Biblioasis International Translation Series: 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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.