Poets From Bulgaria

"When […] we had crossed the border between Turkey and Greece, a Greek trader, my fellow traveler, dismounted from his horse and kissed the soil. “We have trodden upon Hellenic ground,” he said.—My God! How red this ground is!—Yes! Because it is saturated with blood! I immediately made some verses, which I also declaimed with a prophetic inspiration. My intoxication intensified when I first saw the famous Parthenon from a distance."

"In Greek I sang like a swan, now in Slavic I cannot even sing like a donkey."

"We, Bulgarians, have been so abused and despised by other nationalities that it is high time we regained our dignity. When one reads our folk songs, in which every beauty is called a Greek woman, then one will instinctively conclude that wretched self-contempt is a national characteristic of the Bulgarian. It is high time we prove ourselves men among men. Bulgarian industriousness is rarely to be found among other nationalities; it has ennobled us, and it will be our salvation. . . . Having listened to the abuses heaped upon all the Bulgarians, I have lived all my life with the idea that I was a nonentity. The same thought has kept me away from the highest circles of society without which no one has ever become a famous citizen, or a man of letters. It is true that a proud man comes to no good, but it is also true that he who despises himself is a suicide."

"From a young age, I was instinctively drawn to stories of escape, adventure and the high seas. It wasn’t just that I was living in a society where I felt trapped, it was also because I was a reader and a dreamer. In retrospect, no matter where I grew up I probably would have dreamt of escape. But the fact that we were living behind the iron curtain fuelled that escapism."

"Traumas, or very powerful, primal experiences, especially when they’re experienced by large numbers of people, have a tendency to affect everything they touch. At that border, it wasn’t just one person who died. It was many, untold numbers—mouths full of earth. I think when you have a massive collective experience like that, the trauma remains in the earth. I think the earth has a memory, trees have a memory, rivers have a memory. If we’re a little bit open to it, we pick it up…"

"The trauma of half a century of social life based on lies is going to take several generations to heal, if it heals at all."

"It seems to me that untold histories that come from a very pure place of suffering and survival contain truth. Everything else is subject to question, really. Anything that comes to us through an official source—especially an official source attached to a national or religious agenda, or any of those other identity politics that seem to bedevil the world at the moment—is questioned. I felt that the voices I was hearing, the places from which these stories came to me, were genuine and, therefore, very precious. The stories in themselves contained both the questions and the answers about identity, or about what borders do to people and how they survive."