Music featured on this episode (all from albums released in 2007) includes “,” “,” “,” and “.”

This series will continue biweekly through the end of the year, covering all twenty-five winning BTBA books (poetry and fiction) culminating in a Best of the BTBA award chosen by YOU, the listeners and fans, at the end of 2021. Stay tuned to Three Percent for additional posts, interviews, analysis of translation trends, and more.

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Paraguayan SeaÌęis an epic poem in story form about a woman from Paraguay, living in a beach town in Brazil, reflecting on her experiences with two lovers, an old man and a younger one, and using those experiences as a way to delve into the physical, sensual, and spiritual elements of existence. The book is originally written in Portunhol (a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese spoken along the border of where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay touch) and Guarani, a native language of Paraguay. The English translation maintains much of the Guarani, with a generous glossary in the back, and is inventively interspersed with “Frenglish,” a combination of QuĂ©bĂ©cois French and English. Erin Moure, in her translator note, wrote that she kept Guarani a part of this translation because she, “decided to trust Bueno’s own admonition that Guarani is essential to the text, for Guarani bursts out of his text at every seam, even the most infinitesimal, and its epistemologies and relations are crucial.” In so doing, Moure created a text that is accessible to an English readership, but brings us to Guarani instead of having it diminished and rendered invisible. In this translation, it asserts its own necessity and though we may lose the way it interacts with Spanish and Portuguese, in geographically relevant rhythm, the resonances that emerge from the act of creating another hybrid language offer their own linguistic charms.

by Wilson Bueno, translated from the Portunhol and Guarani to Frenglish and Guarani by Erin Moore (Brazil, Nightboat Books)

by Ursula Andkjaer Olsen, translated from the Danish by Katrine Øgaard Jensen (Denmark, Broken Dimanche Press)

by Hirato Renkichi, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita (Japan, Ugly Duckling Presse)

by Ana Ristović, translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref (Serbia, Zephyr Press)

by Eleni Vakalo, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich (Greece, Ugly Duckling Presse)

by AnaĂŻs Barbeau-Lavalette, translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins (Canada, Coach House)

by GuĂ°bergur Bergsson, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)

by Mathias Énard, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell (France, New Directions)

by Rodrigo FresĂĄn, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Argentina, Open Letter Books)

by Santiago Gamboa, translated from the Spanish by Howard Curtis (Colombia, Europa Editions)

by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole (Germany, Two Lines Press)

by Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff (Switzerland, New Directions)

by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump (France, Two Lines Press)

by Romina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press)

by Wu He, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry (Taiwan, Columbia University Press)

Featuring a blend of contemporary writers and modern classics, of writers from cultures around the world, and of a variety of stylistic approaches, these shortlists have something for everyone.

On the fiction side of things, there are books from eight different countries and six languages, ranging from Taiwanese author Wu He’s Remains of Life to the postmodern machinations of Guðbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller to Romina Paula’s August. Two other titles of note are Compass by Mathias Énard, which is a finalist for the 2018 Albertine Prize, and Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, which won this year’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

The poetry finalists are also quite diverse, featuring books from six different countries, including Greece (Before Lyricism by Eleni Vakalo) to Japan (Spiral Staircase by Hirato Renkichi) to Brazil (Paraguayan Sea by Wilson Bueno).

Winners from both categories will be announced Thursday, May 31^st as part of the New York Rights Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion (125 West 18^th St.). The announcement will be preceded by a panel starting at 4:30 on “Translated Literature Today: A Decade of Growth.” They will also be announced simultaneously at .

Thanks to grant funds from the Amazon Literary Partnership, the winning authors and translators will each receive $5,000 cash prizes. Three Percent at the URochester founded the BTBAs in 2008, and over the past six years, the Amazon Literary Partnership has contributed more than $140,000 to international authors and their translators through the BTBA.

Past winners of the fiction award include: Chronicle of the Murdered House by LĂșcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson; Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman; The Last Lover by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen; Seiobo There Below and Satantango, both by LĂĄszlĂł Krasznahorkai, and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes respectively; Stone Upon Stone by WiesƂaw Myƛliwski, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston; and The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

In terms of the poetry award, past winners include: Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert; Rilke Shake by Angélica Freitas, translated from the Portuguese by Hilary Kaplan; Diorama by Rocío Cerón, translated from the Spanish by Anna Rosenwong; The Guest in the Wood by Elisa Biagini, translated from the Italian by Diana Thow, Sarah Stickney, and Eugene Ostashevsky; Wheel with a Single Spoke by Nichita Stănescu, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter; and Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura, translated from the Japanese by Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander.

This year’s fiction jury is made up of: Caitlin Baker (University Book Store, Seattle), Kasia BartoszyƄska (Monmouth College), Tara Cheesman-Olmsted (), Lori Feathers (), Mark Haber (writer, ), Adam Hetherington (author), Jeremy Keng (reader, freelance reviewer), Bradley Schmidt (translator), and P.ÌęT. Smith (The Scofield).

The poetry jury includes: Raluca Albu (BOMB), Jarrod Annis (), Tess Lewis (writer and translator), Aditi Machado (poet and translator), and Emma Ramadan (translator, ).

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For more information, visit the official site and the official and follow the award on

Also, check out Three Percent for Why This Book Should Win posts for each of the remaining sixteen finalists.

Ìęby Johannes Urzidil, translated from the German by David Burnett (Germany, Pushkin Press)Ìę

Five stories culled from disparate parts of a dead author’s career seems an unlikely candidate for the Best Translated Book Award, but nothing about The Last Bell’s publication seems likely. It is the first-ever English translation, thanks to David Burnett, of a member of Kafka’s Prague circle, a writer Max Brod called “the great troubadour of a Prague forever lost,” who somehow himself got lost through passing decades despite all these years living right under our noses: Urzidil was a Czech immigrant in New York, continuing to produce enigmatic stories in German which earned him a small following there if nowhere else. With the lure of a time capsule or buried treasure, we are drawn to Urzidil, curious to see if this forgotten writer will live up to our enticing idea of him.

Living up to expectations is hard, especially with Kafka as a point of comparison. There’s nothing automatic about the creative spark, and each writer’s art must live or die by its own merits; so while Urzidil’s stories sometimes incorporate surreal elements owing something to Kafka—the talking pickles and reanimated painted woman in “The Duchess of Albanera,” for example—what makes each of the stories in The Last Bell live is that they contain small miracles of empathy, of Urzidil inhabiting a strange mind and illustrating the fears, hopes, and moral conundrums experienced therein.

In the title story, Urzidil somehow manages to turn a hammy below-the-stairs servant comedy into a parable about the choices non-Jewish civilians made during the Holocaust. The story turns on empathy—the tragicomic fact that Marska alone can feel compassion for people like her absent employers, who hastily fled the country as the Nazis started rounding up Jews. Her sister Joska has no such sentimental attachments; she has no qualms about plundering oppressed people. Marska cannot revel in her employer’s riches: “How can it be that something sickens you and yet you guard it like a treasure?” Marska’s position in the class system may have been a subordinate one, but it imbued her with a rigid sense of morality; money doesn’t belong to you if you didn’t work for it. Empathy for her Jewish landlord drives Marska as the story reaches its terrible crisis, and she asks her absent Master (a writer, it so happens!) for empathy in the story’s powerful denouement:

I wonder if he’ll write it down the way I lived it, and everything that went through my mind while it happened? I wonder if he’ll be on my side when they summon him as a witness at the Last Judgment?

Yet empathy in Urzidil’s stories is never divorced from moral instruction. One may take seriously Seigelmann, the travel agent in “Seigelmann’s Journey” whose rich imagination belies the fact that he’s never left his charming little town of Birkenau, without believing that such self-deceits as he engages in are harmless. What justifies placing him in Birkenau, symbolically turning this lovelorn travel agent into a future Nazi, other than obscure, elemental longings Urzidil points to in the soul? Empathy is how Urzidil gets at these springs of motivation, a subject necessary to broach to understand the irruption of racial hatred and violence.

A logical progression drives the hostile behavior of the villagers on the right and left banks of the river in “Where the Valley Ends,” these Bohemian Hatfields and McCoys. Yet Urzidil’s narrator abstracts himself from the conflict—what seems a quaint allegory for industrialization, national hatreds, and war—and describes the quarrel between these two factions in a small village from the perspective of Mother Nature, seeing the root of conflict not in terms of one grievance or racial hatred, but more elementally as part of humanity’s unfettered desire to create meanings and control Nature. For Urzidil, calamity arises from such uncontrolled longings—the strength that is actually weakness. When the protagonist in “The Duchess of Albanera” acts on a moment of daring and steals a painting of the said Duchess, the Duchess in the painting comes to life to tell him he acted not out of courage but out of cowardice, because he was afraid of women, so he needed to steal an inanimate one. Urzidil’s uncanny ability to unearth moral strength, and Burnett’s ability to render that strength in English, in one character’s diminutive position and weakness in another character’s act of daring show exceptional insight, and demonstrate why The Last Bell deserves this award.

by Sergio Pitol, translated from the Spanish by George Henson (Mexico, Deep Vellum)

Books that are part of a series have a tough time getting the recognition they deserve, in general and for awards in particular. The first book comes out and people rave enthusiastically yet they need to see where the rest goes. The middle are a bridge, a getting here to there, appreciated but sort of lost in the process. Then comes the end, the final book, and people have forgotten it all existed. The frantic, absurd pace with which the book world consumes the shiny new book of the month doesn’t allow for culminations. It’s shameful, really, and with Sergio Pitol’s “Trilogy of Memory,” each translated by George Henson, it really, really should be otherwise. The Magician of Vienna deserves to win the 2018 BTBA because on its own it’s an astounding book, and as the end of a trilogy, it pulls disparate ideas together over a huge span.

Pitol died just two days after the longlist was announced. Not that a man as successful as he needed more accolades, but I for one am happy for there to be one more. We shouldn’t let his passing sway us, it’s not a reason for a book to win an award, but it would make for a nice story, wouldn’t it? Either way, his work being recognized in the US is a huge step towards more of it coming, and a deserving win here would push forward with even more momentum.

This trilogy is for people who—like Pitol, like his translator Henson—lead a life where living and literature, reading it, writing it, thinking about it, overlap completely. They are inseparable and to make sense of one is to seek to make sense of the other. In a way, there are no limits to this life. This is memoir, this is fiction, this is literary criticism, and it’s not interested in blending those genres, in thinking on what it means to be cross-genre. Instead, Pitol simply writes as he must. He travels in time as he sorts his memories, travels in time as he sorts history, travels in space as he physically travels, travels in space as he follows the history of foreign authors or their characters. It’s not limited to books however—music, theater, movies, visual art, all of it is invoked, all part of this existence. The breadth is remarkable, and Pitol’s control of it even more so.

He is always in control, and Henson relays that control to English readers. Both are impressive in their skill and art. This isn’t just memory of his life, but remembrances of the books he’s read. The details he pulls, the thoughts he can assemble of the works seem impossible. He does quote books, does revisit them and revisit his own journals, but you get the sense that research, accuracy to facts was not the upmost importance. In his translation, Henson notes errors form time to time, but I imagine they didn’t concern Pitol much. His project was bigger than that. His project was taking a book, like The Third Policeman, from his past and being able to write something like:

This somnambulistic wandering, where the implausible is described with the greatest naturalness, with the same adjectivization that someone would employ to describe the most ordinary events of daily life, is tinged only occasionally with a slight unreality, like the slight out-of-focus of a lens through which someone contemplates a landscape, rests on an ungraspable sadness, broken from time to time, in a brilliant counterpoint, by the commentaries on de Selby and the recreation of the sordid struggle unleashed by his commentators, which has ended up causing them to go mad and driven them to crime.

The Magician of Vienna deserves to win the BTBA for the intellectual achievement that it is. It deserves to win because it is beautiful and it is passionate. It deserves to win for how inclusive it is, how much it warmly pulls into itself to show what kind of man and life that inclusion can form. It deserves to win for how it brings all this together and makes it something enjoyable to read, a rare form of storytelling.

of Hirato Renkichi, translated from the Japanese by Sho Sugita (Japan, Ugly Duckling Presse)

The seventh statement in Hirato Renkichi’s “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement” reads:

Intuition must replace knowledge; the enemy of Futurist anti-art is concept. “Time and space have already died, and we already live in the absolute.” We must quickly take risks, advance in defiance of danger, and create. There, within the chaos before our eyes, only humanistic activities remain while trying to intuitively feel the supreme rhythm (God’s instinct).”

Renkichi began writing poetry in 1912, roughly around the time Eliot wrote his Prufrock and Gertrude Stein her Tender Buttons. But we shall not compare Renkichi to them. We shall also not call him Japan’s Marinetti even though he was, avowedly, influenced by him and indeed quotes him in his “Manifesto.”

It is a mistake, I think, to turn non-Western writers into counterparts of Western ones to whom they bear, if slight, if profound, resemblance. Because even as early twentieth-century Japan is flush with jazz clubs and the writers then were reading American and European avant-gardes (as Eric Selland so usefully describes in the afterward to this gorgeous, letterpress-bound book), Renkichi’s politics and aesthetics emerge in the context of a distinctly Japanese form of cosmopolitanism in its ultramodern industrialized urban centers.

The image I have of Japanese cities from Renkichi’s poems, Selland’s afterword, and Japanese films is rather different—

An animal of irritated electricity

—from the American city (or sleepy town with many cars and exorbitant rents) in which I currently live. The image is perhaps best captured by the title of the poem, “Ginza, Color, Light, Reverberation, Stench, CuriositĂ©, ÉphĂ©mĂšre,” from which comes the following excerpt:

On the artery of the underground

applying pressure on the mouth of the iron pipe

Cataract cataract cataract

Cataract of water cataract of gas

Cataract of a transparent amber poison

Reverberation of a great flood

Facing afar

tant tant nombreuse curiosité . . . . . .

tant tant nombreuse curiosité . . . . . .

Go, go

Above the paved road

Inside the crowd

On the elevated railway piercing through the roof

On the spiral staircase of a department store

At the circus

At the run-down bar

At the Russian coffee shop

In front of the power plant at midnight

Go, go

Inside every conceivable clamor

The Spiral Staircase’s astonishing catalog of sensations does a weird thing to my brain. It does an even weirder thing to my brain when I think the thoughts that run through them, this fierce and desperate insight into a world in flux to which—aha!—we belong. (From the translator’s introduction: “[Renkichi’s] vision of Futurism was an all-consuming Deus absconditus of the machines—ready to transform all the -isms into a unified theory he called dƍitsu hyƍgen (“expression of one-ness” or “amalgamated expression”).

Maybe the weird thing being done to my brain is . . . hope?

I want greenness! I want greenness!

The tentacles incessantly raising overhead in all directions—

Many things move me, but this book moves me differently. Its alien philosophies make me see outside of myself and participate in a delicious sort of extroversion that would never otherwise, by nature or nurture, be mine.

For the gift of this translation, we must thank Sho Sugita who has to contend not simply with the very dissimilar workings of Japanese and English, but also Renkichi’s extraordinary range of formal techniques, allusions, multilingualisms, and visual poetics that enact his sense of the world, his jouissance, his magnanimity.

Hirato Renkichi died in 1922, when he was only twenty-nine years old. His Collected Poems are now part of Ugly Duckling Presse’s Lost Literature series and they are essential reading.

As you may already know, the BTBA finalists will be officially unveiled tomorrow, Tuesday, May 15th at 10am Eastern over at . (And the winners will be unveiled on Thursday, May 31st following the 4:30 pm panel on “Translated Literature Today” at the Ìęand at The Millions.)

As always, the first person to guess all ten fiction finalistsÌęon their first tryÌęby emailing me at chad.post [a] rochester.edu will will a year’s subscription to Open Letter Books. Here’s the longlist, and here are some clues:

• There are 7 different publishers represented on the shortlist;
• Authors originate from 8 different countries;
• These authors represent 6 different languages;
• Only 1 author has passed away;
• Using both the author’s names and book titles, the only letter that doesn’t make an appearance is Q;
• The average page length of the finalists is 306.7;
• Of the finalists, 3 of the books were published in their original language before 2010;
• Including authors and translators, there are 9 women and 11 men on the shortlist.

There you go! Speculate away! Lobby for your favorites on Twitter (#BTBA2018)! Get ready to argue tomorrow when the ten titles (and six poetry collections) are unveiled!

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Speaking of poetry, I’m willing to give out a subscription if you can name all six of these books on your first try as well.

The clues aren’t as inventive here (I’m technically on a conference call as I write this, so . . . ), but there are also far fewer books on the poetry longlist.

• The finalists hail from 6 different countries (a first in BTBA history?);
• The finalists are all translated from different languages (wow);
• Only one press has two books on this list of finalists.

Good luck!

byÌęRomina Paula, translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Croft (Argentina, Feminist Press)

I initially picked up August because of its beautiful cover and then I read the first sentence.

It was something about wanting to scatter your ashes, something about wanting to scatter you.

The first sentence of August is perfect, it is beautiful, meditative, and for that reason alone August should win the BTBA 2018. Ah, but that would be cheating and August contains so many gorgeous sentences.

In August Emilia travels back to Patagonia to scatter the ashes of her best friend, Andrea, who committed suicide five years earlier. As I read August I felt as though I was eavesdropping on an intimate monologue spoken by Emilia to her dead friend.

Your dad tells me that it’s legal to exhume the body, your body, that you can finally be exhumed and, I mean dealt with.

What August does so well is get into the heart of grief and how grief can swallow one whole.

I don’t know if it’s the white wine that makes it happen or what, I mean my shaking, because I’ve been able to say your name for a while without losing my composure, even been able to talk about what happened, about what happened to you, to say after the death of rather than after the thing with, which as we know tends to lead to confusion.

Once back in her hometown, Emilia stays with Andrea’s parents, wears Andrea’s clothes, and sleeps with her cat. Emilia revisits music and movies they both loved five years ago.

August is a devastating, yet beautiful book, and one of the best books about navigating through the all-consuming fog of grief that I’ve read. For that reason, its gorgeous sentences, and exploration of teenage female friendship, August deserves to win the BTBA 2018. I eagerly await more books by Romina Paula in the future.