So I decided to tell everyone that it was the first Bulgarian novel to ever be translated into English and published in America. That’s worthy of a New York Times profile piece, right? “First Bulgarian Novel to Reach American Readers.” Shit, that was Oprah sort of golden.

Well, dreams of hundreds of thousands of sales became simply hundreds of sales, but this little claim did make its way into Publishers Weekly, and aside from one aggressive letter from a publisher claiming that he had published “a number” of Bulgarian collections of poetry, no one had refused my “First Bulgarian Novel in English” claim.

But how could this possibly be true? Sure, it’s Bulgaria. Not a huge country, granted, but, you know, it’s not Malta. Seemed like somehow, someone would’ve come across something, and brought it into English. But maybe not . . .

As I came to find out later (in Bulgaria, on a trip to the Sozopol Fiction Workshops, thanks to the ), one of the reasons for this possible lack was the late development of the novel in Bulgaria. For ages there had been Bulgarian poets, but novelists are a relatively new phenomenon. Which led to a weird (compared to the U.S. anyway) situation in which most books published by Bulgarian publishers are in translation. Not necessarily because Bulgarian readers are fascinated with world literature, but because there just aren’t enough Bulgarian books being written to sustain larger houses.

Things are obviously changing, and based on my short visit, and on judging the contemporary Bulgarian novel contest, there’s a lot of great Bulgarian stuff out there waiting to be translated into English.

But going back to my original story, approximately one year after making this little announcement, I received a photocopied page from a “Dictionary of World Literature” that a bookseller from Madison, WI found at a garage sale. This dictionary, which I think was published in the early 1950s, was a guide to the literatures of the world, and under the heading of “Bulgaria” there was one novel. which was originally written in 1888 and was translated into English

*

Seven (or so) years later, there are a number of Bulgarian works that have been translated and published in English. And looking at the Translation Database, there are three recent titles worth taking a look at:

• by Vladislav Todorov, translated from the Bulgarian by Joseph Benatov (Paul Dry Books)

I swear to god that after I finish (which is an amazing novel) I’m going to read and review Zift. Based on this description, it sounds fantastic:

December 21, 1963: Having served 20 years for a murder he didn’t commit, “Moth” exits Central Sofia Prison anticipating his first night of freedom. Instead he steps into a new and alien world—the nightmarish totalitarianism of Communist Bulgaria. In his first hours of freedom he traverses the map of a diabolical city, full of decaying neighborhoods, gloomy streets, and a bizarre parade of characters.

A novel of grave wit, Zift unfolds in the course of a single, frenetic night, offering a fast-paced, ghoulish, even grotesque—but also enchanting—tour of shadowy, socialist Sofia. To achieve his depiction of totalitarian absurdity, Vladislav Todorov combines the methods of hardboiled American crime fiction and film noir with socialist symbols and communist ideological clichés.

And seeing that Rochester is thanks in part to this blog (or, probably not, but give me my moment of obscene glory, please), I might as well explain what Zift means:

zift n. 1. black mineral pitch, bitumen, asphalt; used as bonding material for road surfacing and, in the past, as streetwise chewing gum. 2. Slang. shit. [Turkish, form Arabic]

You can read an except of Zift by clicking on this pdf.

• by Angel Wagenstein, translated from the Bulgarian by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova (Other Press)

Just from the title, author’s name, and description, I wouldn’t have guessed this was translated from Bulgarian, but there you go. Here’s what Other Press has to say:

This novel is the saga in five parts of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, who grows up in Kolodetz, a small town near Lvov, which, when he’s a boy, belongs to the Hapsburg Empire, but which subsequently belongs to Poland, Soviet Russia, Germany, and then Russia again. Isaac survives the absurdity and horror of Eastern Europe during the 20th century by pretending to be a fool. If this is an old Jewish art, then Isaac is a consummate artist. He plays the fool all his life, from his boyhood in Kolodetz shetl to the time when he is an accused war criminal in a Gulag in Siberia.

Inseparable from Isaac’s life and story are the Yiddish jokes and fables of Kolodetz. These and the counsel of his dear friend, the rabbi and chair of the atheist club in Kolodetz, Shmuel Ben David, sustain Isaac through two world wars, three concentration camps, and five motherlands. The book puts on record, with full art, what is perhaps the central story of the last one hundred years. It is a wise book.

They also have a slick-as-money “look inside” feature where you can read the first 20+ pages. Worth checking out, especially since Other Press also published Wagenstein’s

• by Lyubomir Nikolov, translated by Miroslav Nikolov (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

Unfortunately, the Carnegie Mellon website doesn’t seem to have a page for this book, or any additional information at all (shame!), so instead, I’ll just quote this description from which is also where the title of this post comes from:

In Unreal Estate, the much-anticipated follow-up to the internationally acclaimed Pagan (Carnegie Mellon University Press 1992), Lyubomir Nikolov has made the Balkans a permanent feature of the American literary landscape. Blending rich Bulgarian folk song traditions with Old World intellectual skepticism and American grit, Nikolov dares to venture where few others have gone. Miroslav Nikolovas bold translations make the poems more accessible than ever. Emerging from years of obscurity, Lyubomir Nikolov strikes again.

And with that, I’m off till tomorrow when I’ll post a bunch of info and samples from Milen Ruskov’s Thrown into Nature.

¹ In the time-honored Three Percent tradition of TMI, it’s fitting that I’m writing about this today seeing that I was finally, officially divorced yesterday afternoon. Yay! Or yay? Or whatever.

And now the long weekend officially starts . . . See ya’ll on Tuesday!

This book features something which was once common (think of the earliest novels: Tom Jones, for instance) but has fallen out of use in novel-writing: a cover-page tagline: “Isaac’s Torah: A novel, concerning the life of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld through two world wars, three concentration camps and five motherlands.” No more accurate and concise description of the novel can be given. Here we are given the setting in history and the protagonist’s condition, as well as a hint, suggested in that epic-scale term, “five motherlands,” of the turbulent scope of the story within.

To me, concentration camps were the first words to jump out at me and I’ll admit, I had some initial apprehension about tackling a heavy piece of Holocaust literature. But my worry was immediately dissuaded by the narrator Isaac Blumenfeld’s sense of humor; author Angel Wagenstein’s uncanny ability to portray, in vivid prose, the voice of a rambling reminiscent telling his story over a coffee on a Sunday afternoon; and of course, translators Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova’s success in transferring intact that voice across the language gap. And in book 4, I was relieved of guilt, as the narrator gives a nod to my apprehension:

And now, please, save me from the memory, heavy as a hundred-ton cast-iron mold, and allow me not to describe to you the hell in which we ended up! . . . In short, save me, please, because of the requirement for the completeness of plot . . . from repeating to you things that are already painfully familiar to you, and that you are already maybe even fed up with.

In this way Isaac Blumenfeld excuses his circumvention of the horrible weight of the Holocaust in the awesome, epic narrative of his life. But to return to the tagline, there are two other, equally-weighted subjects to the matter of this book: the two World Wars and the five motherlands. Blumenfeld’s trip and tumble through these wars, camps and countries forms the body of a seamless narrative, laced with humor, tragedy, wit and wisdom.

Of humor, there is no shortage, despite the equal-quantity dosage of tragedy. As Wagenstein notes in his Acknowledgements, “through [Jewish jokes and anecdotes] my people have turned laughter into a defensive shield, and a source of courage and self-esteem through the most tragic moments of their existence!” Blumenfeld himself maintains a sense of humor even in the face of almost certain death, such as in this passage from book 4, in which he is so far avoiding persecution by pretending to be Polish:

The whole business was about some big boss of theirs who’d been shot in the streets of Warsaw, and now they were looking for a hundred Poles as hostages. You know how it goes: if the assassins do not surrender themselves the hundred Poles will be shot in legal and fully understandable retribution. Now, I ask you . . . what was better—to remain a Pole or admit I was a Jew? . . . In the one case, as well as in the other, I’d end up, as the saying goes, pushing up daisies, but I personally preferred to be a Polish Jew—a sweeper in the New York subway.

And throughout the novel, Blumenfeld compares, with ironic wit, real-life atrocities, all-too-human insanities, and plain misfortune, to a wealth of little fables, jokes, and anecdotes.

The thing I find most intriguing about this book is its construction by the author, Wagenstein, as almost the work of another “author,” Blumenfeld. As Wagenstein points out in the passage he has included “Instead of a Foreword,” the work “is nothing more than a conscientious transcription of another’s memories and reflections,” which fact makes him, in a sense, a translator himself, not between languages, but from oral narrative to page. The careful balance of digression, rambling, and non sequitur—the trappings of the oral narrative—against elegant, discursive prose constructions is impressive. While reducing his tangible presence in the overall picture, Wagenstein provides a fine glaze of craft as the vessel in which the narrative is delivered from the storyteller to the reader.

Angel Wagenstein’s novel is an important monument to the lives of those who suffered the horrors of the two World Wars and all those wars’ extenuations, but rather than a lamentation of Blumenfeld’s, and the Jewish people’s, loss, it is a celebration of his and their lives. As uplifting as it is tragic, Isaac’s Torah is a great contribution to the literature of the period, the Wars, and the Holocaust, and to world literature as a whole.