always direction-specific?’ Don Mee Choi on poetry, translation, politics and twinning draughtjournal.com/article/tran...

“We are all strange inside,” writes Cărtărescu in his newest journal. “But only authors know it, for they have seen themselves from within... What I do is describe myself even as the vivisection is taking place, while the scalpel cuts, while the retractor pulls the wound apart.”

Draught is about making, and so it’s only right that the first piece in the journal is a visit to an artist’s studio, in this case the brilliant Rosalind Nashashibi.

For the inaugural issue of Draught Journal @draughtjournal.bsky.social: On Bookmarks and Other Ruins—a reflection on the bookmark as a fragile site of memory, desire, and incompletion, accompanied by images of my own bookmarks. draughtjournal.com/article/on-b...

This happened just now. Pre-orders up!!! Deeply grateful to @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social and all my teachers at UCD and the kind writers who wrote the blurbs including @gagebybell.bsky.social and @martinadalton.bsky.social and so many others … www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page...

I don't know if you remember but some time ago I said that we'd have something to share soon. Anyway, it's this @draughtjournal.bsky.social

For the inaugural issue of Draught Journal @draughtjournal.bsky.social: On Bookmarks and Other Ruins—a reflection on the bookmark as a fragile site of memory, desire, and incompletion, accompanied by images of my own bookmarks. draughtjournal.com/article/on-b...

Draught is now live! www.draughtjournal.com Issue 1.1.1 with contributions by Glenn Adamson, Jen Calleja, Don Mee Choi, Mark Cousins, Daisy Lafarge, Mark Manders, Rosalind Nashashibi, Lisa Robertson, Christina Tudor-Sideri and Francesca Wade

The physical world, long eclipsed by our luminous devices, still murmurs the language of the real. A language I fear we are slowly unlearning.

a dark and gloomy afternoon with Eros mélancolique by Jacques Roubaud and Anne Garréta

“Each season tightens like a vise around me,” writes Cioran in one of his October journal entries.

time of the heart

“With my burned hand, I write of the nature of fire,” says Flaubert, whom Ingeborg Bachmann echoes in Malina. Tonight, with my own hand clumsily burned, I write not of fire, but of departure, of silence, of the void’s quiet invitation to dissolve unseen into being.

At night. Edvard Munch; tr. Jennifer Lloyd

“One must abandon one’s metaphors when the time comes,” writes Anna de Noailles to Marcel Proust, paraphrasing Alphonse Daudet.

My two modes of being when under the weather are restlessness and silly philosophy jokes, and since I cannot pace around, I now find myself tempted to insert Nancy’s “there’s never been a body in philosophy” into every academic paper.

“In one another we will never be lacking.” —Hélène Cixous

The correspondence of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan in the original German is my Duolingo—I will never be able to carry a real conversation, but I can say: “Führ mich an die Seine, wir wollen so lange hineinschauen, bis wir kleine Fische geworden sind und uns wieder erkennen.”

Four in the morning. We’ll always have the Seine.

At night, to fend off a migraine, Carole Maso’s Ava and the tenderness of an autumn breeze.

“she found the cemetery”

the senses in disarray

Gentle reminder from Merleau-Ponty: “We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.”

in the poem—

At night and in Awaiting Oblivion: “Through the words a little daylight still passed.”

“Finally, Cixous’ account of the flying manuscript reveals what may seem the most strange and yet touching definition of friendship—you identify a friend by the symptom or symptoms, by the aberrations, he or she opens up in you.” reconstruction.digitalodu.com/Issues/092/d...

Tea and oranges and a somewhat DeLilloan curiosity: given the rapture, which I assume will be happening on US time, must one still take the kettle back to the stove?

“She receives the letter before it arrives. How does she do it? What is this might?” Jacques Derrida on Hélène Cixous

Where are the dead? Again I think of Jan Patočka, his posthumously published phenomenology of the afterlife, which I have read countless times and written about briefly in this passage from my essay on Eternity and a Day for The Carbon Arc (Vanguard Editions). “The other lives in us.”

“Where are the dead?” —In Farthest Seas, Lalla Romano; tr. @brianrobmoore.bsky.social

Spending the day with @brianrobmoore.bsky.social’s wonderful translation of Lalla Romano’s In Farthest Seas.

A night saturated with spectral tension: shadows of self brush against shadows of other, desire pulses through the void, intimacy hangs by a thread, ghostly pleasures haunt what is both held close and endlessly slipping away. And then there’s Time, coming forth from its lakes.

the Blanchotian urge to dwell in the paradoxical simultaneity of desire and void

the self and its inseparable double // the self always doubled by the outside

somewhere in the pages of Marguerite Duras, “the blue that flees the fingers”

The act of writing— Maurice Blanchot. The Gaze of Orpheus. Tr. Lydia Davis.

today and throughout the rest of September alongside The Gaze of Orpheus and relics in the manuscript

Maurice Blanchot, born on this day, “offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates.”

“I have often prayed for you / Like this / Let me have her.” —Leonard Cohen

“Believe nothing of me except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own.”

“Someone must forgive us for the paths we take to love, for the paths are many and dark, and we are ardent and cruel in our journey.” —Leonard Cohen

the state of things