We’ll be posting more commentary about this over the next few weeks, building up to the announcement of the winning title on May 3rd at 5:30pm the PEN World Voices/CLMP Fest taking place at the Washington Mews in New York.

Also, the finalists for poetry are going to be announced on the Poetry Foundation blog, and will be reproduced here as soon as that goes live.

The 2013 Best Translated Book Award Fiction Finalist

translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary (Open Letter Books; Argentina)

translated from the French by Alyson Waters (Archipelago Books; France)

translated from the Persian by Tom Patterdale (Melville House; Iran)

translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes (New Directions; Hungary)

translated from the French by Lorin Stein (Dalkey Archive Press; France)

translated from the Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz (New Directions; Brazil)

translated from the German by Philip Boehm (Metropolitan Books; Romania)

translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz (Open Letter Books; Russia)

translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball (Indiana University Press; Djibouti)

translated from the German by Donal McLaughlin (Seagull Books; Switzerland)

Special thanks needs to go out to all of our fine judges: Monica Carter, Salonica; Tess Doering Lewis, translator and critic; Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading and Center for the Art of Translation; Susan Harris, Words Without Borders; Bill Martin, translator; Bill Marx, Arts Fuse; Michael Orthofer, Complete Review; Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books; and Jenn Witte, Skylight Books.

And we want to thank Amazon.com once again for underwriting the award and providing $25,000 allowing us to give $5,000 cash prizes to both winning authors and translators, along with providing a small honorarium for the judges.

by Eric Chevillard, translated from the French by Alyson Waters and published by Archipelago Books

This piece is by translator, critic, and BTBA judge, Tess Lewis.

For sheer narrative inventiveness and luxuriant delight in the seductive power of fiction, you can do no better than pick up a book by Eric Chevillard. Chevillard is one of France’s most mercurial and impish contemporary writers. He has written more than twenty idiosyncratic books that push Big Questions to absurd extremes and his Prehistoric Times is an intellectual roller coaster and fun house mirror gallery in one.

The unnamed narrator, an archeologist by training, was “derailed” by a fall while excavating a cave with dozens of Paleolithic paintings. He has been demoted to guardian and guide in the site, a position he is as unsuited to fill as the uniform that goes with it, his predecessor having been much shorter and fatter. In his meandering monologue, the narrator justifies his delay in taking up his duties despite increasingly menacing threats of dismissal.

The narrator’s reflections swing from the abstract to the concrete and back again. Sometimes his progress is logical, sometimes associative, but the connective tissue, Chevillard’s antic, slightly off-kilter, acrobatic prose, virtuosically rendered into English by Alyson Waters, makes the web of his thoughts seem inevitable and coherent even at its most absurd.

The size of his uniform’s cap leads the narrator to meditate on the genesis of thought and to formulate a series of hypotheses about how the shape of the skull might affect the quality of the thinking done in it. Would thoughts develop more freely in a dome-shaped brainpan or would they get lost or confused? Alternatively, would a turnip-shaped skull engender sharper, more focused thoughts or simply constrict them? Then he segues to recollections of his childhood, to wondering whether Homo Sapiens had usurped the place of more intelligent ancestors, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, to man’s need for rituals, to speculation on the aesthetic ideas of troglodyte painters and how imagination changes man’s relation to world. He zigzags over a great deal of territory, assuring the reader that he is not wasting time, though by now the reader feels as if he has been led by the nose in random circles and U-turns.

There is indeed a method to his meandering. His ruminations have all been preparation for his grand ambition, to create a work of art that will endure, like his beloved cave paintings, outside of recorded history. In Chevillard’s hands, the novel of ideas is as exhilarating as a metaphysical fairground. Strap yourselves in and enjoy the ride.