"Reality is much richer and more unexpected than we can imagine": An Interview with Iana Boukova

Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet, writer, and translator. Born in Sofia in 1968, she has a degree in Classics from Sofia University. 

She is the author of three books of poetry, including Diocletian’s Palaces (1995), Boat in the Eye (2000), and Notes of the Phantom Woman (2018); two collections of short stories, including A as in Аnything (2006) and Tales With No Return (2016); and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow (first published in 2009, followed by a revised edition in 2014). Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman received the Ivan Nikolov National Award for most outstanding book of poetry in 2019. A Greek-language version of it was also published in 2018 in Athens under the title Drapetomania.

Her poems and short stories have been translated into numerous languages, including Greek, Spanish, French, German, and Arabic. English translations of her poetry and prose have been published in various anthologies and journals in the US and the UK, including Best European Fiction 2017, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Absinthe, Drunken Boat, European Literature Network, Zoland Poetry, Take Five, At the End of the World – Contemporary Poetry from Bulgaria. Poems originally written by her in Greek were included in Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (Penguin Books, 2016, New York Review of Books, 2017).

Boukova is also the editor and translator into Bulgarian of more than ten collections and anthologies of modern and ancient Greek poetry, including Sappho’s Fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and the Pythian Odes by Pindar.

Boukova has lived in Greece since 1994, where she is a member of the platform Greek Poetry Now and of the editorial board of FRMK, a biannual journal on poetry, poetics, and visual arts. 

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Tell me please: what if someone, who had never read anything written by you, asked you about your writing style and which author you might be stylistically similar to? How would you answer?

 I believe that the only way to present myself is in the texts I write. I’d rather advise anyone who is interested in my work to open any of my books at random or search online and read even one small fragment. This is the way to learn significantly more about my writing than any detailed introduction. However, if I still have to introduce myself in a certain way, I would say that I am an author who works more with ideas than with descriptions.


Can your novel "Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow" be attributed to the genre of magical realism?

 But what does ‘magical realism’ mean in general?  Consider for example a composer who perceives colors when he hears certain musical chords and the combinations of these colors modify his compositional process. A composer so fascinated with birds, that he starts notating bird songs from all over the world and incorporating birdsong transcriptions into his music. Everyone would probably assume that this is a fictional character. However, the truth is that it is the French composer Olivier Messiaen and all said above is a fact indeed. Reality is much richer and more unexpected than we can imagine. In the novel, I would rather deal with unexpected aspects of reality than with the creation of fantastic situations. In fact, some of my characters have strange and hyperbolic properties and talents, and here and there in the text I develop (mainly in a playing and parodying manner) elements that resemble the style of magical realism. But nothing violates the laws of physics in the book – only the law of expectation. It even occurred to me several times that the things and situations I thought I had created in my fantasy turned out to exist for real. For example, I described two minor characters that earn their living by allowing snakes to bite their hands at fairs. Over time, not only was the venom no longer dangerous to them but they also looked younger than their age. The book had already been published when I saw an American documentary about a man catching snakes and dealing with them all his life. Snakes would bite him dozens of times and he gained resistance to any venom. He was seventy years old but looked fifty. Things can be that strange…


How did you manage to move from a very small form of writing to such a large literary text, especially when everyone is talking about you as a great poet?

What I strive for is for my texts to have a high degree of concentration and more than one way of reading. I am deeply interested in the relationship between what is said and what is not said in the text, in the balance between what is stated and what should be guessed. There was a point in my writing when I discovered that I could apply in prose everything I had learned in poetry. The way I deal with plot lines, characters and fragments of narratives in prose is practically the same as what I do with lines, phrases and images in my poetry. The method is similar and the architecture of the text is alike.


How would you describe the contemporary literary process in Greece where you have been living for so long? Is the contemporary Greek literature different from Bulgarian?

 I am more interested in similarities than differences. The fact that I actively participate in two (so to speak) “small” literatures, makes the oppositions between center and periphery, marginality and leadership at the global literary scene subject of great importance to me. What I feel in the air is a subtle urge for decentralization of literature. There is a very strong and vital energy in the "peripheral" literatures. There is curiosity and thirst for discoveries. There is pursuit of quality and – a word somehow out of fashion in recent decades – depth. This is especially applies for poetry. It is really important groups and nuclei of this energy from around the world to get connected with each other – to form an network of communication and interaction.


I am sure that our readers will be very interested to hear who are your favorite foreign authors? And whether they influenced your work?

The list is long but I get never tired of presenting it because the authors whom I love set my coordinate system in the literature and the territory in which I try to work. They range from Kafka, Borges, and Sebald, but also include Márquez, Marguerite Yourcenar, Virginia Woolf , Milorad Pavić, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon among others. All of them, in one way or another, influenced the way I write and opened up horizons for my very idea of ​​literature.


Are you writing anything now, and if so, what exactly?

I've been working on something for the last few weeks and this is a poetic project, based on "found text”. It has the title "Fears leading to insanity" and it treats the inability of the modern person (and the language in particular) to approach the subject of death. I used fragments from a variety of sources: stories in the news, forensic reports, posts in discussion forums, advertisements of funeral homes, dictionary entries, etc. So in this case, I worked with raw material that is completely opposite to those means I felt close to until now: imagination, narration, personal point of view. Despite this method being completely new for me, the construction of the text itself represents that same way of construction and that same need for balance as can be seen in every other work of mine.


In your prose books, you quite brilliantly use and play with the image of the "shadow". I wonder why the "shadow"? Is there something special and sacred for you in its depiction?

This use is never symbolic or unambiguous. ‘Shadow’ means different things in different places. In the title of the novel, it means mainly circular motion, moving along a circular path. The direction of the shadow that we cast is always circular, clockwise. We are all a kind of "sundials", we are constantly measuring time with our bodies. Elsewhere in the text, the shadow can be our double with whom we find ourselves in a strange relationship of symmetry and asymmetry. Or our double is in another dimension – our two-dimensional self. It is really playing with different meanings what attracts me in this image as well as in many others.


How did it happen that such a mind-blowing and exceptional novel was born? What was the background of it? We dream of this novel being translated into Ukrainian and English.

All of a sudden, there were some stories that materialized in my head and insisted on being told. The stories invented their protagonists – the eight main characters of the novel, four women and four men, with their personality and agency, and the free will to take decisions. That's how the stories fed the characters, and the characters – the development of the stories. The plot lines gradually merged with each other and a network was created. The world of its own was created. The period of writing of this book was both extremely difficult and also a very happy time of my life. I would be really glad if the novel reached a wide foreign readership.


In what genre do you personally feel at your best? Is the task to continue creating "macro" in "micro" considered your favorite? Or you’re going to write large literary texts anyway?

Each genre meets different requirements and sets different goals. It seems very stimulating to me. In any case, it is long ago that there have been no "pure" genres in the literature of our time. The texts that I like to read most are always more or less hybrid. I feel at my best especially when I am able to switch freely between genres, each time following my intuition. And to create my own mixtures.


Interviewed by Khrystia Vengryniuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Dmytro Kyyan

Kate Tsurkan