Best European Fiction 2013

“The work is vibrant, varied, sometimes downright odd. As [Zadie] Smith says [in her preface]: ‘I was educated in a largely Anglo-American library, and it is sometimes dull to stare at the same four walls all day.’ Here’s the antidote.”
FINANCIAL TIMES

“With the new anthology
Best European Fiction
… our literary world just got wider.”
TIME MAGAZINE

“The collection’s diverse range of styles includes more experimental works than a typical American anthology might … [Mr. Hemon’s] only criteria were to include the best works from as many countries as possible.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL

“This is a precious opportunity to understand more deeply the obsessions, hopes and fears of each nation’s literary psyche—a sort of international show-and-tell of the soul.”
THE GUARDIAN

“Readers for whom the expression ‘foreign literature’ means the work of Canada’s Alice Munro stand to have their eyes opened wide and their reading exposure exploded as they encounter works from places such as Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia (and, yes, from more familiar terrain, such as Spain, the UK, and Russia).”
BOOKLIST STARRED REVIEW

“[W]e can be thankful to have so many talented new voices to discover.”
LIBRARY JOURNAL

“[W]hat the reader takes from them are not only the usual pleasures of fiction—the twists and turns of plot, chance to inhabit other lives, other ways of being—but new ways of thinking about how to tell a story.”
CHRISTOPHER MERRILL, PRI’S “THE WORLD” HOLIDAY PICK

“The book tilts toward unconventional storytelling techniques. And while we’ve heard complaints about this before—why only translate the most difficult work coming out of Europe?—it makes sense here. The book isn’t testing the boundaries, it’s opening them up.”
TIME OUT CHICAGO

“Editor Aleksandar Hemon declares in his preface that at the heart of this compilation is the ‘nonnegotiable need for communication with the world, wherever it may be,’ and asserts that ongoing translation is crucial to this process. The English-language reading world, ‘wherever it may be,’ is grateful.”
THE BELIEVER

“Does European literature exist? Of course it does, and this collection of forty-one stories proves it.”
THE INDEPENDENT

Preface

It is not only in French that the words
translate
and
traduce
bear a close affinity. Legend has it that John Braine’s novel of ambition and opportunism in 1950s Britain,
Room at the Top
, in its Swedish version was very nearly entitled
Vinden
—‘The Attic’—until a vigilant editor thought to double-check. It is also said that in a passage in one of Sean O’Casey’s plays of Dublin working-class life where a character speaks of the ‘little chislers’, that is, children, an earnest Japanese translator rendered the colloquialism as ‘small stone-masons’. One laughs, of course, but at the same time one does sympathise with the hapless traducer. Language is a sly and treacherous medium.

We are all familiar with Robert Frost’s mournful contention that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but meaning itself can go subtly or grossly astray in the crossing from one tongue to another—not so much tripping lightly, one might say, as merely tripping. The problem, as any translator will ruefully remind us, is that in the original text meaning is not fixed, but is always more or less ambiguous. This is so not only in verse, but can be true of the most seemingly limpid passages of prose. You sit down to write a letter to your lover, or your bank manager, thinking you know exactly what you have to say, yet when you finish and read over what you have written you notice that the sense is not quite as you intended. Who speaks here, you wonder? The answer is, language itself, wilful, subtle, coercive. We think we speak, but really it is we who are spoken.

Even when language seems at its most docile, the sense, or non-sense, of a phrase can turn on the most innocent-seeming effect. Take that comma in the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus
. In the original the first proposition is written thus: ‘
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist
.’ Wittgenstein in his early work was fond of symmetry, and certainly this is a handsomely symmetrical sentence. However, the rules of punctuation in German are strict, and by those rules a comma is called for here, at the halfway point in the sentence, making for a nice caesura.

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