At Night All Blood is Black
novel by David Diop
At Night All Blood Is Black is a novel by French author David Diop, which was first published in French on August 16, 2018, by Éditions du Seuil, it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens that same year. The novel centers around Alfa Ndiaye and his adopted brother Mademba Diop, who are Senegalese Tirailleurs fighting in World War I.
Quotes
edit- To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single.
- ...I had been inhuman by obeying duty's voice. But I was now free to listen no longer, to no longer obey the voices that command us not to be human when we must.
- Only after you were gone did I finally begin to think. Only with your death, at dusk, did I know, did I understand that I would no longer listen to the voice of duty, the voice that commands, the voice that leads the way. But it was too late.
- My brothers in combat, white or black, need to believe that it isn’t the war that will kill them, but the evil eye. They need to believe it won’t be one of the thousands of bullets fired by the enemy from the other side that will randomly kill them. They don’t like randomness. Randomness is too absurd. They want someone to blame, they’d rather think that the enemy bullet that hits them was directed, guided by some cruel, malevolent, evil intent.
- That’s war: it’s when God lags behind the music of men, when he can’t untangle the threads of so many fates at the same time.
- Don't tell me that we don't need madness on the battlefield. God's truth, the mad fear nothing. The others, white or black, play at being mad, perform madness so that they can calmly throw themselves in front of the bullets of the enemy on the other side. It allows them to run straight at death without being too afraid. You'd have to be mad to obey Captain Armand when he whistles for the attack, knowing there's almost no chance you'll come home alive. God's truth, you'd have to be crazy to drag yourself screaming out of the belly of the earth.
- I believe I understand that what’s written on high is only a copy of what man writes here below. God’s truth, I believe that God always lags behind us. It’s all He can do to assess the damage.
- Men share with each other the same lifeblood, but each feeds himself from it differently. Even if the new isn’t really new, it’s always new for those who, ceaselessly, wash up on the world’s shores, generation after generation, wave after wave. So, in order to find yourself in life, to not lose yourself on the path, you must listen to the voice of duty. To think too much about yourself is to falter. Whoever understands this secret has the potential to live in peace. But it’s easier said than done.
- To translate is to betray at the borders, it's to cheat, it's to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large.