By Zdravka Evtimova

       I translate my own short stories from my native language Bulgarian into English, and I find the process both challenging and extremely useful for me as a writer.
The style of the short story “Miss Daniella” is rich in colloquial expressions. I know that as a literary translator I should find a voice for the narrative that is, at places, lively, colloquial and, I hope, at the same time poetic. This means that I use many English idioms, and idioms do not often correspond exactly to their equivalents in Bulgarian. Apart from that, English syntax and Bulgarian syntax are quite different when it comes to word order, reflexive verbs, and what may be called "implied" meanings. In Bulgarian, the forms of the verb let you know if the action takes place regularly or it has been performed only once. In English, I most often have to use adverbial expressions to express that aspect of the verbal action.
       When I translate from Bulgarian into English, I first do the literal translation, then I try to polish it and make it sound more like typical English. I constantly check my work using dozens of dictionaries: Oxford Dictionary of English Collocations, Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs, Cambridge Dictionary of English Synonyms and Antonyms, English-Bulgarian Parasitological Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of English, McMillan Dictionary of English, Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of English, etc.
       In my opinion, the close cooperation with a native English speaker would be the best and irreplaceable instrument to achieve the goal I have as a literary translator: to improve my translation. That means that my ultimate goal as a translator is to have a good translation. In other words, I try very hard to preserve the spirit of the original work; I strive to preserve the beauty and uniqueness of my native Bulgarian language and convey it in my English translation. While I work I am hoping that the English readers of my translations will feel my admiration for my native country and for the Bulgarian language. This is very hard, almost impossible to achieve. Sometimes I plod along for hours trying to find the appropriate English preposition or phrasal verb, and at the end of the day it turns out I have used the wrong verb, or I have used the right one in a wrong way. As a literary translator I have the responsibility to recreate once again the atmosphere of my short stories and invite the readers to sail the rough sea that the words of my translation have called into being. In order to achieve my ends, I would try to transform the native speaker I work with into a lighthouse that would show the readers their way in my world. In this respect, I think the recommendations that some editors send me are extremely useful. They are practical guidance I can find nowhere else.
       In Bulgarian, I can feel the weight and stature of the words; I can catch their aroma. Bulgarian is a rich, ancient language: it is a mixture of some old Thracian words, proto-Bulgarian words, and about 85% of the words in Bulgarian are of Slavic origin. There are Turkish, Greek, and Latin words as well, and all these components impart unique layers of meaning to the narrative. I love it when I can capture the richness of my native language and preserve it for the English-speaking readers. Then I feel it is worth translating from Bulgarian into English. It feels like letting English-speaking readers live in a Bulgarian town and fall in love with it.
       When I translate my own work I feel I write the story once again. I not only change details, I invent new images, even new characters, and sometimes I re-invent the original Bulgarian short story. In the Bulgarian original of “Miss Daniella” there was a phrase—“Kalinko was as meek as mud”—but I changed it into “Kalinko was as meek as a dirt road” in the English. After I completed my English translation, I went back and changed the Bulgarian text. Another example of this is with the sentence “Her dress smelled sweet” in my Bulgarian original. I translated it, “There was a sweet lake of fragrance around her dress,” and I later incorporated this into my original Bulgarian story.
       Sometimes when I translate my stories into English, I start using only some of the words from the original Bulgarian sentences, and that spurs me to write an entirely new narrative. If the editors ask me to send them the Bulgarian original, I cannot offer them anything because the original doesn’t look like the translation any more. The translation turns into a short story of its own; it becomes an original. I wrote in this manner the short story “The Narrow Street,” which was published in Retort Review, in Australia, and when the Bulgarian editors wanted the original story, I had to translate the new story from English into Bulgarian. The same thing happened to the short story “Sha”: the Bulgarian and the English versions became as far away as the equator and the poles, yet they were literary twins. I think these are the happiest moments for the writer who translates his/her own work into a foreign language. Sometimes I even have the feeling I help the Bulgarian language become a tiny bit richer.
        As a conclusion I can say that writing a short story and translating it into a foreign language are the two sides of the process of making the short story better, more real, and more beautiful. Translating my short stories into English makes me a happier and more compassionate human being, a person who admires and at the same time stands in awe of the English language.

<Zdravka Evtimova's Bio> <Zdravka Evtimova's Translation>

Programs in Creative Writing and Translation     ■     Department of English     ■     University of Arkansas      ■     Fayetteville