A.S. Byatt, Possession (opening lines)
The book was thick and black and covered with dust. Its boards were bowed and creaking; it had been maltreated in its own time. Its spine was missing…. It was bandaged about and about with dirty white tape, tied in a neat bow.
Book me a passage — bowed by age
I’m on board with creaking
My spine missing
Treat myself for mal du doute
Let them eat bandages (caked in blood
I have bad images
Dirt white trash ever’where, cult-like
buzzing imagined seventh function
Tape their noise, tie ’em up
sure aint neat freaks
A-boot & a-boot — eh, flyboys
Mine in-jokes galore, archival,
whoopie who cares?
Y are we at this?
These B’s, mistreated herein,
in a bow… done
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller (trans, William Weaver)
Opening lines: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.
Closing line: And you say, “Just a moment. I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino.”
Relax · Concentrate · Dispel · Fade
expect grapheme greyscale a’gen
Night-light on in ever’more boffo buff
Self-Portrait … convex mirror’d
Razor-file frame fame
(hold by careful hand, pls)
Cultish wish In a good trouble way
Dish it up
Here’s lookin’ at you, kid
And you say, “Just a moment. I’m almost finished
a fabulist attempt on Italo Calvino’s shelf life.” [1]
Albert Camus, The Outsider (trans, Joseph Laredo)
From the depths of my future, throughout the whole of this absurd life I’d been leading, I’d felt a vague breath drifting towards me across all the years that were still to come, and on its way this breath had evened out everything that was then being proposed to me in the equally unreal years I was living through.
Ohh, that slow dancer Meursault
jigging a painful five step
This well timed Primer — a “how to” zig’n
zag that ol’ existential standard
Bourgie bunk foisted (not proposed)
& a dark wind to level it out
No goal-keeping sigh fated (feted?)
between the sticks
So a ballsier translation sits best
Or this, from our bullish first-year files —
He killed the man, not with anger or hatred
but simply with a gun. [2]