Blindness does not preclude insight – it may even be a crucial ingredient. T S Eliot described Tiresias, the sightless seer, as ‘the most important personage’ in The Waste Land. Arthur Rimbaud once wrote, ‘the Poet makes himself seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of the senses.’ Seeing is built on sacrifice, or, as Eliot put it, ‘I Tiresias have foresuffered all’.

The Romanian poet, novelist and essayist Mircea Cărtărescu, winner of the Dublin Literary Award for Solenoid (2015; translated by Sean Cotter in 2022), is a firm believer in suffering as a route to truths. His masterwork, Orbitor, appeared between 1996 and 2007 in three volumes, each bearing a title that denoted part of a butterfly (the left wing, the body, the right wing). The overall title, Cărtărescu has said, means something like ‘the light of truth, the light of revelation’ – of particular importance to a writer once censored by the Ceaușescu regime. When Cotter produced his version of Orbitor in 2013, now in the process of being reissued by Penguin, he called it Blinding, to reflect Cărtărescu’s desire for painful illumination and revelation through perdition. 

Cărtărescu aspires to write at the edge of what is writable. Cotter has found an ideal English equivalent for the Romanian’s tone, at once earthy and ethereal, especially in the descriptions of anatomical detail (‘the great aurora borealis of my cortex’) and the mystery of phenomenal experience (‘this starry heaven