SOURCE: “Publishing Blanchot in America: A Metapoetic View,” in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, Station Hill, 1999, pp. 511-27.

In the following essay, Quasha and Stein consider Blanchot's writings in an American context and discuss the difficulty of translating, reading, and interpreting his texts, particularly in light of their poetic openness and prophetic quality.

After two decades of publishing the writing of Maurice Blanchot, we find ourselves still standing at the threshold. Slowly—very slowly—we may be learning the meanings of our own commitments. The decision to publish Blanchot has seemed at times fully conscious, perhaps willful, and yet curiously receptive, something unforeseeable, indeed inseparable from (our sense of) the nature of the work itself, its precarious adventure on the edge. In many ways publishing this most mysterious of writers is hardly different from reading him: one is always at the beginning of knowing what it is one...