MAX BLECHER
OCCURRENCE IN THE
IMMEDIATE UNREALITY
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Featured Artist
ANCA BOERIU
University of Plymouth Press
Contents
The Impression of the Theatrical
Museum of Curiosities
Benevolent Spaces
Wedding Day
Spontaneous Understanding
Beneath the Stage
Autumn
The Ivory Head
After the Fever
A Succession of Objects
Dreaming Sleep
The Author
The Translator
Featured Artist
Romanian Writers Series
Who Won the World War of Religions?
Why we Love Women
No Way Out of Hadesburg and Other Poems
The Băiuţ Alley Lads
The Cinematography Caravan
Lines Poems Poetry
French Themes
The Book of Winter and Other Poems
Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit
Small Changes in Attitude
Auntie Varvara’s Clients
Notes on Romanian Spelling and Pronunciation
ebook edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2014 by University of Plymouth Press, Endsleigh Place, Drake Circus, Plymouth, Devon, PL4 8AA, United Kingdom.
eISBN 978-1-84102-343-4
© Max Blecher 2009
© Anca Boeriu 2009
© University of Plymouth Press 2014
The rights of Max Blecher as the author of this work and Anca Boeriu as the artist of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A hardback CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84102-207-9
Series Editor: Anthony Caleshu
Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
Publisher: Paul Honeywill
ebook Publishing Assistants: Harriet Butt and Stacey Killian, Production Assistants: Aimee Dewar, Emma Fletcher, Shuo Huang, Harriet McClure, Michelle Phillips, Ying Xi and Riccarda Zinggl
All rights reserved. Any person who carries out any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Published with the support of the Romanian Cultural Institute
Introduction
Alistair Ian Blyth
Max Blecher was born on 8 September 1909 in Botoşani, a provincial town in northern Moldavia, also the birthplace of a number of other important Romanian writers, such as late-Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu, historian Nicolae Iorga, avant-garde poet and artist Isidore Isou (the inventor of “lettrisme”), and, more recently, novelist Dan Lungu. Up until the Second World War, Botoşani was an ethnically and culturally diverse town, whose population was made up of Romanians, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Roma and Lipovians (Russian Old Believers whose ancestors had fled persecution during the time of Peter the Great). At the turn of the century, Jews made up almost half of the town’s population. Max Blecher was the son of a merchant from the town’s Jewish community. While he was still a young child, Blecher’s family moved to Roman, a Moldavian town south of Botoşani, in the county of Neamţ, where his father opened a porcelain shop. The petty bourgeois Jewish milieu of provincial Moldavia is memorably evoked in his autobiographical Întîmplări în irealitatea imediată (Occurrences in the Immediate Unreality) (1936), for example in the settings of Eugene’s sewing machine shop or the house and office of Blecher’s uncle and cousins, the Webers.
After finishing lycée in Roman, Blecher travelled to Paris to study medicine. It was here, in 1928, that he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the spine, or Pott’s disease. He subsequently underwent treatment at sanatoria in France (Berck-sur-Mer), Switzerland (Leysin) and Romania (Tekirghiol), an experience which served as the inspiration for his novel Inimi cicatrizate (Cicatrised Hearts), in some ways a miniature, more naturalist counterpart to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and which is also described in Vizuina luminată: Jurnal de sanatoriu (The Illumined Burrow: Sanatorium Diary). However, treatment was of no avail, and Max Blecher was to remain bedridden until the end of his short life. After a decade of illness and suffering, he died, aged 28, on 31 May 1938.
Blecher’s literary work dates entirely from the period of his illness. Saşa Pană describes him as having been “paralysed and wracked by pain for ten years, with a few relative intermissions, but his mind voyaged through the most deeply buried mysteries, he burrowed with the tenacity of a miner into the remotest seams of his rich mind, of a body engrafted with abscesses and gangrenes”.1 On 29 June 1930, Blecher made his literary debut with a short prose piece entitled “Herrant”, written in Berck-sur-Mer and published in Bilete de papagal (Parrot Papers).2 In another short prose piece published in 1934,3 Blecher describes Berck, home to five thousand patients suffering from tuberculosis of the spine, as a “town of immobility and plaster-casts”. Plaster is the material specific to the place, “just as steel is to Creuzot, coal to Liverpool, or petrol to Baku”. Similarly, Blecher describes the hallucinatory spectacle of a town whose inhabitants are all paralysed in a recumbent posture and encased in plaster: “Recumbent they go to the cinema, recumbent they take carriage rides, recumbent they frequent places of entertainment, recumbent they attend lectures, recumbent they pay their social visits”.4 Also in 1934, a slim volume of Blecher’s poems, entitled Transparent Body, was published. In the same year, Blecher published translations from Appolinaire, in Frize (Friezes) magazine. His own poetry is lyrical and surrealistic, reminiscent perhaps of Paul Eluard, as can be seen in the following strophe, for example: “Your integument/Like a bird in the nest of the heart/In rivers of blood you bathe/And you fly through my fingertips”.5 The following year, in 1935, his parents rented a small house for him in a suburb of his