The Suitcase
Not like those lightweight ones, with little wheels, bearing kicks
and punches with a plastic indifference. It’s leather, hefty, well-mannered,
with smooth edges, for every day, for Sunday, Our Father and at the hour of
our death, chug-chug, always leaned against the wall, inhaling,
exhaling, what do you need it for, except to collect dust, you’re mistaken,
no dust can ever . . .
On the inside, it’s soft, plaid, gently torn, carefully mended.
Nothing to do with its bloated, luxurious polycarbonate
brothers. Its inside pocket has frills, like the curtain of an attic window
in Lublin. Not a pocket, but a little window, inward, backward, don’t look,
child, such terrible things happened there, from there it waved at its grandfather, who
departed to . . .
The brass nails, attention, dress, in line to the last,
the monogram in its place, the mechanisms click-clack, you might say
this one got lucky, the only survivor out of the whole family,
a worshipper of Saint Lazare and Saint Pancras, it smells of a dining car,
never felt the stench of stock cars, a bon vivant
you’d say, but . . .
The other day my little daughter told me she heard it crying, its locks
creaking, it didn’t want to recount anything, she kept insisting and asking, finally
it sighed, admitted to no longer remembering anything, to being all empty
on the inside, to having nothing. So now she fills it with her own memories—
her first words, the scraped knee, the stuffed bunny, the ripped sock, and
as though everything once again . . .
FOUNTAINOUS
While
quietly
awaiting
your turn
to drink at
the fountains
next to the Cinema House, Banya Bashi, and the tram No. 20 stop, amidst the dispersed noise
of car horns, breaks, and alarms, you strain to hear that ancient, round-the-clock gurgling
beneath your feet, and for a moment you imagine that this voice preceding all human tongues, now daily
sealed into throats, plastic containers, bottles, trunks, trailers, this whole mixture of magnesium
iron manganese sodium potassium selenium nickel zinc cyanide
copper arsenic boron lead etc. suddenly simply explodes, blows up civilization’s fragile packaging
and sweeps over us, and turns us and all our Greek Roman Thracian and
whatever other roots upside down, and sends us to a horror movie, down the drain, into the depot where antediluvian equipment gets recycled, and drowns us in our own thirst, and swallows us
in our own gulp . . . Such a pure and transparent ending.
Somehow undeservedly transparent
and pure.
You lean over and drink.
NADYA RADULOVA (1975) is a poet, fiction author, literary translator, and editor. She has authored six poetry books, including Tongue Tied Name (1996), Albas (2000), Cotton, Glass And Electricity (2004), Bandoneon (2008), When They Fall Asleep (2015) and Little World, Big World (2020). The novel Yozhi Lives Here (2023) is her most recent title. Radulova has been awarded the Ivan Nikolov (2000, 2020) and the Nikolay Kanchev national poetry prizes (2015), the Krastan Dyankov Translation award (2009), and the Union of Translators in Bulgaria award (2021). An anthology of her poetry under the title The Woman from the Corner House was translated into Romanian by Lora Nenkovska and Claudiu Komartin and published in 2022 by Max Blecher. The German translation of her poetry book Little World, Big World (translated by Henrike Schmidt, eta Verlag) received the Hamburg Literary Prize in 2023. Translations of her work into English, Spanish, Turkish, Greek, and Ukrainian have also appeared in a number of magazines and periodicals.
About the Translator
EKATERINA PETROVA is a literary translator from the Bulgarian and a bilingual nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She has translated novels, short stories, nonfiction texts, poetry, plays, and children’s books by many Bulgarian contemporary authors. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, Reading in Translation, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, is coming out with New York Review Books in 2026.