PICKING LONELINESS

just like mushrooms
loneliness too has a double
poisonous and edible
loneliness

one bows to you
with its red hat
the other watches you
smiling with polka dots

by its blue blood you’ll recognize
which one counts your hours

Stoyanka Grudova

Translation: Katerina Stoykova

from the anthology Season of Delicate Hunger (ed. Katerina Stoykova), Accents Publishing 2014

Stoyanka Grudova graduated in Bulgarian philology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski “. She has worked as a lab technician, teacher, secretary of a community center, puppet theater dramaturg, journalist, editor and responsible secretary of a literary almanac. Her life and creativity are connected with the city of Burgas. She basically writes adult poetry. She debuted in the collection of “Five Young Poets” in 1978. Published poetic books: “World” (1981), “Consciousness” (1986), “I Fish” (2012) and “The Future Between Us” (2015). She also wrote books with poetry for children: “Angelcelle Brother” (2000), “Prayer” (2007) and “The Star with Rosemary Hair” (2009). She participated in various poetic anthologies. Her poetry is translated in Russian and Macedonian.

Katerina Stoykova is the author of poetry books in English and Bulgarian, most recently Second Skin (ICU, 2018, Bulgarian) and the bilingual Bird on a Window Sill (Signs, 2017, English and Bulgarian). The Bulgarian edition of How God Punishes was published by ICU in 2014 and won the Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Prize. Katerina is the editor and the main translator of The Season of Delicate Hunger: Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry (Accents Publishing, 2014). For six years she hosted the literary radio show Accents on WRFL 88.1FM. In 2010, Katerina launched the independent literary press Accents Publishing. Katerina co-wrote the independent feature film Proud Citizen, directed by Thom Southerland, and acted in the lead role.

Photo credit: Libra Skorp; Katerina Stoykova

This blog post is part of #BulgarianLiteratureMonth.