Suspend Your Disbelief

Search Results: bulgarian literature

Essays |

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: Part II

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

…пада.” After spending a week in Sozopol thinking and talking so much about Bulgarian literature and translation, Penkov put flesh on the bones by describing what it was like to write a book about Bulgaria in English—and then to translate it into his native language himself. “Future of Translation” panel, Sofia. From left: Kapka Kassabova, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Rana Dasgupta, Miroslav Penkov. Not featured: John Freeman. / CR: Simona Ilieva Back home…


Essays |

The 2011 Sozopol Fiction Seminar: Part I

by Jeremiah Chamberlin

…st of us followed: Angela Rodel from Southern California who had married a Bulgarian and has been translating Bulgarian to English for over fifteen years; Svetlozar Zhelev, the publisher of the biggest publishing house in Bulgaria; Ivan Landzhev, a screenwriter for Bulgaria’s top TV show; Jane E. Martin from Montreal who wrote tech manuals and short stories; Ivan Dimitrov, a Bulgarian Fellow from last year who just wanted to continue the discussio…


Interviews |

Close Up the Little Devil: An Interview with Zachary Karabashliev

by Steven Wingate

…she was from and she told me she was an American. I was blown away by her Bulgarian. She had read the novel in Bulgarian, we talked about how cool it would be to share it with the American audience. Later, she translated some of my short stories into English and one of them was shortlisted for the Best European Stories collection—it is a fine, fine translation. Angela is a professional musician—I believe this has a lot to do with the way she tran…


Interviews |

Maybe the World is a Story: an Interview with Miroslav Penkov

by Steven Wingate

…short stories, and I’d go as far as to make the big pronouncement that in Bulgarian literature the short story takes central stage over the novel. Maybe because of how strong our oral tradition was during the centuries of Ottoman rule when tales were passed not in writing but in song. Maybe for some other reason. But I fell in love with short stories at an early age and began writing them when I was twelve. Only, the stories I wrote kept getting…


Interviews |

Entering the Memories of the Body: An Interview with Virginia Zaharieva

by Steven Wingate

…poetry, especially in haiku form. FWR has been very interested in covering Bulgarian literature, so our readers have seen interviews with and/or reviews of many of your contemporaries. Where do you fit with other Bulgarian writers that our readers may have met through FWR? I’m not thinking of compare/contrast so much as whose genetic makeup you feel you share. I learned good Bulgarian language from the Bulgarian literary tradition. As my best teac…


Reviews |

East of the West: A Country in Stories, by Miroslav Penkov

by Steven Wingate

…ture and presents us as we are—with our worries, with our yad, with our furtive gropings toward meaning—no matter how much we may wish to be some other way. Further Links & Resources Check out other FWR pieces on Bulgarian literature. Here’s an interview with Penkov in The Dallas Observer’s book blog. Read an archive of Penkov’s work on Blackbird. Penkov offers a list of how to write about Bulgaria in GRANTA….


Interviews |

Breath and Voice: An Interview with Garth Greenwell

by Polly Stewart

…rrow has found a level of international success almost unprecedented for a Bulgarian writer. Two other Bulgarians who deserve to be much more widely read are Teodora Dimova, whose novel The Mothers is fierce and more than a little terrifying (there isn’t an English-language edition yet, but a translated excerpt is available online), and Angel Wagenstein, whose work I’m only discovering now. Wagenstein is well known in much of Europe, and it’s time…


Interviews |

All Times are Awake at Once: An Interview with Angel Igov

by Steven Wingate

…e live in an ahistorical age and people care less and less about the past. Literature, however, cultivates the awareness that it’s somewhat unhealthy to live in the present only. For Bulgarians, indeed, history has traditionally been quite important. As a young nation, Bulgaria constructed its identity through the tales of the glorious medieval past and the fainter echoes of Thracian antiquity. This is why, even as I call it a young nation, most B…


Interviews |

The Animal that is the Novel: an Interview with Georgi Gospodinov

by Steven Wingate

…hysics, Angela Rodel, has been a major force behind the recent increase of Bulgarian literature on the English-speaking scene. How closely did you work with her on this translation, and what do you see as the challenges of translating this book in particular? author photo by Vassil Tanev Angela Rodel is indeed an excellent translator. By the way, she won an NEA grant to translate the novel. Our work together was both pleasant and intense. I like t…


Reviews |

Everything Happens As It Does, by Albena Stambolova

by Steven Wingate

…ibility to the body of English translations from her nation’s contemporary literature. While the men show some concern for what being a Bulgarian means, what Bulgaria as a nation means (or, in the case of Ruskov, what civilization itself means), Stambolova tells sinuous tales that snake through the lives of her characters, leaving the reader feeling privy to those deeply personal moments in which life make perfect emotional sense—even as it makes…



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