A pure reverberation

Charlotte Mandell's long-awaited translation of Maurice Blanchot's late essay collection A Voice from Elsewhere is published this week by SUNY Press. Should you miss the many reviews of it across the US press, Gerald Bruns recommends it thus:

Here is a volume of Blanchot’s commentaries on poems by Louis-René des Forêts, René Char, and Paul Celan, together with his celebrated account of Michel Foucault’s œuvre. In each case Blanchot finds himself obsessed by ‘a voice from elsewhere’ — a voice that is at once intimate, wordless, and uninhabited: la voix de personne, no-one’s voice. These commentaries, superbly translated by Charlotte Mandell, are themselves constituted by this voice, a pure reverberation that readers of Blanchot’s writings will not have forgotten. They will say: so here he is, if he ever was.