Pain – Street View
Months after my father’s death
I could bear looking at his house
only on Google Street View.
The satellite photos are old
and dad is still alive.
I sit in front of the screen and enlarge
the pixels of childhood.
Letter to a Childhood Friend
I no longer blame you for going into the sea and not coming back.
You wanted to be a mermaid and you are to some extent:
half memories, half death.
I have spread the extravagant pain
that ate up the summer and every season since.
You can’t know how much lemonade we drank
to get empty bottles for our letters to you.
I’m writing to you for the last time.
I just want you to know that for thirty years
your mother’s been sitting on the shore.
Instead of a phone, she presses a shell to her ear
and waits for you to call.
Central Broadcasting
When my grandmother went blind
she took a liking to the radio
and to the end she listened to reports of catastrophes,
meetings with leaders, the value of the dollar,
the weather forecast, the level of the Danube in centimetres.
And so, since she’s gone, I take care
not to use long sentences,
that my diction is clear
and to speak at a normal pace.
I repeat myself in all cases.
Somewhere under the earth
on the hour grandma is straining to hear.
Conversations with Ivo
We nurtured our minutes
like the larvae of poems.
Not everything becomes a butterfly,
not everything stings like a wasp.
Whatever’s born to us
and whatever’s not born –
is equally dear to me.
YORDANKA BELEVA (1977) is considered one of the most distinctive female voices in contemporary Bulgarian literature. A short story writer and a poet, she has authored four poetry collections: Peignoirs and Boats (2002), Her (2012), The Missed Moment (2017), Evening News (2024), and four short story collections: The Sea Level of Love (2011), Keys (2015), Keder (2018), Hedgehogs Come out at Night (2022). She has won national awards for both poetry and prose and her short stories and poems have been translated into Arabic, English, French, German, Polish, Spanish, Ukrainian and published in numerous anthologies. Beleva’s short story collection Keder, translated in English by Izidora Angel, won the National Endowment for the Art prose award in the USA at the end of 2022. Keder was published in Macedonian (Blesok, 2019), Turkish (Metis, 2024) and in Czech (Runa, 2025). Beleva’s poetry collection The Missed Moment was published in German by eta Verlag in 2021. Many of her short stories have been filmed and awarded at international festivals (His Cannibal Granny, Family Portrait of the Black Earth and others). Beleva’s most recent short story collection Hedgehogs Come Out at Night is already published in Spanish (La Tortuga Búlgara, 2025) and is in the works for Macedonian (ILI-ILI).
About the Translator
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. Forthcoming publications include full-length collections of his translations of the Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev and of contemporary Bulgarian poet Kristin Dimitrova.