Blaga Dimitrova (II) — [All evening we have been talking]

Description: 

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:
All evening we have been talking
about our friend who died.
And everyone changes him in memory,
in each he is reborn—he’s both

     unique and multiple,
     nearby and infinite,
     enmeshed in moments and immortal.

Listening, I stare insatiably
at the horizon’s streak—
platonic meeting of
sea and sky—it’s both

     open and closed,
     changeable and permanent,
     the eye’s idea

of endless. The illusion
of a line reveals
another line—it is the only way
a human being sees
infinity: through boundary.
The memory of someone dead
reveals the qualities
of those alive.
And to our inner eye
all immortality appears

     only through death,
     only beyond a point.

Explanation:
Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova’s [All evening we have been talking] (1976) highlights the horizon as a site of contradiction, and littoral space more broadly as a point of access to the realm of the deceased, sublime, and unknown. This poem materializes, in some way, the boundaries between shifting phenomenologies of knowledge and perception: namely the linguistic, empirical, genealogical, and spiritual. Here, Dimitrova accentuates the seascape, as well as human existence itself, as one of essential multitudes, ever-shifting layers, and paradox.

Citation: Dimitrova, Blaga. [All evening we have been talking]. Trans. Niko Boris and Heather McHugh, in Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova, Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp. 6.