Iana Boukova, or The Relentless Search for Meaning(s)

“An author who squeezes language to the last drop, enters arithmetic scuffles with it, drives language into a corner, makes a bet with language and wins every time.” This is how the Bulgarian writer Iana Boukova describes Georges Perec in her essay “Not Small. Minor,” but it also happens to be a fitting description of how she engages with language herself: by challenging it, testing its limits, and reinventing its rules and functions.

I first stumbled across the essay as a graduate student in literary translation at the University of Iowa, when I was asked to give an overview of Bulgarian literature in a seminar on comparative poetics. The text impressed me, not just because of how different it was from the status quo-preserving theoretical papers I’d already come across, but also because I found its claims about the marginal status of translated Bulgarian literature in the context of “world” literature to be compelling. The fact that Boukova never referred to her own work in the essay made me curious about how her writing might fit into the concept of minor literature, which—rather than the literature of “small” languages (a category to which Bulgarian is usually considered to belong)—she claims is “the one written always by a minority and in every language.” This led me to her novel Пътуване по посока на сянката (Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow), which I’d been hearing about for years—often as an unusual, innovative book that was difficult, if not utterly impossible, to translate. Tentatively, I decided to translate several excerpts from the novel and share them with my peers and mentors. Besides the thrill I felt while working on them, I was also impressed by how even these short excerpts implicated readers and encouraged them to produce their own readings. Motivated by my own experience and an enthusiastic reception, I eventually decided to take on the whole novel. Over the course of the book’s translation, and as I’ve learned more about Boukova’s work and thinking, I’ve come to discover that the essay “Not Small. Minor” could be read as a sort of manifesto for the kind of literature that Boukova herself writes. Minor literature, she says,

is the rhizome literature, the literature with many doors, the literature avoiding interpretation because it is never created to serve an interpretation. Neither political nor social nor philosophical nor metaphysical nor psychoanalytical nor gender. It is the literary literature. Its choices and balances are determined solely and exclusively by literary laws. [. . .] The boundary is the place of its sojourn because it is the literature that expands the territory of literature.

Пътуване по посока на сянката (Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow) provides one possible framework through which to introduce Iana Boukova and her complete body of work to date, which also includes three books of poetry, two short story collections, and numerous translations from Latin and ancient and modern Greek. As her only novel, it may seem unrepresentative of Boukova’s entire literary oeuvre, but it in fact brings together and expands on many of the thematic, aesthetic, and stylistic concerns that run through all of her writing and that her poems and short stories also engage, albeit in a much more condensed manner.
 

 
Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet, writer, and translator. Born in Sofia in 1968, she has a degree in classics from Sofia University. She is the author of the poetry books “Diocletian’s Palaces” (1995), “Boat in the Eye” (2000), and “Notes of the Phantom Woman” (2018); the short story collections  “A as in Аnything” (2006) and “Tales With No Return” (2016); and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow (published in 2009, followed by a revised edition in 2014). Boukova is also the editor and translator into Bulgarian of over a dozen collections and anthologies of Latin and modern and ancient Greek poetry. She has been living in Athens since 1994, where she actively participates in Greece’s literary scene as an author, translator, and literary critic, a member of the platform Greek Poetry Now, and an editor on the board of FRMK, a biannual journal on poetry, poetics, and visual arts.

Beyond this factual biography, introducing Boukova in a more in-depth and meaningful way is a difficult task. Not just to international readers, to whom—even though a number of her poems and short stories have already been translated into about a dozen languages—she still remains largely unknown, but to broader Bulgarian reading audiences as well. In Bulgaria, although her name is well-known and she enjoys a reputation as a serious writer, translator, essayist, and thinker, she tends to be considered a complicated, sometimes even inaccessible and elitist author—despite her own deeply held egalitarian beliefs and her view of literature (very much including the one she writes) as a profoundly democratic art. So, although she cannot be considered a mainstream writer, Boukova enjoys a core of dedicated, impassioned, and surprisingly diverse readers who engage with her work deeply and follow her projects closely.

Complicating matters further is the breadth of Boukova’s literary pursuits. Her Bulgarian translations of Sappho’s fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and Pindar’s Pythian odes enjoy an almost canonical status, so besides being known as an author, she is also renowned as a gifted and prolific translator. Despite the diversity of her endeavors, however, Boukova herself identifies first and foremost as a poet. “I started off as a poet and I continue to think as a poet. My prose is constructed on the basis of poetry, and by poetry I mean the kind of extremely concentrated usage of language beyond the quotidian and beyond the purely informative. Words that say much more than their dictionary definitions.” This, incidentally, is also one of the aspects that make her writing incredibly challenging, but at the same time especially thrilling to translate.

The difficulty of introducing Boukova, particularly to a foreign audience, is further exacerbated by her own firm refusal to be, in her own words, “constantly and forcefully shoved into” any of the narrow categories of national, regional, gender, or social identity that the nonnegotiable factual details of her biography might presuppose. She objects to the insistence to seek and invariably find “a so-called ‘feminineness’” in all of her texts, regardless of their actual subject matter or intention, as well as to their interpretation through the lens of national origins or belonging. “The fact that I come from one Balkan country and live in another sets the notion of my ‘Balkanness’ in stone. Without knowing exactly what this concept means in literature, I’ve noticed that it very often [implies expectations] varying from a predictable exoticism to outright kitsch.” At the same time, Boukova resists attempts to be labeled either as “an emigrant who writes” in Greece or as “a writer from Greece” in Bulgaria.

Instead, she identifies as an author whose constant metaphysical search largely determines the way she views the world and the way she writes, and says that she considers this as her most fundamental and intimate identity. By contrast, she describes her “identity as a woman with all of its historical and social baggage” to be “decisive mostly in regards to the unconditional egalitarianism” that she practices and upholds, while ranking her national identity and belonging as least important. She says she considers herself “an heir to all of world literature, in all of its geographic and historical breadth, without feeling a strict obligation to be a successor of the Bulgarian literary tradition.” As she points out, however, “this in and of itself creates a certain paradox, since for me as a writer, the Bulgarian language is my instrument as well as my weapon.” But even this anchor is not as fixed as it may seem. Boukova has also been writing literary criticism and translating into Greek for years, while she conceived, wrote, and published her latest poetry collection “Notes of the Phantom Woman” simultaneously in Greek and Bulgarian (as Drapetomania and Записки на жената призрак, respectively).

   
Even readers who might be unaware of Boukova’s self-identification as an heir to world literature are bound, upon encountering her work, to notice her undeniable kinship with a constellation of authors often described as “global.” When I first shared excerpts of her novel with my literature professors and fellow translators, all of them voracious readers of diverse tastes, I was struck by the wide array of writers with whom they felt Boukova was in conversation. They ranged from Kafka, Pynchon, and Sebald, to Borges, García Márquez, Pavić, Perec, Calvino, Woolf, and Yourcenar—writers that Boukova herself credits for having “opened up the horizon of [her] very idea of literature.” Reading their work, she explains, was what first made her realize that poetry could be written through the devices of prose. “Especially Calvino, Pavić, and Borges showed me the possibility for the building blocks of prose—plotlines, characters, narrative—to be employed in the manner of poetry, i.e. nonlinearly, so they are arranged not in the conventional method of cause-and-effect, but in the freely associative, polyvalent way, in which poems tend to be constructed.”
 
Besides methodological and stylistic, those influences are also ideological. Boukova cites South American authors as role models: “As an author from a small country, the subject of transformation and the effacing, or the upturning, of the oppositions between center and periphery, marginality and leadership is of great importance to me.” Her kinship with Borges is worth underscoring, and according to the Bulgarian poet Silvia Choleva, Boukova “is a Borgesian type of author. She favors play, references, riddles, unexpected twists, ironies, and the dramaturgy of verse. She possesses deep knowledge not just in the sphere of the humanities, in which she is specialized, but she is enticed by science as well, she knows a lot, and all of this is reflected in ‘Notes of the Phantom Woman.’” But also across most of her writing.
 
Since embarking on the translation of Пътуване по посока на сянката (Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow), it seems to me as though almost everything else I happen to read, or even only skim, resonates with the book in one way or another: whether it is a Sappho fragment, a book from The Odyssey, a verse by Catullus, an Anne Carson translation, a passage from Don Quixote, literary theory by Nabokov, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Steiner, or fiction by Tokarczuk, Lispector, or Sebald. And even though it is the lot of the translator to constantly hear echoes of her author, I’m certain that in Boukova’s case these reverberations testify to the cosmopolitanism and intertextuality of her writing and to her own extreme erudition. But also, to the great freedom she grants her readers to make their own discoveries and draw their own connections.  
 
The writers mentioned above form a kind of community that truly comes into being through the process of translation. Expanding on her concept of minor literature, which “is never a centre (the very impulse of its existence is a thrust off the centre), but always a network of reciprocities and attractions,” Boukova argues that its

authors are a community and the tracing out of their contacts, relationships and break-ups via the [delays] of translation, through historical vicissitudes, over decades and continents is the finest adventure in the literary history of the 20th century (someday, I believe, the history of literature should be told via the history of translations). Minor literature is–I’d rather formulate it so–global in the long term. It has always been that, even before the term (global) came about.

 
While Boukova clearly belongs to this community in spirit, it is only and precisely through translation that she is able to join it in practice. This is one argument in favor of translating and publishing her work more widely. Even if her name becomes better known internationally and more of her work becomes available in translation, however, Boukova will doubtlessly continue to produce the kind of literature that she herself defines as “minor.”
 
This prospect might cause international publishers to shy away from taking her on. Even those who take the leap of publishing her work in translation might be tempted to describe Boukova as the Balkan García Márquez, the female Pavić, the Bulgarian Calvino, or the contemporary Yourcenar. But as her translator, I’m convinced it is crucial to emphasize the dialogical, rather than imitative, nature of that kinship—and to underscore the ways in which Boukova incorporates those connections to produce writing that is immediately recognizable as only and wholly her own.
 
   
In addition to its inherent cosmopolitanism and intertextuality, and indeed as their very extension, there is another important quality that defines and unites Iana Boukova’s literary oeuvre: the freedom and agency that she bestows upon her readers, whom she insistently and continuously invites to create their own readings. This is why, while it may be tempting to describe Boukova as a writer’s writer, due to her intellectual literary concerns, or a translator’s writer, due to the innovative ways that she engages with language, she might actually—and above all—be a reader’s writer. “It’s true,” she explains,

that I write the kinds of texts I like to read. I appreciate it when the author gives me space to reflect and assemble things myself. I don’t like the author to hold my hand and bring my attention to things I can extricate on my own, or to intrusively point me in just one direction. This kind of writing is extremely boring to me. It brings me no pleasure. I like authors who construct the text in ways that allow me to perform my own free movements within their network of thoughtfully supplied cues. [. . .] I prefer the narrative to be more fluid, more fragmentary, so that within this narrative each reader can connect the modules and construct the story, to become a kind of co-author.

This freedom, however, also comes with certain obligations—by empowering readers to become “a kind of co-author” of the text, Boukova also expects, even demands them to invest time and effort into their readings. When I first encountered her novel, I found it difficult to access, partly because it resisted a single reading or interpretation. It was only after I began translating it—which required reading it much more slowly, closely, and deliberately, taking it apart, then reassembling it in the form of an English-language text (which I aim to make simultaneously as liberating and as demanding as the original)—that I felt I was encountering the novel in a meaningful, even joyous, way. Far from suggesting that Boukova can only be read by her translators, I hope this illustrates that engaging with her work and disentangling its complexity requires active and thoughtful participation on the part of her readers.

In response to readers who describe her work as “complicated,” Boukova comments,

This is usually said in one of two ways: “It’s very good and complicated,” or in a negative way, “It’s very complicated and impossible to understand.” As I said, I like complicated books, all my favorite books are complicated. To me, “complicated” is a compliment. I believe that books must be complicated, if they are simple, there’s no reason for them to exist. Books talk about serious, important things, which cannot be talked about in a simple way, as this would be suspicious and lead to dangerous ideologies or pure foolishness. If one is interested in books and reading, one has to cultivate the ability to read complicated books.

As the Bulgarian poet and literary critic Marin Bodakov has observed, Boukova neither fawns over her readers nor courts them, but puts them in a position of discomfort. This approach could seem alienating, even torturous, if it weren’t for the fact that Boukova also applies the same attitude to herself. By refusing to write lyrical poetry and easily digestible prose that offer neatly packaged answers, Boukova is relentless as she embarks on what she calls “a constant and obsessive search for meanings.” Unafraid of unsettling, or even infuriating her readers, she constantly invites them to join her on this search, which—as her use of “meanings” in the plural suggests—could never possibly come to a satisfactory end.

Although this refusal to offer easy answers probably results in the loss of a broader readership, those willing to accompany her on this search are rewarded generously. They are bound to discover new ways of thinking about language, reading, writing, and translation, and in this way become better readers. Not least of all, they might even find their faith in humanity restored. Rather than flinching away from or smoothing over the hardship of human existence, Boukova engages the serious themes of life, fate, death, in order to examine the human predicament in all of its vulnerability, fallibility, and inconsolability. And yet she does so by balancing the frightening with the funny, the insightful with the irreverent, the philosophical with the playful, the sinister with the saintly. When it comes down to it, all of Boukova’s work—regardless of whether (like her novel) it is set in the Balkans during the nineteenth century, or (like most of her poems and short stories) in an unspecified (usually presumed contemporary) place and time—is underpinned by her profound faith in humanity and her view of human beings, despite their inevitable mortality and weaknesses, as heroic creatures.

 
Пътуване по посока на сянката (Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow) ends not with a full stop, but with an ellipsis—a punctuation mark that Boukova uses extremely sparingly. In contrast to English, where the three dots generally signal an omission or pause anywhere within the phrase, in Bulgarian they usually come at the end of the sentence and tend to imply a trailing off, an invitation to the reader to finish the phrase. One possible interpretation of this particular ellipsis is as a suggestion that even though the novel, like any other text, must at some point come to an end, it is through subsequent readings—and translations—that it continues to live and generate potentially infinite meanings. In that way, the “delays of translation,” besides being a hindrance, can also serve as agents for bestowing the text with new energy and prolonging its lifespan.

So it is also no accident that “Remora, or The Full Stop at the End” does not come at the very end, but is followed by “Outis, or The Art of Translation,” which is actually the novel’s final chapter. Neither is it an accident, then, that the only character who doesn’t die by the end of the novel is that of Outis, the translator. Rather than as any kind of claim about the invincibility, omnipotence, or infallibility of translators, I’d like to think that in this case the figure of the translator might be understood more broadly as the kind of close, attentive, and dedicated reader—‘no one’ in particular, but also potentially anyone—who reads, rereads, interprets, and (re)creates the text.

All this seems in line with Boukova’s general philosophy. Writers, she says, know well that “at the moment the full stop is put down, they no longer have any power over the text. It can be read however readers decide. It can be translated however it happens on the part of the translators. Once they’ve created the text, words acquire a life of their own, independent of the author.”