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Hearing Voices
Angela Rodel
It was love at first sight when my
16-year-old self saw the letters
frolicking across the Language
Arts bulletin board at my high
school, the frilly, coquettish
Ж, the cat-tailed Ц, and poor
“backwards” Я. Of course,
like most of the world’s rubes,
I thought it was the Russian
alphabet—a mistake that Bulgarians have taken pains to drum out
of my head ever since. After all, St. Cyril was a Byzantine with a
Bulgarian mother—but who ever sees their beloved as they really
are
Despite my initial confusion, Bulgaria would get me in
the end—the Cyrillic alphabet led me to Russian literature and
Slavic linguistics, but it took Bulgarian music to unmask my
true love for what it really was. As a freshman at Yale, where
I was studying linguistics and Russian, I got my first taste of
Bulgarian folk singing thanks to the Yale Slavic Chorus. Yet I kept
Bulgaria and the Bulgarian language in an idyllic, pastoral mental
compartment—while I was cramming my head full of Pushkin and
Mayakovsky in Russian class, the only Bulgarian poetry I cared
to hear was the “pure” voice of the folk—ballads of a young man
gone to the well to meet his sweetheart belted out in a sternumshattering
tone. I was yet another foreigner mesmerized by the
mystery of Bulgarian voices.
In 1996, after graduating from Yale in linguistics, I shot over
to Sofia on a Fulbright grant to study Bulgarian language and
literature at Sofia University—and to study folk singing on the
side, of course. But when I landed in that grimy city at the height
of an economic and political spasm brought on by hyperinflation
and corrupt governance, the “authentic” Bulgarian voice I thought
I knew was nowhere to be found; what I had imagined was a
vibrant tradition gushing uninhibited from Bulgarian soul was
for the most part an institutionalized relic or a K-6 after-school
pastime.
The haunting voice of the shepherd had been largely drowned
out in the post-socialist cacophony. Yet once I met a couple of
poets through musical circles, I tuned in to other voices—those
of the shepherds’ great-grandchildren: bohemians chafing at
2
National Endowment for the Arts