13 Questions for Christina Tudor-Sideri

Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer and translator. She is the author of Under the Sign of the Labyrinth (2020), Disembodied (2022), the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces (2023), and Schism Blue (2024). Her writing—often dealing with memory, identity, and the play between corporeality—is immersive, poetic, beautiful, and intense.

Her translations include works by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.

Christina, self-portrait

What are you reading currently and why? 

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin, in the translation of Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain, which I am reading because I am beginning to feel Nancy’s absence. I miss the possibility of new thought that his being in the world ensured. Thankfully, I am far from reading all of his books, so his words will most likely be with me for a long time. I find that reading Nancy augments the gaze, somehow, or rather, the reach and the ways of the gaze—I gain new eyes to see the world. Of course, one can say that about reading in general, but when reading Nancy, and I am thinking here mostly from a phenomenological perspective, the I multiplies within and then outside of itself, until there are so many that there is now the possibility of grasping the ungraspable. There are novels that do the same, there are poems, and essays, perhaps even in a better way, or more viscerally, more aesthetically—though I should say that, for instance, his short study on sleep, The Fall of Sleep, in the translation of Charlotte Mandell, does this beautifully, and Nancy himself says it in these conversations: “it’s a book that remains very much on the side of the ‘aesthetic’ instead of the metaphysical”—nevertheless, it is rare in philosophy. 

Robert Lamberton’s introductory essay to his Station Hill translation of Porphyry’s On The Cave of the Nymphs. I skipped it when I first read the book and have been meaning to return to it. I will most likely go ahead and also reread Porphyry’s commentary. It opens, in Lamberton’s translation, with: “One is inclined to wonder what on earth the cave in Ithaca means for Homer.”

Poemas a mi muerte [Poems to my Death] by Spanish poet and philosopher Chantal Maillard, whose diaries and essays I’ve grown fond of in the last few years. There is very little of her writing available in English. I am hoping that will change soon. 

Over the summer, I have returned to Proust, wanting to read all the volumes in the translation of Moncrieff et al., since whenever I read In Search of Lost Time I did so in the Romanian translation or in a combination of Romanian/French/English. I am currently on the first pages of the second volume. Should one even mention Proust, given that he is always present? It is of course always an incomparable experience, more so now, since I am also translating Mihail Sebastian’s studies on Proust and his correspondence. 

Speaking of books that are always present, I keep within reach and open almost every day the diaries and the collected screenplays of Andrei Tarkovsky, Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir’s notebooks on Time, something by Hélène Cixous, something by Maurice Blanchot (at the moment, Awaiting Oblivion), Derrida’s The Post Card, Cioran’s Cahiers, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus; the poems of Anna de Noailles and Forugh Farrokhzad and Anne Carson and Susan Stewart and Louise Glück and Paul Celan; brutt, or The Sighing Gardens by Friederike Mayröcker, and many others.

Lastly, The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti, forthcoming on June 6 from Fitzcarraldo Editions, in the translation of Peter Filkins, who is also the translator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s collected poems, Darkness Spoken, and who is currently writing a biography of her for Yale University Press. I have waited for this book ever since I knew of the existence of Canetti’s lifetime project. I already read the Spanish translation, and wrote about it last year, and am now at my second read of the English. I think it’s an essential book to understand Canetti, to understand his thought, his other works, his inner world. I worry that it might be misinterpreted as some sort of senselessness on his part, how can one be against death—he too worried, he worried that people would think he is praising or longing for immortality. Dismissing it on such grounds would mean losing important connections and threads that pass through his other books. The Spanish translation has annotations of the fragments that Canetti pulled from this and used in other works, I have searched for some of them and tried to make sense of the context, of why these and not others, and it has significantly improved my understanding of how he wrote, and why, and what he wanted his work to be.

What book(s) most altered your taste in literature? 

The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras. Always there, always revealing itself from under the veil of conversations regarding what my favorite novel might be, when I cannot decide whether it is Malina or Thomas the Obscure or The Blind Owl.

This short novel by Duras, the only book I have read in all the languages I know, this little novel whose effects one cannot truly explain; the magnetism, the arousal, the sadness—a deep sadness that comes from nowhere and everywhere; the shock and the collision between author and character and reader. Between night and sea. Wind and breath. Void and self. I often say that Blanchot was the one who helped me write, the one who made it possible for me to accept how my thought flows from the mind onto the page, but it was also Duras, specifically The Malady of Death and Blue Eyes, Black Hair, altering not only my taste in literature but also how I thought about writing. If Blanchot taught me to write, Duras taught me that the text is always present—the text, the act of creating the text, being its creator, and thus the only one who knows. She writes, in a fragment on The Ravishing of Lol Stein, “I’m the only one who knows what kind of blue the girl in the book’s scarf is.” I learned, from Duras, that I am indeed the only one who knows. And yet, I am also the one who will never know the pleasure of my own writing. And so I read hers.

If Blanchot taught me to write, Duras taught me that the text is always present—the text, the act of creating the text, being its creator, and thus the only one who knows.

Before The Malady of Death, in my childhood, there were of course other books, for instance, Mircea Eliade’s The Forbidden Forest (Noaptea de Sanziene), something about how it mirrored my world in a way that was only real to myself, The Little Match Girl (“She wanted to warm herself” is on my mind every single day), and Kafka’s The Castle, for being the first novel I ever read, and also the first book that continued in my dreams each night for as long as it took me to read it, and sometimes even after that. And, The Lady of the Camellias. I was very young when I read it, and I cried so much and for so long that I could not make it to school the next day. The only other time when that happened was a few years earlier, after watching Frank Borzage’s Street Angel one morning in second grade. 

Describe the last time a work of literature affected you physically.

It was Carole Maso’s Ava. I reread it recently and, this time, it revealed itself in a way that made my response to it very physical. There is a poem by Romanian poet Gabriela Melinescu, “this is the hospital hour / in which the world can only be saved through beauty,” and that is what Ava brought into my life this time around, a very physical need to know what can save the world, what is beauty, how and why we suffer and love and long for others and for life—for more life. “Ava Klein, thirty-nine.” I read it and I become her. Two years earlier, but I become her. I think of these women, characters, narrators—Ava Klein, Paul Auster’s Anna Blume, David Markson’s Kate, Ingeborg Bachmann’s unknown woman, Claudia from The Seaside Hotel by Michael Holt (a stunning novella published in March by Sublunary Editions), Emma Bovary, Effi Briest, the barely known Paulina from Pierre Jean Jouve’s Paulina 1880, so many others—and I can’t help but live their lives, not only when I read their stories, but long after. It might be that I will never stop living their lives.

I can’t help but live their lives, not only when I read their stories, but long after. It might be that I will never stop living their lives.

Sometimes you go through the day-to-day feeling like a contour. Everything—the mind, the body—mere outline, and you open a book, to mend or to forget, or simply to pass the time, but what it does is fill you. It gives you organs and arteries and flesh and its pages become your skin; it clothes you; it embraces you. Not all books do this, it is not an experience that all good books provide, and you wouldn’t want it from everything you read. I wouldn’t. It would be too painful. Too filling. Too tight. But when it happens, it’s everything. And it’s important to speak about it. Reading is solitary, which is at times my favorite thing about it, but speaking, sharing, describing, even though others have not experienced a book in the same manner as you—it helps us know one another. 

Also, since I have already mentioned Auster and Anna Blume, I would add here Baumgartner and In the Country of Last Things, which I recently read for the first time. I don’t know what name to ascribe to this feeling, but there are passages in both of these books that read enough as my own thoughts that have transported me back to when I have thought them or when I wrote them in my own books, a strangely corporeal journey, albeit metaphorically, as one cannot travel through time, but nevertheless to the point where I felt as I felt when I thought them, where I felt in the air the fragrance that was there when I wrote them. When I find something akin to my own language and thought in, say, Blanchot, Cixous, Duras, Bachmann, or others whom I have read without interruption for years, I see it as a normal occurrence. It affects me, but not like this. And Auster was fairly new to me, so it was all the more unexpected. 

Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.

“The insomniac dwells in a paradoxical bedroom: both a tomb and an entrance to other worlds. A bedroom is not simply a room. A bedroom is a world, a forest, a refuge, an abyss, a trap. The bedroom, the hollow where we retreat, has the shape of our head, of the inside of our head. It has our shape in counter-relief. ‘For we are like tree trunks in the snow,’ Kafka wrote. We are lying there. And we don’t sleep. As sturdy as insomnia. In the Preludes, T.S. Eliot describes the blanket thrown from the bed ‘in a thousand furnished rooms’, the shadows fading, the glimmer of the unforgiving dawn on the insomniac flat on her back. And it is in his own bedroom that Henri Michaux writes Darkness Moves: ‘Beneath the low ceiling of my little bedroom is my night, a deep abyss.’ Insomnia only ever happens in a bedroom.” (from Sleepless: A Memoir of Insomnia by Marie Darrieussecq; translated by Penny Hueston)

How do you treat the books you read?

In my library, there is a copy of Mircea Eliade’s Le sacré et le profane so highlighted and annotated in black ink that one can barely make sense of the text anymore. A dictionary of Constantin Noica’s philosophical concepts with numerous sticky notes on each page, with coffee stains, shaped like anything but a book, from when I dropped it in water many years ago. There is marginalia in the Romanian translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy written when I first read it as a child; there are poems and scribbles and random thoughts on the last pages of Cioran, Kafka, Duras, Ionesco, and many others; dark blue ink stains adorn the edges of a 1920s copy of Les fleurs du mal. The book lives with me and I live with the book. Sometimes it’s chaotic, sometimes it’s aesthetically pleasing; other times there is but a miniscule residue. In a now lost copy of The Post Card I had inserted new pages, blank pages on which I wrote my thoughts or just copied Derrida’s words. Hemlock by Cixous, also lost, had marginalia that could fill a short book. I do everything—dogear, bookmark, highlight—or nothing at all.

I live and the book is there. I love and the book is there. I feel pain and the book is there.

I have books that carry the underline and marginalia of former lovers; sometimes I erase them upon rereading. There are books that I have read countless times and which bear no sign of their being in my hands. Books that belonged to people I never knew but whom I know from words and lines that they have immortalized on these pages. I find within their train tickets, their photographs, their bookmarks. I never remove them. I don’t even change their position. Sometimes I press flowers inside of books. Other times what they carry is not visible to the eye. I live and the book is there. I love and the book is there. I feel pain and the book is there. I drop it in rivers and bathtubs and from windows and it returns to me wet, marked by the green of leaves, pierced by the branches of trees. I do try to take care of them. Rereading the way I do; one needs to take care of books.

What quality do you most appreciate in a novel? 

Its language. Or rather, the flow of its language. There is nothing else that can keep me if its language does not pull me in, and also not much to say about it, or rather, too much to say about it, because language touches differently every time, and so it is something else with every novel, with every read, but, yes, for me, it’s the language and how it flows from the page to the mind that makes a novel worth rereading. 

Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?

Hélène Cixous. What she does with words is hypnotic. Her language is important, inspiring, imperative. “Coming to Writing” is one of the most beautiful essays I have ever read, with an opening that I could not forget, even if I were to never read it again. Her translators have managed to preserve the spellbinding flow of her language in English. Betsy Wing, Peggy Kamuf, Eric Prenowitz, they have given her readers the Cixous one encounters in French. There are different ways that get us there, yes, we are speaking after all of two very different languages, but nevertheless we get Cixous. Her fiction is also like no other, though I wouldn’t necessarily call it fiction, since with Cixous, one rarely knows, what is, what was, what will never be, what comes from the mind, what flows from the veins, what is reality outside the window, in the world, what is dream or thought or theory. 

What book are you avoiding reading?

Canetti writes somewhere that there are books which stay with us for years but that we never read, books that we carry from room to room, from country to country, until one moment, when we cannot help but give it everything we have. It had to be so, he says, the book had to travel and take space and be in our presence. We had to be in its presence. Nevertheless, I should not have an answer for this question, because as beautiful as I find this passage from Canetti, I am also a very curious person, impatient, and so I don’t usually avoid reading anything, nor do I put something off for longer than external circumstances might dictate. But there is one exception: Maurice Blanchot’s The Most High. It was not intentional; it happened that I was nearing the end of his works in translation and I could not find this one, and one day I said to myself: don’t read it. Not yet. I don’t know when I will.

What book do you find overrated/overvalued? 

I don’t think for more than necessary about the books I do not like or the books that people love and I do not. I do think all the time about the books that remain in a limbo between the known and the unknown, between being read and being forgotten. I think about the written treasures we will never unearth, about those that remain available only to a handful of people for a lack of a translation or an interest from publishers. Every language has them. I wish we could do more for these books. 

What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil? 

I do not want to know. Perhaps it has yet to be written. I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it because I already think too much about death. I write about it, I live with it, I read what others have written and then I write about that. I do not want to know, at least not for now, the actual circumstances of my death. I am perhaps inclined to side with Canetti at times, to position myself against death, not out of some desire for immortality, but, same as him, because there are times when it feels like the only way. But death is not my villain. Ever since I was eight and wrote, for a school assignment: when we are gone, a sign of our passage through the world must remain; let us not live in vain, I knew that death was not my villain. It was a story about an old man, dying, who was nevertheless planting a tree. In whatever way the mind and the years have allowed me, I have always tried to make sense of what is oblivion. Why we sometimes forget and other times we don’t. Why there are deaths that linger and lives that get erased as if a drawing in the sand were washed away by the sea. Why there are waves that take some and not others, and how we, as individuals, as communities, make this happen with our actions. Someone asked me a while ago what book was the narrator of Disembodied reading when she died. On that first page, at the very beginning—the beginning for the reader, the end for her—what book was she reading that it was so important as to place it there, in her hand and on the first page. Why not just the act of reading. And then I asked myself the same thing: why not just the act of reading? Was it just the act of reading? I think the final book should be something only the dying self should know, which is why I don’t want to choose a book until the moment I will pick it up and read it and it will be the last one. 

If you were to design a literature course around a singular word, what word would that be and what three books might appear on the reading list? 

SHADOW. Shadow self, shadow Other, shadow duality. The real and the reflected. If I have to pick just three books, then: The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me by Maurice Blanchot, and Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. An answer that might differ in a few days, months, but at the moment, it is the shadow that interests me, influenced also by the fact that I reread A Short History of the Shadow by art historian Victor Ieronim Stoichita, a study on the depiction and meaning of the shadow in art, which made me think of the shadow in literature. Not just the Jungian shadow, but the shadow in all its depictions and manifestations. The phenomenological shadow that one might see on the wall and feel indebted to tell her a story—the story. The shadow of self-reflection. The absent presence, the present absence of a self in turmoil, the inner voice that does not come as echo but as a darkening of one’s world. There are other books, of course, that would be perfect for this, books such as Malina, The Body Artist, Compass. There is poetry, maybe T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men; there are short stories—one of my favorites—The Distances by Julio Cortázar. But the three I mentioned are more palpable choices. Something to the touch, when one reads them and the river of words courses through the veins. I would say that there is also a lot of philosophy that one could read about this, and yet, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy, in reference to Georges Bataille writing I look into the night and enter it: “no philosopher truly takes it upon themselves to do that because philosophers are supposed to introduce light into the world.” As soon as I wrote this, Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga came to mind with a counter idea: “When you want to see something clearly, do not shine too much light on it, do not exile all the shadows from its surface.” Though he was of course also a poet and novelist. 

In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?

The narrator of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina. “I, too, go on living somewhere, blessed with all kinds of wounds.”

Why read literature?

To live. To live, to know; to grasp, to feel—yourself and the Other and the world around. There is a limit to what we can experience on our own, to what we can know, to what our minds and our bodies make sense of, an edge up to where we can go, a door that can never be open. Literature opens that door. It erases that limit. It connects people. Literature is our threshold to the underworld. Whether it’s a poem, a novel, an essay—whatever conveys thought, whatever creates a world, a world different from the one we know, or even an identical world, but through the gaze of another. I spent the first six years of my life in a small village in southern Romania, close to the Danube, and all my school holidays after that. My world was paradise, but it was also unbelievably small. Even later, in Bucharest, for the smallness of my world had nothing to do with the reclusiveness of the countryside. Everyone’s world is small. If one lives guided only by one body and one mind, the world is small. Too small for how short life is. Too small for how long life is, for life is also terribly long. As Richard Howard writes in one of his poems, “Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you / will be petrified—astonished—to learn / memory is endless, life very long / and you—you are immortal after all.” How can one live that immortality, the whole of one’s life, in just one body, in just one mind, in just one world? How to fill the endlessness of memory with just one life? Maybe we can. But why would we?