How did you render Rene Karabash’s book stylistically into English, keeping the rigour of the storytelling intact?
I started with an excerpt. There’s a lack of demand in translating from a ‘small’ language like the Bulgarian. So, you’ve to create that demand.
When I got the book [from Rene’s agent, Gergana], I was curious if I could do this because it was interesting, innovative, and just brilliant. After translating a few pages, I submitted them to the Gulf Coast Prize, which we ended up winning, so it was a clear signal that what I was doing was working.
Translating this book was very personal to me. Bulgarian is in my bones, so I didn’t approach the book from a US perspective. It was the other way round —the journey of this translation mimics my journey as an immigrant.
The other important thing was not to reduce and disappear the Bulgarian by choosing an easiest option in English. There’s a fine line between idiom and cliché. I wanted the text in English to be as alive it was in Bulgarian. That meant looking at what was implied and intended by Rene, what wasn’t there, the spaces, the silences.
In her interview, Rene Karabash talked about the meditational state she was in while writing the book. Was it the same for you during the translation process?
{{/usCountry}}In her interview, Rene Karabash talked about the meditational state she was in while writing the book. Was it the same for you during the translation process?
{{/usCountry}}I think, like all great artists, Rene was channelling, and I think I reached that state too, because in a way I blacked out for a certain part of it, and don’t remember translating it. But I do remember thinking, ‘Oh my god! This is the best thing I’ve ever worked on.’
I knew it was so good, and I got to know it was so good from others, too. When I sent it to our US editor, Buzz, he was blown away by the translation. But of course, those feelings are not necessarily a straight line to an International Booker nomination.
The book’s reception has been incredible. I don’t want to say “beyond my wildest dreams” because the intent to have my work be in conversation with the world has always been there. And Rene is, of course, already a rockstar. When the moment came, it was both a thrill and something we were [both] ready for.
How challenging was to render the poetics of She Who Remains in English?
When you’re working with a really good source material, it’s like cooking with really good ingredients. You don’t have to disguise staleness.
Rene’s text was so alive and powerful on the page that it made my work easier. I could hear the music; I could dance to it. So, I felt this amazing chemistry with the text; I just knew what to do with it. I had a lot of fun seeking out words that weren’t necessarily direct, word-to-word translation of Bulgarian to English.
For example, there’s this beautiful lovemaking scene between the two women in the book. In Bulgarian, Rene talked about подножие/ podnojie, which would translate to “foot” or “pedestal”, but because it was the body, I thought it would be much more beautiful to say “the bedrock of the body”. That’s when translation becomes art.
Reading this book in English, the performativity of gender, courtesy, Judith Butler, isn’t lost on readers. But She Who Remains is quite different. What distinguishes its gender politics from that of predominant Anglophone discourse?
What I loved about Rene’s book is that it went way beyond the discourse that I’m exposed to in America, which is heavily dependent on pronouns.
Gender is central to the story but it isn’t a story of gender transition per se. It’s really about the main character, who, yes, has since birth felt to be gender fluid, finding a “loophole” where she can escape an arranged marriage by taking the oath of the sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood, [she starts] living as a man. So, it’s not necessarily that she feels like she has been born into the wrong body or identifies as male, it’s a desperate attempt to try to save her own life. Which, of course, comes at an inordinate cost.
As far as pronouns, Bulgarian is a very gendered language. Not only are nouns gendered, but Bulgarian grammar is so complex and rich that even speaker genders themselves. I found it really interesting that Rene almost never refers to the main character as male, there’s a single exception towards the end, which I won’t spoil. And because English isn’t gendered, I thought it was really beautiful that I could use that to lean into the in-betweenness of Bekija and Matija, which was freeing.
There’s this sentence in the book: “What you do to yourself, no one else can do to you.” In relation to the Kanun talked about in the book, I was wondering if we can talk about our own incapacity in the face of events to forgive ourselves.
I come from a very patriarchal family. Bulgarians are very patriarchal. Rene’s story set in Albania, which is, like, 500-something kilometres from Bulgaria, isn’t a far-off imagined place to me. She uses an extreme example to show where things have been and where things can go back to, given what is happening.
And I had to fight my own father, who had very strong opinions about how things should happen and how things should be, and if you rebelled against that then there was hell to pay. So, it’s very difficult to rise up against that, when you have been disempowered your entire life. To rise up, to find it in yourself that you want to be heard, seen, is difficult. It breaks down your spirit.
I think the book shows that you can have a complicated main character. Even the father is complicated. Though in so many ways he is a villain, he is also a narrative engine. And he’s a teacher to Bekija; he teaches her about work, animals, honour — and the very slippery nature of that concept. So, I think the book is a commentary on letting go of binaries — male/female, good/bad, sad/happy — because we all contain multitudes.
As a translator, you’ve picked texts of Hristo Karastoyanov, Nataliya Deleva and Yordanka Beleva. How do you decide which author to translate?
When I choose a project, it’s always very instinctual. I trust some kind of impulse, knowing that the rest of it will come.
Because I’m not dipping my toe in a language that I learnt as an adult, one of the fundamental things that I look at when I translate something — besides that it’s personal to me — is the theme that emerges in different works that I translate. Whether it’s the persecution of artists or examination of fascist and corrupt systems in Hristo Karastoyanov’s The Same Night Awaits Us All, or, with Nataliya Deleva’s book, Four Minutes, about the fallout from communism and how to find identity in a collapsed system that cast you out to begin with. With Dana Beleva’s stories, they’re very lyrical, compressed. Almost folkloric flash fiction. And she’s a poet, like Rene. So, her stories are almost like little poems, exploring the female self and the way women relate to each other and to themselves.
With Rene’s work, it just so obvious to me that I wanted to see what I could do with it. But there was that line — What have you brought me, a wound or death — that got me. I was in, and here we are.
READ MORE: Rene Karabash: “A voice appeared out of nowhere and wanted to tell this story”
What’s it like to create space for works like She Who Remains?
There’s not a lack of brilliant Bulgarian authors. What is lacking is a clear path to publishing that doesn’t involve years of blindly pitching, praying you get a grant, and so forth. And there can be the idea of having met “the quota”. Like if there’s one successful Bulgarian author then we can check that box.
But, as we now see, there is room. We can see that there are publishers willing to take chances, risks that big publishers won’t. With our work now being acknowledged at the highest possible level, I believe more people will pay attention to Bulgarian writing. So many independent publishers are already doing that, our publishers did that— Sandorf Passage in the US, and Peirene Press in the UK. For our book, every step of the way in this journey feels like it was meant to be, and we’re so glad.
Please tell us about your debut memoir, Solomon’s Daughter.
I’m feverishly working on it because some people are asking for it. It’s a coming-of-age, character-driven memoir with a very complex, complicated father figure as its engine. In many ways, I’m exploring similar themes that are present in Rene’s book, in terms of the patriarchal family dynamics and what we think we owe to the people who made us.
It’s very different from my work as a translator. It isn’t fiction, to start. But there’s also dark humour that runs throughout it and none of the books I’ve translated have ever used humour to tell a story. But, working on it as a writer alongside my translation work has been wonderful because there’s cross-pollination. There are days when I’m unable to bring myself to work on the memoir, like Hemingway said, you’re bleeding at the typewriter when you’re writing. So, what I do instead is translate a little passage to warm up, and then I go to my own writing. So, I feel very fortunate to have both writing and translation as outlets.
Saurabh Sharma (they) is a nonbinary, queer writer, essayist, and culture critic. On X: @writerly_life; Instagram: @writerlylife.