Even though they only represent a fraction of the prodigious output of the country’s many poets, English translations of contemporary Bulgarian poetry are not quite as rare as they were once reputed to be. Indeed, with luck, diligence and Google, and thanks to the enthusiasm of independent publishers and online bookstores, it’s possible to construct a reasonably decent map of its main currents and trends.
No single all-embracing anthology has yet been published (there’s no Oxford/Norton/Penguin Book of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry, for example), but a number of more modestly scaled ventures are out there and can – with varying degrees of difficulty – be tracked down.
The chunkiest by far is The Season of Delicate Hunger (2014), edited and, for the most part, translated by Katerina Stoykova of Accents Publishing. Running to just over 300 pages, it includes work by 32 contemporary poets and offers a wide-ranging snapshot of the kinds of poetry being written in Bulgarian in the socially and economically troubled last decade of the twentieth century and the somewhat less troubled, but still precarious early years of the twenty-first.
Tsvetanka Elenkova and Jonathan Dunne’s At the End of the World (published by Shearsman in 2012), on the other hand, eschews “emblematic poems” in favour of a thematic approach that encompasses the human and natural environment, spirituality, metaphysics and, in some cases, the gnomic.
Slightly further off the beaten track are three other anthologies: A Balkan Exchange (Arc, 2007), New Social Poetry (CreateSpace, 2016) and Bulgaria’s Most Translated (Ah! Maria, 2018). The first of these is not an anthology in the conventional sense, more the product of a project that brought together four poets from Sofia – Kristin Dimitrova, Georgi Gospodinov, Nadya Radulova and Vasil Vidinski (aka VBV) – with four translators from the north-east of England – Andy Croft, Mark Robinson, Linda France and W.N. Herbert – to create new work in each other’s company and translate it in both linguistic directions. Much of its energy derives from the ongoing conversations running through the book and the strongly individual voices of all eight poets involved.
Edited by Vladimir Sabourin and with translations by Christopher Buxton, New Social Poetry includes poets who tend not to be those anthologised elsewhere, and although not all the poems themselves are as combative as the manifesto suggests, its alternative perspective acts as a complementary view of what energises Bulgaria’s seemingly ever-increasing population of poets.
Bulgaria’s Most Translated, meanwhile, is very much a greatest hits compilation. Published by the spectacularly sporadic literary journal Ah! Maria (founded in 1990 and finally staggering to issue 21 thirty-one years later), it incorporates both poetry and prose by some of Bulgaria’s most well-known contemporary writers.
With a number of notable exceptions, nearly all of the poets published in these anthologies began publishing their work after the end of Bulgaria’s socialist “experiment”. The older ones were students or young adults at that time, the younger ones weren’t even born. Their poetry has emerged during the long, hard and, some would say, incomplete transition from totalitarianism to capitalism, and while attempting to pin down the dominant characteristics of their work is foolhardy at best, two broad-stroke trends seem to underlie much of the work that’s been translated and published in these volumes: a linguistic and metaphorical depth and elusiveness which is, perhaps, rooted in the necessarily tangential strategies of their predecessors writing within the constraints imposed by the communist regime; and an openness to postmodernist experiment founded in what Georgi Gospodinov has called “anti-monumentality” – a healthy distrust in prevailing narratives, a refusal to succumb to the desire to write “the great Bulgarian poem” and the discovery and celebration of the poetry inherent in the fleeting, the momentary and the everyday.
Katerina Stoykova at Accents Publishing has put out two individual collections of enduring interest in the form of the late poet and critic Marin Bodakov’s impeccably minimalist The Chaos of Desire and the Palestinian long-term Sofian resident Khairi Hamdan’s The Invisible Arm of Peace, both of which reverberate with a melancholy and intellectual inquisitiveness. Just this month too Accents is publishing Happiness Street by Olya Stoyanov. Similarly, Bulgata in Germany has published Taming Space, a selected volume by Petar Tchouhov, translated by various hands that showcases the wry humour which attends the often intimate situations and thought-experiments one of Bulgaria’s most internationally well-known poets explores in his work.
Also recently published are Iana Boukava’s collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, translated by Ekaterina Petrova and John O’Kane, from the Ugly Duckling Press in 2024, and two 2025 volumes by Silvia Choleva – Journeys There and Back (ICU), also translated by Ekaterina Petrova, and The Unexpected Answer: New and Selected Poetry (DA), translated by Elena Alexieva Jonathan Dunne, Kaloyan Ignatovski, Marina Stefanova and Maria P. Vassileva.
Two forthcoming publications worth looking out for are the philosophically and metaphorically elusive Yordan Eftimov’s The Heart is not a Creator, translated by Jonathan Dunne and due out from the UK’s Broken Sleep Books any day now, and a selection of characteristically sharp-minded, but determinedly humane poems by Kristin Dimitrova, A Moment Short of Perfection, that’ll be published in the US by White Pine Press in early 2026. The work of the twentieth-century poets Nikola Vaptsarov and Geo Milev is also available in individual volumes. Smokestack Books in the UK has published a selection of Vaptsarov’s work translated by Georgi Gospodinov and Andy Croft under the title Kino, while my own translations of Milev’s poems and prose poems, Once There Was Spring, has recently appeared from Worple Press.
And, of course, in addition to this, there are the translations of Bulgarian poetry you’ll come across in print and online literary magazines. Modern Poetry in Translation, Raceme, Balkan Poetry Today, Blackbox Manifold, Acumen, The Fortnightly Review, East of the North, Ilanot Review, Littoral, Ballast and others have been open to work which, to many Anglophone readers, seems to be coming from an angle that doesn’t necessarily coincide with the traditions and ruptures favoured by an English-speaking poetry world haunted by ghosts of a different kind. David Cooke at the UK-based online journal The High Window has been particularly supportive, publishing two Bulgarian translation supplements plus selections of work by Petar Tchouhov and Khairi Hamdan on its site, while Hristo Dimitrov’s site Bulgata offers a generous selection of work in poetry and prose by both the relatively well-known and the less so.
Translation – especially the translation of poetry – is a field fraught with difficulties, from the linguistic to the financial, but it’s not impossible. And, yes, of course, there always will be work that deserves to be translated which hasn’t been and the publishing industry still remains relatively hostile to work in translation, but for the moment at least contemporary Bulgarian poetry’s probably doing all right.
— Tom Phillips
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.