On a website called Lost Bulgaria, anyone curious enough can browse thousands of carefully preserved and curated photographs depicting the poignant yet essential ways in which the people, customs, and landscape have transformed or been transformed from the last quarter of the 1800s until 2010. About a dozen of the blurred images kept in this time machine take us back to the first half of the twentieth century and Lake Ohrid, one of the world’s oldest and deepest, which nowadays is split by the border between North Macedonia and Albania. The majority of the visuals reveal everyday life near the shores, the monasteries that dot the mountainous terrain, the traditionally clad locals, or the passers-by who felt the need to extend a prayer to Saint Naum of Ohrid. Kapka Kassabova’s latest travelogue with distinct autobiographical elements, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, offers a similar but much more powerful passage through the lake’s past and present.
The book, which reviewers often place in the travel fiction genre, is pronouncedly personal, even though the disclosed memories, both on an individual level and as an outlet for the collective subconscious, undoubtedly remind readers from diverse regions of the globe of their unique roots and unending voyage of self-discovery.
The author (b. 1973) spent her childhood and teenage years in Sofia and later moved with her family to New Zealand, only to finally—or at least for the time being—settle down in the Scottish Highlands. Her extensive travels have informed her writing, which encompasses poetry collections and novels, in addition to literary travelogues. Although Kassabova’s mother tongue is Bulgarian, she writes in English, a practice that evokes the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Khalil Gibran, and Joseph Conrad and makes her Bulgarian translations all the more fascinating.
Located on the edge of her grandmother’s homeland, Lake Ohrid is where she passed a few of her summer holidays. Once considered the pearl of the Balkans, nowadays it is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site and boasts endemic species and unique prehistoric remnants. Despite this international protection however, its pristine waters are still threatened by climate change and widespread pollution. While making a convincing case for immediate preservation action of global scale, Kassabova’s fictionalized reportage can also be perceived as a continuation to her previous one, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, in which she sets on a quest to comprehend the meaning of the separation points not only between countries, but also between people. In a similar fashion, To the Lake prompts us to tag along as she traces the ancient Via Egnatia and dives into the bloody history of the region, where Bulgarians, Macedonians, Albanians, and Greek are always at crossroads, especially in the aftermath of the two Balkan wars and the ensuing decades under communist rule.
The narrative is composed of two main sections, delineated by the gentle change of seasons, which, as we eventually discover, is as central in securing a platform for life to unfold in all its glory as it is in regulating the inner workings of the human spirit. Each chapter opens with a quote that hints at what will be at the heart of the following pages, be it the lake itself, in part a physical object that can be sensed and in part a metaphysical destiny that cannot be escaped, or the hardships that have inflicted huge scars on those who have lived by it. Having been a witness to myriad battles, regime changes, and ethnical shifts, the lacustrine environment persists as a silent onlooker, a role we mortals can seldom afford to play. As the author, who took it upon herself to follow into her maternal ancestors’ footsteps, put it:
. . . as we continue to witness in this century conflicts of a civil and fratricidal nature, divisive politics between and within nations, patriarchal autocracy and revisionism, mass emigration and displacement—as we witness this, unless we become aware of how we carry our own legacies, we too may become unwitting agents of destruction.
Memories and desire are certainly mixed, as the poet would have it, and create a collage of faces we are bound to encounter on our way to the lake’s tranquil surface and wellspring of calm. Among them are tourists in awe of its stunning beauty and legendary character; equally mythical freedom fighters and their offspring, who act as the family archeologists, digging deep into the orchard with the hope of chancing upon the missing piece in the clan’s puzzle; pilgrims arriving on foot and immediately heading in the direction of the nearest miraculous icon fabled to possess healing properties; the bones of an old woman who is laid beside the eternal waves and is at long last allowed to rest in peace. The narrator brings forth precise facts and numbers about various buildings, statues, fountains. However, it is usually the impression the cobbled streets leave us with that endures, while our minds are busy reinventing the towns and their annals spanning thousands upon thousands of sentences. Locals wear their hearts on their sleeves and are quick to uncover secrets to seemingly anyone who gives the correct answer to the ever present “Whose are you?” question. East and West come together in a harmonious collision, paradoxical only because our modern understanding of the world is more prone to division than relishing the rich tapestry of cultures and blood lines that is the Balkan region. All of this unfolds against the backdrop of nature.
After a short pause, the wanderings resume later the same year with the objective being yet another lake—Prespa. It is now autumn and the atmosphere is quite different. What awaits is not the reinvigoration of the world but its hibernation. While at first the voice guiding the plotline is eager to share with us the obstacles she had encountered on her own bumpy road, the later chapters pay closer attention to other people’s tales and recount their intimate chronology and the peculiar ways in which time can be experienced—both vertically and horizontally, the vortex never so distant as to let us forget about it. The future is as important as the past and even though history is still in the making, what troubles the traveler are no longer the bygone woes of people who may or may not have existed but the challenges that lie ahead for a new generation, one marked by trauma passed from parents sentenced to work camps to their unborn sons and daughters who will eventually emigrate in search of a better life, only to one day find themselves running, as if intentionally, right into the family curse. A journey of war and peace indeed.
The language of the book is delicate, which presupposes a translator who is also a sculptor—their undivided attention dedicated to removing unnecessary linguistic layers to carve out a truly exquisite work of art. Recently, an interviewer was keen to learn more about the way Kassabova works with her Bulgarian translators, especially considering her latest collaboration with Nevena Dishlieva-Krasteva, to whom we owe the local version of To the Lake. The author explained:
Normally, each translation puts the book in a new light. The skilled translator manages to highlight many matters and questions, which may not have been visible to the author herself [. . .] It could be said that each of my works is an attempt to build an in-between bridge, a process of constant translation [. . .] I cannot say that I have adopted any strategic approach when it comes to “translating” the Balkan peculiarities for uninitiated readers—after all, I am an artist, not a strategist. Perhaps, at the end of the day, these same peculiarities are not as important as the principle behind what is told, its truthfulness, sincerity. It seems to me that I instinctively feel what is universal, that is, truly interesting, immortal, in the midst of all the details.
The original contains a glossary at the end, which is missing in the Bulgarian version. Words such as gurbet (“work abroad”), samovila (“female shape-shifting entity in Balkan folklore”), or detsa begalci (“refugee children”), which would spark the English audience’s curiosity, rarely need additional explanation for the Bulgarian. What would otherwise be regarded as an “exoticism” seems to be replaced by an uncanny feeling—the reader is all of a sudden acutely aware of their own culture, they are forced to stand outside it and are then invited to reenter, this time with a fresh perspective. Whenever appropriate, the Bulgarian variant uses the diminutive forms of the names, which is the common way to address people in this part of the world, while also sometimes providing supplementary details that could help draw even more parallels between the book and the domestic day-to-day reality (e.g., accurate naming of streets and neighborhoods in the capital). The partnership between author and translator is evident in that the Bulgarian text contains extra paragraphs, one of which relates a conversation between two Macedonians with their language unedited, making it even more obvious how close the two cultures are.
The latter summarizes what the whole book tries to achieve. By showing us the intricate ways in which human paths cross, Kassabova instills the image of kindness we need to show one another if we are to make it through the unexpected twists of fate. And just as the locals are never able to leave the lake, so the reader is bound to discover that they too will never be able to leave the book’s potent message behind.
Andriana Hamas is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Bulgaria.
*****
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