Blaga Dimitrova (I) — [I want to pull the child]
Blaga Dimitrova (1922 – 2003) was born in Byala Slatina in Northwestern Bulgaria. Renowned as poet, prose-writer, critic, and even Bulgaria’s 2nd Vice President between the years of 1992-3, she has been described by one of her prominent translators, Heather McHugh, as “the conscience of Bulgarian poetry, its reconstructor of mind and innovator of language, its voice of comfort and courage…” Dimitrova is a poet of distinctly transgressive force – one who experiments with a complex layering of seemingly disparate conceptual threads and motifs, concealing hidden truths and perspectives before bringing them, in perfectly aligned harmony, to light. Her collection Forbidden Sea, first published in Bulgarian in 2000, functions as a focal point for this project – composed in the aftermath of her diagnosis with cancer, and prohibition, by her doctor, from swimming in the Black Sea waters.
Heather McHugh’s introduction to the translated version of Forbidden Sea excellently articulates the multiplicity and paradox inherent to Dimitrova’s treatment of the water space, writing: “the doctor’s prohibition against swimming is metaphorically extended to convey other demarcations – those dividing definition from definition, world from world, being from being (old from young, man from woman, living from dead). The paradoxes that everywhere engage Dimitrova’s attention (the colors of our human blindness, the doubleness of human nature) are clearly visible here. And it is the horizon, ultimately emblem of all distinctions, that turns out to have been the protagonist of this series.” The Forbidden Sea collection is one in constant navigation of the boundaries demarcating our human existence. Dimitrova’s explorations of motherhood, history, knowledge, love, life, and death, are as unrelenting and timeless as the water itself.
Excerpt:
I want to pull the child
gently, by the hand,
not tear her away
from playing with the sea—
just slip myself into the space
between two waves,
direct her hearing toward
the words of wind and water.
Just as I reach out, she’s yelling
Wait! and pushing me away,
dashing reckless back into
the pirate’s lap, the wave’s inveigling.
She is deaf to that gray voice,
amphibian, that warns
the old ones, makes them wise.
And all my admonitions only weary her.
In vain, I will have drunk
the sea to the dregs,
in vain have paid for experience
with the cash of all my days
if I can’t give it to my daughter.
You, strange life, aren’t you
grounded in this
unbequeathability of what we know?
So everyone must start all over
with a childish recklessness
instead of looking back toward her
precluding mother.
Explanation:
Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova’s [I want to pull the child] (1976) is a poem exploring the endless passage of time, processes of growth, transition, communication, inheritance, and the origins of knowledge. Dimitrova reflects, via the conceptual frame of a mother and child (or perhaps ambiguously a woman and her younger self), the means by which we come into an understanding of the world, and reconcile experiences that are painful, or grounded in the vast unknown. By slipping into the space between two waves, and directing our hearing to the words of wind and water, Dimitrova suggests that we may find answers to the great unanswered questions of human being – the nature of time, the essence of human relationships, or symbiosis of the present and past, as a few examples.
Citation: Dimitrova, Blaga. I want to pull the child. Trans. Niko Boris and Heather McHugh, in Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova, Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp. 10.