This Translation Tuesday, a grim vision of the future comes to us from Bulgarian author Georgi Tenev and his translator, Traci Speed. Rado is on a train through a dystopian but dimly recognisable Europe, trying to get off the continent before apocalypse sweeps in from the east. As the carriages inch around a radioactive Mediterranean, he muses about how things came to be so wrong. The signs of moribund civilisation that spring from Tenev’s imagination are graphic and pointed. Passengers trade in the bones of migrants who died trying to enter Europe in the ‘better days’. Mutant rabbits, originally bred for KFC, serve as ‘edible companions’ for the journey ahead. There are whispers that Hitler has come back from the dead. When things go catastrophically wrong, Tenev shows, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.
This war’s been going a long time, and it’s being fought for what’s most important inside of you. The struggle’s between those of us who want to save you and that animal force that wants to swallow you up. We found the subgenetic formula for intelligence, for human reason. We determined the principle behind the absorption of ephermine, that subtle substance with a negative mass, that diaphanous matter. Ephermine cannot exist independently, and so it gravitates in an orbit around the photon and comprises part of its spectrum. This form is vulnerable and unstable, but without it—consciousness, thought, and reason wouldn’t exist. Something else that wouldn’t exist is that thing which, for a change, we call the soul—that which is not quite intrinsic to the body. For some time now, we’ve been trying to migrate from this body, from the biochemical base to another independent host of identity. We made attempts and we made mistakes; you, however, turned out to be a paradox, an exception to the rule. You’re too attached to the biological, to what you consider life. We have to put people like you under quarantine until we’ve researched the vector of your development better. Until we write the story of your—yours personally, in this case—your rise and fall. You call it birth and death. Fine, call it that. In order to reach the heart of the ephermine, however, the casing has to be destroyed. A person has to be crushed and broken down before receiving a new unrestricted identity. But you stubbornly persist, you want to maintain the status quo. Fine, listen to your story. Then you can evaluate whether or not you have anything to be sorry for.