Night and Day 

Your transparent shoulders

Your transparent eyes

Your transparent brain

Your transparent womb

Your transparent knees

At night you shine all over
like a central intelligence
agency

Analysts are walking within
calculating the odds

At the other end of the world
a man is blown up
another’s walking on four legs
with a leash round his neck

From every mouth
taped with elastoplast
pours truth truth truth

night-time you shine all over
I want to watch you
but I always look through you

I observe cosmic anomalies

That’s how I fall asleep
curled in fetal pose
hands between my thighs

Tomorrow is another centre
for another intelligence agency

Kiril Vassilev

Translation: Christopher Buxton

The English translation of the poem has been published first in the book New Social Poetry – The Anthology (CreateSpace 2018).

Kiril Vassilev was born in 1971 in Sofia. He graduated in culturology from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski “. He worked, among others, as a reporter of the newspaper “Dnevnik”, and as a lecturer at New Bulgarian University in Sofia. He has published translations and critical articles in many cultural periodical, mainly in the “Literary Journal”, the “Literary Forum”, and also in the magazines “Season“, “Altera” and “Page“. His book “Three Poems” published in 2004, was declared “debut of the year” by literary critic Plamen Doynov. Also many other literary critics consider him as one of the most significant Bulgarian poets after that emerged after 1989. Kiril Vassilev has also published the poetry books “Missing Pages” (Stigmati 2010), and most recently “Provinces” (Small Stations Press 2015).

Christopher Buxton graduated in English and American literature at the University of Kent. He first came to Bulgaria in 1977 as an English teacher in Burgas. He has had two novels published in Bulgaria, Far from the Danube and Prudence and the Red Baron and has also written a number of articles for Vagabond Magazine on contemporary Bulgarian social, cultural and political issues. Some of his translations of Bulgarian classic literary texts can be found on his blog. They include stories by Yovkov and Elin Pelin, poetry by Kiril Christov, Ivan Vazov, Vladimir Bashev, and Christo Fotev. He has recently published two books with the poetry of Peyo Yavorov and Dimcho Debelyanov and an anthology with classical Bulgarian poems in his own translation. He is a committee member of the British Bulgarian Friendship Society. Together with his wife, he is running Black Sea Oleander Press, a small independent publishing house.

Photo credit: AzCheta; Christopher Buxton

This blog post is part of #BulgarianLiteratureMonth.