Kristin Dimitrova

Brief interview with Wompo Diane Kendig


Diane: So, Kristin, can you tell me a bit about yourself as a person and a poet, where you were born, were you first started writing, where you studied, and what you do now in addition to writing poetry?

Kristin: I was born in 1963 in Sofia, Bulgaria, in an age which has recently begun to look to me very distant. In my early childhood there were only three cars parked in our street: our little Trabant, made in East Germany, and two Russian dinosaurs. (Our country was part of the socialist block between 1944-1989…. Nowadays in Bulgaria we can buy practically anything (if we have the money), we can write anything if there is a newspaper to publish it (the former political censorship has taken an economical turn) and the streets in Sofia are full to capacity, actually full beyond capacity, with cars. The view of these car-clogged streets is the only thing that can make me nostalgic.
I graduated at the department of English and American studies at Sofia University and I met my future husband there, Vladimir Trendafilov, who is my present husband as well. Vladimir is a professor of literature today, with books on the past and contemporary literary situations in Bulgaria. We still read all kinds of things to each other whenever one of us finds something amazing. There are texts you cannot help but share. And become a pester in the process.

I work at the same Sofia University where I studied. I started writing poetry at 27, which is generally considered an old age for poets. Among the romantics it looks like a good age to die. All of a sudden, one day I wrote six poems and I felt very important. Since then, I’ve never again written six poems for a day, and I’ve never felt very important. Those first poems were total rubbish.
What else do I do? I write fiction, newspaper articles, scripts. My novel “Sabazius”, which is part of the Canongate Myth series, recently received a national fiction of the year award. I translate from and into English, but I don’t do that much. I have a daughter – Lilia, and a son - Constantin. They are great.

Diane: As a poet, where do you locate yourself in poetry, especially in Bulgarian poetry, European poetry, poetry anywhere else in the world? How much Bulgarian poetry is available these days?

Kristin: It is very difficult for me to locate myself. One usually expects that somebody else would do it for them. Let’s try with facts. I have six awards for poetry from different years and one for the translation of a selection of John Donne’s poems into Bulgarian. But as James Thurber says, there is no safety in numbers, nor in anything else. Awards wouldn’t have meant anything if I had no readers. Translations of my poems or short stories have been published in anthologies, newspapers or magazines in 20 countries so far. A Visit to the Clockmaker is my Irish book, translated by the poet Gregory O’Donoghue. I am part of the poetry book A Balkan Exchange, which became a UK book with the help of the British poets Andy Croft, Mark Robinson, Linda France and W.N. Herbert. Does that locate me anywhere in the world? I am not sure it does.

Bulgarian poetry is doing well, I think, due to publishing houses like Janet 45, Fakel, Altera and some others, and then the Helikon chain of bookstores, Bulgarski Knizhitsi bookstore, maybe some others who sell poetry, and the online bookstores. These are the conditions without which even the best poems in the world cannot meet their readers, at least, during this century. As for the readers – are there crowds of them or not – let’s say this is another question and stop at that.

Diane: Where do you see Bulgarian poetry today: is it healthy? respected? And what of the poetry of women poets in Bulgaria? Is it as published and as accepted as that of men?

Kristin: Poetry does not bring much money or out-of-literature prestige, which – I hate to say it –perhaps explains why there are so many women in it in Bulgaria nowadays. Women, however, are very serious about it, and if I were a man, I wouldn’t underestimate this. I’d like to mention the names of Stanka Pencheva, Ekaterina Iosifova, Rada Alexandrova, Malina Tomova, Bozhana Apostolova, Sylvia Choleva, Tzveta Sofronieva, Miglena Nikolchina, Sofia Nestorova, Mirela Ivanova, Virginia Zaharieva, Nadya Radulova, Maya Dalgacheva, Marica Kolcheva, Olya Stoyanova, Krasimira Djisova, Boyana Petkova, Kamelia Spasova, Maria Kalinova, going more or less from the veterans to the youngest.



Links
To read more of Kristin's work, in both English and Bulgarian:
liternet.bg/publish5/kdimitrova/index.html