Blaga Dimitrova (III) — [More and more I confide]
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:
More and more I confide
in the dead, because the living won’t discuss
what’s most important.
And the dead are not afraid of death—
they’re its interpreters, their voices
soothing as my father’s used to be
on this same shore, explaining
so a child could understand
how in a cauldron with no lid
the sea can cook up clouds. . . .
The dead speak too in ways I understand—
through dreams and moods and intimations,
whiffs and suddenties and hints.
Closer and closer I come to what they mean.
But something crucial still escapes me:
the moment I dissolve like sea spray, turn
to something else—what will I
see, in that last corner of my memory,
the last faint glimmer of the dream? If only
I could meet their glance, if only
I could tell them what
I’ve kept concealed—do they
suspect? It’s torment.
I’ve no cover, and it’s getting hot.
Explanation:
Bulgarian poet Blaga Dimitrova’s [More and more I confide] (1976) articulates, through the metaphorical frame of the seashore and littoral space, the limits of our perception and processes by which we come into knowledge, truth, and understanding. It accentuates the littoral space as a point of access to the unconscious, or forms of knowledge that resist articulation in words. Here, Dimitrova’s poetic speaker comes into contact with the dead: those who “speak too in ways I understand –/ through dreams and moods and intimations,/ whiffs and suddenties and hints.” Such language, it would appear, emerges between the crashing waves; comprehensible only in the fleeting moment before “I dissolve like sea spray, turn/ to something else…” Referring to perceptions of the human ‘self’ as something immutable and ever changing, such knowledge is portrayed as easily lost: like grains of sand slipping through fingers, or water trickling from rivers into the sea.
Citation: Dimitrova, Blaga. [More and more I confide]. Trans. Niko Boris and Heather McHugh, in Because the Sea is Black: Poems of Blaga Dimitrova, Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp. 8.