My Tongue, My Enemy Without you—blood in the mouth. I swallow, the Latin serifs scratch. My tongue, my brother. Decorated, perforated— metal ball rolls along the teeth like a perverse arrowhead. Tongue or Death. My tongue, my own carcass. My tongue, another friend whom I’ve betrayed. Shouldering guilt, the innocent start running. My tongue, my … Continue reading Katerina Stoykova: My Tongue, My Enemy
The fight for national liberation in the 19th century has been an important subject of many works of Bulgarian literature since Ivan Vazov’s novel „Under the Yoke“ (written 1887-1888; it was the first novel written in Bulgarian language). While most of these works focus on the story of an individual, a small group of people, … Continue reading Galina Zlatareva: The Medallion
Workers VI With a helmet swept off the head the strap cutting into the throat Weighing you down to the earth’s lap you’re not her son The petrol field is not mother earth but you’ve lain backwards Over clods of earth lit up like ores from the all-enveloping In this artificial heaven paraffin film huge … Continue reading Vladimir Sabourin: Workers VI
RAIN Half an hour I’ve been standing in the shower and can’t wash off this haunting dream pursuing me for years, in which you abandon me at the farmer’s market in a southern city. The tides of blood discard sand and dead jellyfish in my eyes and I can’t see how you walk away carrying … Continue reading Aksinia Mihaylova: Rain
Creative Spurt By now the moon has shrunk back to a dark comma in the sky, and I have stopped writing. Two weeks of rubbing pen and paper like a cicada its front legs, and erupting in some language I no longer use for thinking. They say the tongue you become a poet in is … Continue reading Katerina Stoykova: Creative Spurt
The most famous and probably most important writer born in Bulgaria is Elias Canetti. The Nobel Prize Winner was born 1905 in Ruse at the Danube, at that time an important trading center and the most modern town in Bulgaria. Although Canetti was neither by ethnicity, nor by nationality, nor by language a Bulgarian author … Continue reading Once upon a time in Bulgaria – Elias Canetti: The Tongue Set Free
Stony coke You think, that under the earth there, that we can become worthy. Working out of the companies, we’ll gather enough money, until wife and kids appear. And you think: how straightforward, a black sun shines from the height, and from below naturally intrepid shining ores open eyes up wide like a man rising … Continue reading Ani Ilkov: Stony Coke
Bulgarian traditional food is a mix of many influences, and while it is sometimes difficult to say if a specific dish is really genuinely Bulgarian – Turks, Greeks, Serbs and Macedonians have a very similar cuisine – it is safe to say that it is delicious and that you will almost for sure put on … Continue reading Bulgarian Cuisine: Three Book Recommendations
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 … Continue reading Stoyanka Grudova: Picking Loneliness
“There are very few people with the capacity to change the world. Jesus Christ was one, Karl Marx was another.” Such thoughtful, meaningful and expressing words to start a novel*: Bulgariana (Dragon Books, revised edition, 2014), featuring Bulgaria’s recent history. Having lived in Turkey for a few years, I encountered in Çorlu, Turkey a few ambitious … Continue reading Randall Baker’s Bulgariana: A Review by Nuri Al-Khalaf
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 