“Forgive me, beautiful Bulgarian language, for telling stories in a foreign tongue, a tongue that is now sweet and close to me”. I was pretty unforgiving towards Miroslav Penkov’s collection of short stories East of the West until I read this sentence, on the very final e-page of my ebook. I usually never read the Acknowledgements. They really tend to pull you out of the imagined world of fiction writing and crash you in the real world, where a book not only has an author, but an editor and a copyeditor and proof-editor, and the author isn’t sitting by themselves in an attic, entirely dedicated to their book, but, go figure, they have parents and children and a spouse. Acknowledgements break the romanticized image of the capital-A Author, and it turns out this is what I actually needed to understand this book.
At its core, East of the West is a book about Bulgaria and Bulgarians – those who stayed, those who left, those who returned. Communism and emigration are huge parts of the stories Eastern literatures tell, and I’m thinking here for instance of Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov or Romanian author Gabriela Adameșteanu. The half a century of Communism leaves marks, sure, yet it sometimes seems that this is the only thing this part of Europe has to say of itself and pretty much the only thing the West knows of us. And Penkov’s stories make good use of the trope. His characters carry the weight of history very visibly while struggling with personal loss, difficult family circumstances and the lack of sense of a world like a pocket of time.
One of the most important things to be said about this collection is that it was written in English about the repercussions of a history which the English-speaking part of the world can barely begin to imagine. Writing in English about Bulgaria and its slice of history is, I think, both an act of translation and a form of reinvention. The English language offers a broader audience, granting access to readers who might never have encountered these stories otherwise. They actually quite seem to be the target audience, implied in the title – East of the West. The West is the reference point. We just happen to stand East of it. Yet it also distances the stories from the very people who stand in their center. Does a story lose something essential when it is told in a language other than the one in which it was lived? Or does the act of translation, of reshaping experiences in a new linguistic framework, create something fresh and universally resonant?
Maybe both. Maybe none. Maybe I’m overthinking. But the fact remains. The stories happened there, and they are told here. They are malleable, they move across time and geography, the old and the new, tradition and modernity, homeland and exile. They are a summing up of contradictions which make up the lives of people who have rooted up their lives and moved across the world in search of better lives. In ‘A Picture with Yuki’ the male narrator leaves his native Bulgaria and moves to the US, where he marries a Japanese woman. Yet it is still to Bulgaria the couple returns when they realize they can’t have children the “American” way. In the closing story, ‘Devshirmeh’, Mihail (whom everyone calls Michael) tries to hold on to his Bulgarian roots by speaking to his American-born daughter only Bulgarian, and telling her the fantasy tale of his great-grandmother. The irony of it is that in matter of life and death, the truth about the mother-country is revealed.
makedonija
My brother came back from the war without a scratch. We never spoke of what he’d seen or done. I was ashamed to ask, and he was ashamed to say. We’d lost the war, of course, like all other recent wars, which was regrettable, since we never really lost our battles; we just picked the wrong allies.
‘Makedonija’ is the opening story of East of the West and is told by an old man who lives with his wife, Nora, in a senior retirement center in Bulgaria in the 1950s. Their daughter, Buryana, and her son visit them once a week and we learn that she is divorced and struggling with raising her son. In parallel to the events in the present, the old man reads letters Nora received from the front as a young woman, in 1905. The storyline in the letters runs in parallel with the old man’s memories of his brother, who fights in the same war by his own choosing.
This was one of my favourite stories in the collection because it interweaves personal and historical memory. It illustrates how the present shapes our understanding of the past and how the events of the past still continue to throw their shadows over the present. History is never truly left behind, especially for the East, is what the story says. It lingers in letters, memories and the very fabric of family relationships.
the letter
The winter I was born, Grandmoms says, wolves roamed the streets and snatched away babies. She says money was toilet paper and coupons were the new money and you had to stand in line for coupons days in a row. Three hundred coupons bought you a loaf of bread. Five hundred bought you cheese.
Almost all of the stories in the collection follow a certain pattern – characters with a story of how their lives evolved, crushed by the boots of history. But ‘The Letter’ is different. It is a short story closer to the sense which I understand a short story ought to be – it offers a glimpse in a single moment of the life of a character, without much explanation as to why and how.
Mariyke is a teenage girl who lives with her grandma in a Bulgarian village. Her sister, Magda, has a kind of mental disability and lives in an institution. Both of their parents live abroad. When Mariyke suddenly comes in possession of a large sum of money, she has a choice to make – help her sister or let herself be drawn by the current of dreams towards a life of glitter and plenty.
But returning to the Acknowledgements. They were such a revelation for me after reading East of the West because they allowed me to drop the capital-A idea of the Author and look at Miroslav Penkov as a storyteller of the world. He told Bulgarian stories in English and maybe that was meant as a bridge between a world he left behind and the new world he’s inhabiting. Maybe the intention was to preserve his homeland’s stories and make them accessible while also shaping them through the lens of a second linguistic identity. Or maybe none of this matters because, as Georgi Gospodinov writes in an essay on the power of fiction, storytelling preserves the very essence of being human, and then it doesn’t matter if you’re Bulgarian or English or Romanian. What matters is that your story is told and your story is understood. And for that, language is just a tool. The soil of the heart must bear fruit to the seeds.
your thoughts?