Transparent Body & Other Poems

Translated into English for the first time, the collected poems of Max Blecher—the lone volume of poetry published in his lifetime, Transparent Body, along with verse published in periodicals and posthumously—add important color to Blecher's body of work, most clearly displaying his early surrealist tendencies, as well as illustrating key moments in his prose works, as readers will find allusions and callbacks to his three novels. This volume is bilingual, with the original Romanian on the facing pages.

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.