from The Heart Is Not A Creator
Translated from the Bulgarian by Jonathan Dunne
NOTES ON SLAVKO VORKAPICH’S SHORT FILM “MOODS OF THE SEA” (1941) I feel like a bird the water tries to crush, but without this danger – what kind of flight is it? Accelerating competitor in front of whom is a hard rock. The best place for nesting is in the eaves, barely a few centimetres wide, beneath which is the abyss. Grooming is primary care. The main occupation, done with skilful étourderie. The fear of water teeming with mammals down below, the first serious conviction. The sea, which embraces and instantly retreats like a timid or attentive lover. Defeated armies that withdraw with their dignity intact as after a refusal to dance. Huge waves like full lips. Waves like ocean waterfalls. Waves that invade like a shower of kisses and don’t let you breathe. Weightlifters lined up, lifting in perfect synchrony, pushing up the weight of the world record. Foam – the sea rises. It grows without ascending. Without wanting to, it rises. Like everything that rises, by the way. Armies of clouds conspiratorially moving on the bias. Cirrus clouds that depict the giant skeleton of a bird in flight. And then a tractor’s deep furrow in clay soil. Only a drenched bird, a bird completely submerged in tons of water, has the right to jump to another space. The ribs of the waves. Birds that land on moving water. Foam upon foam. A bird that playfully sews the air to the blanket of water. Flowing, running water that floods an island of smooth, calm water. Birds that proudly resist the wind, as if the right to do so transforms their action into a reasonable position. There is no similarity between the tide and all other tides. There is no difference between the tide and the eruption of a volcano or the sun.
THE HEART IS NOT A CREATOR Do you remember how I started blowing in your ear? I had to imitate various winds. A night breeze, which blows from land to water and is perfect for quietly setting out; a hurricane hot Kazakh ibe, which pounds the drums of the field with little stones; a dry harmattan, which colours the Atlantic with the blood of the Sahara; an Arabian simoom, which mixes the iron of the earth with the bubbles of the sea; an Italian dry sirocco, which with its heat causes madness and murder from a loss of direction; a spring mistral, which cuts Marseille sunrises into slices; a Sinai sharab, which absorbs the water from your eyes; a cold Uruguayan pampero with lots of rain, which wraps you like a shawl; a Khartoum haboob, which covers everything in dust and makes you feel immured in the air; a squall, which violently overturns solid boats; an icy Tramontane descending from above like a fallen angel. Scary, tender, soft as a sponge and hard as concrete. All I got was a laugh.
THE HEART IS NOT A CREATOR A pile of stones poured out in the waves on the promontory backyard of the resort. From afar they look like a heart, albeit from another angle they could be a fist with a thumb sticking out between the forefinger and the middle finger. The surf wouldn’t even scare a child. The heart is not a creator and the tattooed with beers would agree. One of the women has a painted face – she explains in broken English that she fell asleep when they were drawing three stars only next to her ear and woke up to find a whole constellation (freckles apart). The throbbing pain in her heart-stomach has the selfsame force.
THE HEART IS NOT A CREATOR Everything here was so pretty in its lack of purpose – the black slope lined with low moss-covered stone walls dividing parcels that haven’t been worked in centuries. A fragrant desert one kilometre above sea level. They bought the house from an Englishman who was convinced it was haunted. Oh, what nonsense! The Englishman had left his previous wife and been left by the Bulgarian, who was beautiful like everything foreign. Everything else had been registered in her name for safekeeping. The heart cannot build, but it can’t destroy, either. Does he really believe that? Their first job now was to open the windows despite the mosquitoes. He went out to pick some weeds for the vases and the salad bowls. When he reached the barn with its caved-in roof he noticed a birch had pushed through the scattered stones, and there flashed through his mind a vision from childhood: the day is overcast, coals have been dropped in the hay any old how.
INSTRUCTIONS Stick your chin in the sand to feel its hardness. Now swim in it – it is soft as air. Breathe through its interior – it is hollow. Immerse yourself to the waist, then to the neck. Finally leave a straw for looking in. Dig yourself out – slowly. Scoop two handfuls of sand, generously pile them up, level them off, and put them in your mouth. Chew. Then spit without helping yourself with anything. Let every grain stuck to your lips, your eyes, remind you how you went from being soft-bodied to being a killer.
Yordan Eftimov (Razgrad, 1971) went to the Classics high school in Sofia and later studied Bulgarian Philology at Sofia University. He teaches literary theory at New Bulgarian University. He is a well-known critic and editor of the popular Literary Newspaper. His collection The Heart Is Not a Creator, first published in 2013, won both the Ivan Nikolov and the Hristo Fotev National Poetry Awards.
Jonathan Dunne studied Classics at Oxford University. He directs the publishing house Small Stations Press. He has translated more than seventy books from the Bulgarian, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish languages. He writes on the spiritual aspect of language, meaning inside words, translation as a metaphor for life. His latest book is Seven Brief Lessons on Language (2023).
World Poetry Review 