BTBA BYTES: Sentences from the Best Translated Book Award Longlist

Since 2008, the announcement of Three Percent's Best Translated Book Award has become something of an annual event for readers of literature in translation. This year's longlist, announced March 11th, is no exception: it reads like a veritable Who's Who of international literature. Weighing in at 25 books, it is broadly inclusive, featuring works translated from more than a dozen languages and published in a variety of formats (from commercial hardcovers to limited edition chapbooks). 

This week's post is for those of you who are eager for a taste of each work but might not have the time or resources to track down all the longlisted titles. Plus it's also just plain fun. Open Letter's Chad Post (the man behind the magic!) and Biblioasis decided to ask the publishers and translators of each book to select a single iconic or in some way representative sentence from their respective books: once compiled, the sentences would work as a kind of mini-anthology and stylistic shorthand to the year's longlist. We then decided to go one further: why not post the respective sentences without attribution, embedding links to the pages of the individual books, and let the writing speak for itself? 

The sentences below demonstrate a true breadth of narrative strategy and aesthetic sensibility. Some are aphoristic and ornate; some are brief and colloquial. Some are harrowing; some are funny, brusque, sarcastic. Some are only a few words long, creating direct portals to their overarching thematic concerns and pivotal plot points; and others are winding,  piling clause upon clause like an intoxicated bricklayer, hinting at an elaborate structure whose dimensions can only be guessed at. Whatever the sentence or its intentions, each grants access to its corresponding text in a unique way. We hope a few pique your interest and persuade you to seek out the books from which they are excerpted. 

Without further ado: 

BTBA BYTES: Sentences from the 2014 Best Translated Book Award Longlist

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EVERY LINE I WRITE FROM NOW ON WILL BE USED AGAINST ME

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It is odd that at each and every moment life offers us an unspecified number of choices, that we are constantly making choices that change us, taking certain paths and eschewing others, and yet, when we look back, most of us remember ourselves as children much the same as we are today.

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I follow what I see to be good, seize what I find appealing by the forelock, reject the impositions of tradition.

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Held like a gemstone in the ring of stars, nocturnal Bucharest filled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebrae and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, making the city and me a single being.

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If her prehistoric Shlomi was right and it was impossible to swim in the same river twice, and the main thing in life was change itself – Shlomi said that change contained a lot of fire energy – then why shouldn’t she embark on a shopping expedition now in this Mikado, with her mother’s credit card, as long as it hadn’t been cancelled?

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I wish to tell you about a train of events that led me into a piece of foolishness, which resulted in such misfortune that I came within an inch of losing my life.

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Because life is constructed in such a merciless fashion, even one minute before a cheerful man kills a child he can still feel entirely at ease, and only one minute before a woman screams out in horror she can close her eyes and dream of the sea, and during the last minute of that child’s life his parents can sit in a kitchen waiting for sugar, talking casually about the child’s white teeth and the rowing trip they have planned,and that child himself can close a gate and begin to cross a road, holding in his right hand a few cubes of sugar wrapped up in white paper, and for the whole of that minute he can see nothing but a clear stream with big fish and a wide-bottomed boat with silent oars.

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When she asked me to swear that I wouldn't open the box for any reason, I swore.

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The way she sat there across from him, like a fashion model, left no room for even a smidgen of doubt: the young lady from the bank was a hedge fund of human flesh.

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A bird fishing in the water: to an indifferent bystander, if he were to notice, perhaps that is all he would see—he would, however, not just have to notice but would have to know in the widening comprehension of the first glance, at least to know and to see just how much this motionless bird, fishing there in between grassy islets of the shallow water, how much this bird was accursedly superfluous; indeed he would have to be conscious, immediately conscious, of how much this enormous snow-white dignified creature is defenseless—because it was superfluous and defenseless, yes, and as so often, the one satisfactorily accounted for the other, namely its superfluity made it defenseless and its defenselessness made it superfluous: a defenseless and superfluous sublimity. . .

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Sometimes the difference between life and death is so small that it's only a matter of whether someone writes in his spare time or writes on his spare time.

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That was how it felt.

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In the waters between the coast of Fujian and the island of Formosa, where the wind from across Asia and the ocean converge, a typhoon approached, the great wind born of the union of many, which whips up the sea, and casts it into the sky, compresses, wrings and then tears apart sea and sky, and between tissues of air and water destroys everything that comes too close to this supernatural alchemy.

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The finest play ever staged cannot compete with the spectacle of a public slicing.

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This episode did not put an end to my pursuit of city solitudes, though I did promise myself and them one thing: never entrust these stolen essences to a pencil.

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The page is the only place in the universe God left blank for me.

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When I went to the cottage after they left, I found innocent traces of their activities: they must have been to the antique shops in Komoro or somewhere, because the kitchen cupboards were full of bowls and plates that, to my eyes, looked less antique than just plain old; they had amused themselves with sparklers for old times’ sake, littering the ground with black threadlike cinders; and birdhouses hung from the branches again.

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There was no plan so perfect that uncertainty could be discarded.

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The owl launched itself into the emptiness and flew with the wind toward the light, dying now where the earth ended and there was only sea.

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The devil had his workshop here in Belarus.

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. . .I was standing by the window afterward looking out at the dawning of the day, it was with the calm, like a sprinkle of finely sieved sand running through my body, of someone who knows he no longer has anything to fear.

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But I am so bored with all these women who talk about their husbands!

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The last time I saw Miguel Desvern or Deverne was also the last time that his wife, Luisa, saw him, which seemed strange, perhaps unfair, given that she was his wife, while I, on the other hand, was a person he had never met, a woman with whom he had never exchanged so much as a single word.

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Between little and nothing lie a few crumbs, blown away by the merest breath.

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One's not complete when one's not dead.