Adapting the four hermeneutic movements George Steiner defined for the act of translation in general, one could recognize nowadays a recurring pattern characterizing the work of young translators trying to promote modern Bulgarian literature outside the country of its origin: (1) moving between the Bulgarian roots and their foreign home; (2) developing a detached attitude towards the literature of their origin country; (3) dealing with insulting and ignorant comments on Bulgarian literature and culture; and (4) translation as a missionary act. Izidora Angel's translation of Hristo Karastoyanov´s novel The Same Night Awaits Us All is an illustration of this pattern and an encouraging success story.
The US has been Izidora Angel's home ever since she left Bulgaria as a child. She studied Politics and Sociology of Contemporary Culture in Great Britain and worked for some time as a journalist and translator in Bulgaria before going back to Chicago. The translation of Karastoyanov's novel is her first major project. Before starting, she had to fight the dragon, guarding as usual the entrance to Bulgarian literature and culture, this time in the face of a famous British critic, using “Bulgarian” as synonym for “Barbarian” in an interview for The New York Times: www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/books/review/clive-james-by-the-book.html. More than one scholar of Bulgarian studies, when confronted with the endless catalogue of such attacks has been wondering about the sense of these phenomena, but here we can only point it out without further comment and congratulate the young translator for her victory over the monster: www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/books/review/the-bulgarian-equivalent.htm.
Reading Karastoyanov's text is really a challenge, not only for the foreign reader. This unusual non-fiction novel has the composition of a diary reconstructing the historical events of 1920s Sofia. The two main protagonists (the poet Geo Milev and the anarchist Georgi Sheytanov) articulate thoughts and emotions mainly in the form of a stream of consciousness. The signals of estrangement in the orthography, in the exorbitant interruptions of the narrative, given to question its own credibility and the re-narrated forms for the narrative voice produce a strong effect. The reader is eager to read on and at the same time forced to stop and reflect on the historical account and its authenticity in a complex way.
At the dawn of modern Bulgarian literature, it was Lyuben Karavelov (1834–79) who tried to write fiction in the renarrative mood and failed. This is the form of the narrative in legends, fairy tales, anecdotes, and historiographic accounts about remote events in Bulgarian. A fictional narrator usually does not appear as someone who has not witnessed the subjects of his own narrative. In The Same Night Awaits Us All the renarrative mood functions as a metafictional device, both reflecting narrative authenticity and enhancing the intensity in the depiction of the characters and the atmosphere of Sofia and Yambol in the 1920s.
There is no morphological correspondence in English for the Bulgarian renarrative mood, but Angel's translation finds convincing solutions to express its specific function in Karastoyanov's novel (to create distance and to show the subjectivity of any attempt to reconstruct history). Famous German translators of Bulgarian literature, on the contrary, totally ignore the function of the renarrative mood in the structure of the point of view in modern Bulgarian short stories and this is more than a pity. Here Karastoyanov was indeed lucky to find a devoted and competent translator.
Being aware of the fact that a translation is always an act of interpretation and a matter of subjective decisions, let me point out some recommendations. The addition of the names of the two protagonists in the target text is not necessary. It would be even contradictory to the narrator´s intention to confuse the reader in his attempt to identify who is speaking at the beginning of the novel—the poet or the anarchist. Angel's aim to help the English reader here is obvious, as is her decision not to use too many signals for the distance and unreliability of the narrative due to the use of the Bulgarian renarrative mood. As a result, the English version of the novel is certainly more readable, but in parts simplifies too much when compared to the original. The translator is well aware that little is known about Bulgarian culture and history in the world. The two Translator's Introductions, the addition of Geo Milev´s poem September in Peter Tempest's translation of 1921 to the English version of Karastoyanov's novel are a successful contribution to cultural understanding. Nevertheless, one could argue about the necessity of some additions, like the abstract from the Milev's poem in the scene with the encounter between the poet and police inspector Geshev (124). A dictionary of the exotic and archaic expressions that remain untranslated in the English version of the novel would be worth some explanatory remarks in an extra supplement. In the Chapter “The Gospel of Herod the Great,” the English style should be more archaic due to the Bulgarian original, alluding to the text of the Bible (Genesis 5).
Izidora Angel's translation of Hristo Karastoyanov's important contemporary novel is a great achievement and a representation of a new generation of mediators of Bulgarian culture, who enjoy the advantages of the foreign gaze to Bulgarian culture, combined with the competence of native bilingualism, while being devoted to their roots and as to their American homeland.
