lKd7nD

After spending years honing my singing voice to sound
Bulgarian, I realized the time had come for karmic payback by
helping Bulgarian writers find their “sound” in English. There
were good translators working from Bulgarian to French and
German, but native speakers of English willing and able to
translate Bulgarian literature were
“For me,
translation means
hearing voices—
allowing an
author’s voice to
sing through my
own.”
few and far between. Thus for the
past decade I have been living
and working in Sofia, making
it my mission to help Bulgarian
literary voices be heard in the
English-speaking world. The
experience was and continues
to be exhilarating—trying to
find the right timbre for a short
story, adding the perfect lexical
ornament, trying to make the text
itself sing, without changing the
key entirely or tripping up the beat. For me, translation means
hearing voices—allowing an author’s voice to sing through my
own, letting Bulgarian rhythms echo inside English syllables,
finding the right key that makes a piece of writing resonate.
Because Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire for nearly
five centuries, some of the most colorful words in Bulgarian today
are Turkish borrowings that, when used in place of their Slavic
synonyms, add a facetious flavor, like a good inside joke. Alas,
American English has no comparable register, so translating these
terms often feels like trying to play Eastern microtonal music
on the Western piano, with its 12 rigid tones—I spend much of
my translating time searching for the right “blue notes” from an
English dialect or jargon to capture this feel. Since I primarily
translate prose, I am used to having more instruments at my
disposal to create the right harmony or atmosphere that allows
the author’s voice to speak—character, plot, dialogue. In poetry,
however, the song is a capella, pure voice, form and content locked
in the barest hand-to-hand combat. Reading new works—both in
the original and in translation—is an endless source for learning
new tunes and new moves…but ultimately, the translator needs to
let those voices in her head sing.
Angela Rodel is a freelance literary translator living in Sofia, Bulgaria. She
has translated works by Milen Ruskov, Zachary Karabashliev, Angel Igov,
Virginia Zaharieva, and Ivan Dimitrov. She received an NEA Translation
Fellowship in 2014.
4
National Endowment for the Arts