Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer:

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

I am curious (exception, rule?) whether most novelists view the most crucial part of their crafting stories as happening at the sentence level, and whether the distinction between a good and great novel is a function of differences in talent in crafting those building blocks. Many book reviews focus on quality of prose, although perhaps the true quality is pulling readers through the story without conscious marveling at the writing (or in spite of that).

Translation, then, confuses me. The best fiction I have read in the past few years -- Ferrante, Knausgaard, Grossman -- is not originally written in English. This fact makes sentence-by-sentence choices on the part of the author seem less vital to the greatness of the novel. Rather, something at a higher level (the novel's ideas, characters, metaphors, the originality of the observations, etc.) is the crucial piece. This seems true to me regardless of whether the translation is good or not. I found the English prose of all these books to be very good to great, and at times I found myself impressed with the choices of the translator. But a great translation is evidence of there being some quality in the book that transcends original language and can thus be communicated by a skilled translator in another language. Perhaps this varies by author or language, or luck of the draw with the translator -- or perhaps for the best books (at least to my taste) these are all secondary concerns. I don't doubt that these books would be better in their original languages, but the fact they are this great in other languages informs my impression of what makes a great novel.

There must be cases though where this breaks down. I am reading Twelfth Night to Nathan and reading Shakespeare out loud is delightful and fascinating -- the wordplay and invention is the joy of the plays, although perhaps that is because the plot archetypes have been so folded into modern constructions as to seem less powerful. Shakespeare has been translated into over 100 languages. How good is it in other languages? How good can it be?

I am reading The Savage Detectives by Bolaño and I have thought about this a lot because the book is about poets and poetry.