This week, our editors report on the foremost developments from their respective regions. In North Macedonia, a new collection from a renowned poet and director finds solace and profundity in the complex nexus between human life and its context. In the Philippines and Bulgaria, readers bid farewell to two titans of writing and translation.
Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia, reporting from North Macedonia
Prostori (Spaces), the third poetry collection by renowned Macedonian film director and poet Antonio Mitrikjeski, was recently published by Dijalog Press. With a track record of two well-received collections and several films playing at festivals across the world, Mitrikjeski is equally ‘intellectually rich and emotionally lush’ in his visual language as he is in literature, per writer Dimitar Bashevski’s review of Prostori.
The collection is fittingly cinematic; weaving together a mystical sublime, oracular dreamscapes, and a loving mimesis of familiar places, Mitrikjeski’s robust poetic voice blends inner and outer worlds, delving deep into the human psyche as he wanders into distant regions—mountain peaks, the ocean’s floor, the night sky. Frequently apostrophic, he foregrounds the deep entanglement between his human subjects and their environments, their ideas, and the people around them. In ‘Saraj,’ a poem about his childhood home, Mitrikjeski celebrates the ‘fraternity of children’ and ‘the mystique and simplicity of all the silhouettes who confessed their feelings’ in the ‘house bearing the roots of beginnings,’ where he still discovers the ‘eternal. . . fraternity of those present.’ Opening the collection and dedicated to his parents, ‘Saraj’ is programmatic. Throughout Prostori, the speaker is preoccupied with finding connection amidst distance, and this search is mediated via both real and oneiric spaces, as well as the relationships they make possible: ‘The lake’s water connects us all. / The fog is lifted,’ writes Mitrikjeski in ‘The Word’. The word itself, the material of poetry—’invisible, written upon the ruins’—will remain eternally within the lake, that is, within the space of human connections, among ‘familiar names’.
Eschewing the usual solipsistic individualism associated with the sublime, the speaker of Prostori acknowledges his situatedness among creatures both human and non-human. His profound empathy extends beyond people—in ‘Devolution,’ he voices his concern for the earth amidst the ravages of industry, which ‘eat away’ at the soil, suffocating the beings living within. ‘Do not give in, mother!’ exclaims the speaker in an agonized apostrophe, a cry that is followed by ‘silence. Because even words / have become algorithms.’ This message arrives to us as especially pertinent in 2024—this year in which we saw the hottest day on Earth, and the replacement of many workers by AI.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines
Southeast Asian Writers (S.E.A. Write) Award laureate Mariano ‘Marne’ L. Kilates, one of our prime torchbearers in the Philippine literary translation scene, has departed this life in late July, at the age of seventy-one.
Born 5 November 1952 in Daraga, Albay in the Bikol region to Dorotea Ll. Losantas, a bibliophile, and Eugenio H. Kilates, a writer-publisher of a post-war Bikol-language periodical, Kilates has authored more than half a dozen collections including the greatly praised Children of the Snarl & Other Poems (Aklat Peskador, 1988), Poems en Route (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 1998), and Mostly in Monsoon Weather: Poems New & Revisited (University of the Philippines Press, 2007). He navigated across Filipino, English, Spanish, and his native Bikol, largely fashioned by an amalgam of inspirations—Spanish prayers and Bikol stories he learned in preschool, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries, morale-boosting by his literature teachers, and the poetry of José García Villa. Rajeev Patke and Philip Holden, in The Routledge Concise History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (2010), leagues Kilates with the late twenty-first century generation of Filipino Anglophone poets: Anthony L. Tan, Isabela Banzon, Emmanuel F. Lacaba, Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, among others.
Kilates was the translator of National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario’s books: Heartland / Muli sa Kandungan ng Lupa (Ateneo de Naga University Press, 2015), In the Hour of Merchant and Felon / Sa Oras ng Tindera at Kriminal / Il regno della venditrice e del criminale (co-translated with Jillian Loise L. Melchor, Filipinas Institute of Translation, 2017), Journeys, Junctions / Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon (Anvil, 2008), and The Loneliness of a Scarecrow / Ang Pangungulila ng Isang Balyan (Flipside, 2013). In collaboration with H. Francisco V. Peñones, Jr., he is also the co-translator of Victor Dennis T. Nierva’s Premio Tomas Arejola-winning Antisipasyón asín Ibá pang mga Rawitdáwit sa Bikol asín Ingles / Anticipation and Other Poems in Bikol and English (ADNU Press, 2016).
He also served as chairperson of the Philippine Literary Arts Council and secretary-general of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas, which bequeathed him their lifetime achievement award, the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas. A visiting faculty who taught translation at the Philippine High School for the Arts, he once held the Henry Lee Professorial Chair for Creative Writing at Ateneo de Manila University.
On literary translation (which he called ‘two-timing love for two languages’), Kilates had this to say: ‘Translation is my parallel and imperfect art. Parallel because I’ve been translating my friends’ Filipino and Bikol poetry and prose for almost as long as I’ve been writing my own poetry. . . And it has proceeded both as a twin creative impulse: a creative act in itself while presenting problems and challenges not quite different from what my own work poses for me; and it is also a pleasurable creative adventure.’
Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria
A couple of weeks ago, Bulgaria bid farewell to one of its most beloved translators and writers: Lyubomir Nikolov, also known as Narvi. Having passed away at the age of seventy-four, Nikolov has left behind an impressive literary legacy; the highlight of this illustrious career might be his translation of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for which he received an award from the Bulgarian Translators’ Union.
In his eulogy, medievalist Manol Glishev recalls his first encounter with the Bulgarian version of the epic fantasy novel at the beginning of the 1990s, and analyzes its seminal cultural position: ‘This translation is an achievement close to that of Krastan Dyankov’s work on Steinbeck or Alexander Shurbanov’s renderings of Chaucer and Milton. The book is multi-layered and can be confusing. Nikolov himself notes in the preface to the first Bulgarian edition that, on occasion, he had to decide whether a name given by the author has an English or “Elvish” etymology—and, consequently, whether it should be reinvented in Bulgarian or not. The correct answer is not always obvious, as some of the book’s readers know. To this, we must add the sweetness of the old Bulgarian phraseology so skillfully imposed by Nikolov on the analogous English expressions of the original. The Lord of the Rings, in Nikolov’s version, sounds just as complete and convincing as it does in English, as I found out for myself several years later.’
Nikolov is also considered to be the godfather of the Choose Your Own Adventure genre in Bulgaria. Writing under two pseudonyms, he was the first to introduce this kind of writing to the local audience. Although the state publisher was reluctant to give Narvi’s originals a green light, the fall of communism in 1989 enabled the newly founded private publishing houses to popularise the now-beloved series. In a recent interview concerning these works, Nikolov himself said: ‘Just a year ago, I would have replied that the gamebooks were forever a thing of the past. But today I am surprised to find that the fans are alive and many.’
And so will the fans of his work remain in the wake of the author’s passing.
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