Fairness

Fairness? The slogan reads:
“The music we all love”.
From the burglars of military warehouses,

stalls overflowing
with camouflage equipment and boots,
to salesmen lined up on the road
to the sea.
“The music we all like”
is a shelf of pop discs in a petrol station.

The field burns.
The vase with sunflowers from the dream,
is today the first-of-September burnt field.
forest fires are the embrace,

into which you’re the first to jump and the sparrows
come to my window to say: Ciao.

The bees in the copper-honey mine
work tirelessly, so that by the evening
the sparks from the fires
can jump to the heavens and become stars.
Gypsy kids hunt dead fish
in the waters of the openly polluted Karaagach.
Somewhere a lad hunts cars with his thumb.
Somewhere a Pole crashes into the barrier

The slogan reads: “Drive carefully. Someone
loves you.”

Alexander Nikolov

Translation: Christopher Buxton

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

Alexander Nikolov (born 1997 in Varna) is a Bulgarian poet. He graduated from “Vasil Drumev” High School of Mathematics and studies Bulgarian philology at the University Veliko Tarnovo “St. St. Cyril and Methodius “. He made his debut in 2016 in the collection of the prize-winners of the Petya Dubarova Primary School Literary Competition. In 2017 he won second place in the Boyan Penev National Student Literary Competition. He is since autumn 2017 editor at the journal New Social Poetry. His first poetic book “Justice.” was published in 2018. Alexander Nikolov’s poetry is distinguished by its subject density and epic-ballad passion.

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: Wikipedia; Christopher Buxton

This blog post is part of #BulgarianLiteratureMonth.