Because the Sea Is Black

#299
Title: Because the Sea Is Black
Author: Blaga Dimitrova
Translators: Niko Boris & Heather McHugh
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Year: 1989
Country: Bulgaria
76 pages

It turns out that I already had Bulgaria covered by Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, but I decided to read Dimitrova anyway since I'm on a bit of a poetry kick.

This collection evokes a similar set of feelings as walking through an exhibition of Frida Kahlo's paintings: The work is stylized, beautiful without being romanticized, and disturbingly compelling in its representation of pain, difficulty, and death. The translation was not clunky and in their introduction, the translators describe how they managed non-translatable words and jokes. I liked the "sea" poems best; the more abstract poems later in the collection were less interesting to me. Overall, the themes of longing for and repulsion from the forbidden (whether the sea, death, or other freedoms) were consistent throughout and the volume has good flow and coherence, not an easy task for the translator/anthologists.