Three poems translated from the Bulgarian by the author
Circle
This story has no direction.
Taking a walk in the forest,
it gets lost among trees.
In the café at the end of the world
it eats black grapes,
comments on the weather
and plays heads and tails
with foreign coins.
Who gives a damn?
Only the only child
who can’t get to sleep
because outside the window
the black grapes on the vine
are translating the wind into Morse Code
and birds hit the glass like coins
falling from the bedside-table.
Self-portrait with tobacco moustache
The owner of the tobacco-yellowed moustache
allows himself to spend a little time in the yard.
He turns his face towards the sun like a lizard
that’s seeking the best place to sleep through the afternoon.
Behind his back he hears a sound he expected:
the footsteps he remembers from a distant past.
Dream or nightmare? He doesn’t know. The walls
of the building look real enough
and the colours of the flowers sharply scream.
Did he say something he shouldn’t have?
The plants remain the same, impartial.
A procession goes by in the street. Drums!
Flags! A car engine coughs.
The owner of the tobacco-yellowed moustache
counts the windows again, the eyes of his home.
He finds a vase and fills it with reminders.
Two coffees, two seas
Early in the morning I go down
and light up a cigarette
outside the villa.
I go here and there
between the morning light
and the shadows of leaves.
The roar of the Black Sea
is a distant whisper.
A table, chair, ashtray, coffee
suddenly appear
and our hostess with “good morning”
and a smile.
My lazy thoughts come into focus
and fly back in time:
to another sea, another coffee
thirty years ago
at the start of the road
that brought us here
where I’m waiting for you to come down
and share the coffee with me
beneath the beams of a scorching summer.
TOM PHILLIPS is a UK-born poet, translator and lecturer currently living in Bulgaria, where he teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His translations ranges across a broad spectrum, from contemporary poetry and fiction to academic studies, oral history testimony and the biography of Bulgarian footballer Hristo Stoichkov. Once There Was Spring, a book of his translations of Geo Milev, has just been published in the UK (Worple Press), while forthcoming publications include a selection of Kirstin Dimitrova’s poems, A Moment Short of Perfection (White Pine Press), in the USA and his own poems written in Bulgarian, Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache (DA Poetry), in Sofia.
Note on the text:
In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the eponymous hero has to make a ‘leap of faith’ in order to get across a bottomless abyss. Writing in Bulgarian, my second language, isn’t quite so melodramatic, but it can feel like teetering along a narrow path on the edge of a chasm echoing with the – to me, often unfamiliar – cultural resonances and connotations of the words and phrases I’m using.
Poems like the three above are written according to one simple rule: when I write in Bulgarian, I have to think in Bulgarian (no cheating and looking up words I know in English but don’t know in Bulgarian in a dictionary). Likewise, when translating them into English, I resist the temptation to add, remove or in any other way ‘improve’ on the original. I translate them as if they’ve been written by someone else.
Very often, in fact, it feels as if they actually have been. They are certainly very different to those I write in my native English, perhaps because, paradoxically, the constraint of writing in a language in which I am less fluent is liberating and allows my mind to venture into previously unperceived terrain.
Another poet once suggested I should try writing poems like this directly in English, but the truth is, I can’t. Poems that start in English go in certain directions while those that start in Bulgarian go somewhere else. Language itself takes the lead and all I can do is hope I don’t fall into the chasm.
–Tom Phillips, Sofia 2025