A Cross Between Dubravka Ugresic & Georgi Gospodinov

Open Letter always goes hard for Bulgarian literature. It’s possible that Small Stations and/or Sandorf Passage have published more Bulgarian translations that we have, but, if so, then Bulgarian lit is absolutely CRUSHING it.1

This dates back to working on Georgi Gospodinov’s Natural Novel for Dalkey Archive Press way back in the early 2000s. At the time, we were doing a lot of Eastern European writers, including Svetislav Basara, Zoran Živković, Vedrana Rudan, and others, and stumbled upon Gospodinov via the Northwestern University Press publication of And Other Stories as part of the truly incredible “Writings from an Unbound Europe” series.2

There’s a whole post to be written about the marketing and influence of Eastern European literature in the 1990s and 2000s, but for now, I just want to express that these books and authors (and I would throw in the Austrian Gert Jonke into this mix and various Czech writers, like Jiri Gruša) were incredibly exciting to me, personally, for the combination of historical seriousness, formal inventiveness, dark humor, and linguistic playfulness found in a lot of the works. This carried over into Open Letter and some of our earliest books, like Nobody’s Home by Dubravka Ugresic & Ellen Elias-Bursać, The Guinea Pigs by Ludvík Vaculík & Kača Poláčková, and Vilnius Poker by Ričardas Gavelis & Elizabeth Novickas.

The real love affair between Open Letter and Bulgaria dates from the summer of 2010 though, when I was invited to participate in that year’s Sozopol Fiction Seminar. It was an incredible experience with a number of amazing writers—both Bulgarian and American—in attendance, but the main upshot is that, due to Open Letter’s interest and the support of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Milena Deleva, we ended up creating two programs to support Bulgarian literature: one to provide Bulgarian to English translators with the opportunity to come to Rochester and work with Open Letter and our translation students for a month, and the other to publish the winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Literature Contest.

I love working with emerging translators, so the first project was a real treat, and resulted in a several translation careers and many publications. But the second contest is the one that propelled Open Letter to the forefront as a publisher of Bulgarian literature, with the eighth winning volume, To Essay by Rusana Bardarksa &