Can I describe my trials? I was not able to walk, or breathe, or eat. My breath was made of stone, my body of water, and yet I was dying of thirst. One day they thrust me into the ground; the doctors covered me with mud. What work went on at the bottom of that earth! Who says it's cold? It's a bed of fire, it's a bramble bush. When I got up I could feel nothing. My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered the room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.

From "The Madness of the Day" ("La Folie du Jour," 1973) by Maurice Blanchot. Translated by Lydia Davis (Station Hill Press, 1981). Also included in the Station Hill Blanchot Reader.

Blanchot should be introduced to the Lovecraft crowd.

This post was triggered by reading a 2005 interview with another Blanchot translator, Charlotte Mandell.

Check out Mandell's website too. You'll find Michaux chestnuts like "The elephant is afraid of mice, pigs, firecrackers." (I don't know why I love this sentence so much.)

Mandell's bibliography.

Also at ReadySteadyBook, Kit Maude sums up Cortázar on axolotls and humans: "a visitor to an aquarium is actually an axolotl (a kind of newtish amphibian that shouldn’t, ideally, exist) looking at humans (a kind of gangly pink creature that shouldn’t, ideally, exist)."