Translator’s Note

When it comes to contemporary poetry, Bulgaria is fortunate in having a diverse array of strong poetic voices from a range of generations. If this broad body of work has any defining features or common horizons within which it operates, they are a concern with the precision of the language and imagery, a puzzling at the significance of the apparently insignificant, a willingness to pursue associations beyond the realm of the merely logical and an aesthetic that either fully embraces or at least borders on minimalism. 

These elements are all detectable in the work of Maria Getova, a young poet from the latest emergent generation, who are, as it were, taking on the ‘discoveries’ of the poets immediately preceding them and then bringing their own sensibilities and experiences into play. The apparent simplicity of her poems belies the complexity of their explorations so that we are brought up short against new ways of thinking about the world in only a few lines. 

Ostensibly, translating work with this kind of surface simplicity should be relatively straightforward, but the challenge resides, of course, in finding the right nuance when each and every line or even individual word has its own particular connotation. The Bulgarian word панелката that Maria uses, for example, is loaded with associations. It refers to a particular kind of apartment block built during Bulgaria’s communist era, usually with the cheapest of materials, and they continue to dominate the skyline of large parts of Sofia and other towns and cities in Bulgaria. There is an entire atmosphere built into the word that a translator can only hope to gesture towards by using a term like ‘panel block’, which readers can at least put into a search engine that will link them to a website page that explains exactly what this kind of building is and what it means as a cultural phenomenon in eastern Europe. 

In general, however, my approach is guided by the thought that, when translating poetry, the goal can never be a replica, but an equivalent. Bulgarian is rich in potential sonic effects, thanks largely to it being an inflected language, but these effects are often impossible to replicate in English without distortion (by which I mean resorting to unnatural word order or other artifice). Better, perhaps, to offer readers an equivalent reading experience. A translation which, as a poem in its own right, works in the destination language in a way which, while not perhaps precisely the same as the experience readers in the source language have, is at least similarly rich and diverse. Poems, after all, are open to multiple interpretations by those able to read them in the language they were originally written in. The best a translator can do is, surely, offer a version which is open to multiple interpretations too.  

Tom Phillips