Nataliya Ivanova
Nataliya Ivanova was born in 1992 in Sofia. She graduated in journalism and, following that, the translator-editor MA programme at Sofia University. She works as a media editor and currently for Geroi na Vremeto (Time Heroes) which manages the biggest platform for voluntary initiatives in the country.
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As an author and editor she participates in individual projects for Scribens publishing. Her first poetry collection, Chovek s binokul (Person with Binoculars, publ. Ars) came out in the autumn of 2020, edited by Marin Bodakov and with the support of the National Cultural Fund.
THE AUTHOR’S VOICE
Поезията е:
ядката на човешката душа.
Какъв е животът на твоята поезия (как се ражда, как порасва, как съзрява, как умира)?
Ражда се спонтанно, обикновено само един стих. След това около него или порасва цяло стихотворение, или остава само бележка, нахвърляна из тефтерите. Случва се това да е краят на живота му, но нерядко се връщам към него след месеци или дори години и тогава се оказва, че му е дошло времето, и го дописвам.
Изкуството свързано ли е с политиката и проблемите на нашето време? Кои проблеми те гнетят?
Да. Гнетят ме насилието, липсата на съпричастност, лекотата, с която се извършват жестокости. Войните. Също така летаргията, до която се докарват хората – липсата на всякакъв интерес към обществения живот извън личния комфорт.
Какво искаш да остане след думите?
Вълнение.
Къде отиват ненаписаните истории?
В съкровените разговори. А понякога са просто последното ти самотно убежище.
*** I can’t take away your pain
I can’t take away your pain,
but I can understand it –
from here it looks like a shadow falling over your eyes.
When you look at me, I see fear,
but above all I see
you’re looking for me.
Like a child who’s fallen looks at its wound
steeped in limpid blood –
and then at its mother –
to say it will pass and you’re brave.
And I soothe you, I soothe you and promise,
with a love as soft as pine needles,
a love – ancient stone lain in the mountains,
that it will pass.
Unable to fight your fight,
unable to quarrel with someone,
unable to reassure you even –
I promise you.
Because otherwise what’s left:
to surrender when
life was so good
as to offer us comfort:
to look at each other,
to be there still.
Translated by Tom Phillips
Dream
A stove’s been left in the meadow,
beside it a candle burns and in the stove – someone sleeps.
In the morning crocuses sprout from the wax –
black and lonely,
their gaze turned upwards.
And motherly snow covers them,
and the stove smells of asphalt and spring,
but the person sleeps.
Children race over to see,
trailed by their guardians,
preoccupied with chores,
but the person sleeps.
And they put up electric fences,
and hard rain falls on them,
the stove is someone’s property now,
but the person inside sleeps.
They sleep in their young mother’s arms,
who points at the earth and whispers:
“The flowers have just burst through the soil
and are waiting for you to see them.”
But the person inside sleeps.
Translated by Tom Phillips
*** It was a long day
It was a long day and afterwards
we were getting tired.
We waved off fun with honours
put away the chairs set out in the garden
and winter came on.
We waited, we chatted, wrapped in quilts and embracing,
the working week was touchingly banal and no one skipped breakfast,
ballads played on the radio, wars were fought on familiar presumptions,
friends came to visit and wrinkles lined their faces,
we asked questions, but with caution:
like for instance: otherwise how are you?
Otherwise: as before –
it would mean not asking for the truth.
About the otherwise inexplicable sorrow.
Is it by chance only us who experience it?
Is it by chance it’s only us
who remain wrapped in the quilt?
And the chairs are still here, bleached by the garden sun,
always put away for the following summer,
which invariably comes.
Why then did we feel tired? Why then did it somehow never come?
But we’re fine, we’re fine otherwise.
Even in this darkness we see one and other.
Our eyes still gleam –
like jewels thrown into the trash.
Translated by Tom Phillips
Sofia, September
How I love you tonight
I walk along your tired streets and hear
how a lonely TV flowers
and its voices say nothing
and we are here
the pavements never end
the blocks grow up from the slabs
I have lived in them all
in none
and memories like a dusty living room
arrange themselves in one and the same afternoon –
I’m going out, mum –
from a child
who’s since come home
you know all about this
and everything after –
the witness of evenings and mornings
of first love and the rest
of my secret meetings and partings
so then are you a god or good friend?
I won’t admit to anything
now I’m here:
you – always the same
and me – having forgiven you for staying
long after me
Translated by Tom Phillips
Conversation
When will I understand you,
my inglorious body,
hanging on to life by a nail;
you were there and suffered for yourself –
most likely unintentionally I led you astray
with some closeness
by absurdly touching something
which once was and you remember forever,
but on a quiet afternoon
when the earth is soft,
and the sun slants as in every autumn,
I’ll sense you telling me all,
I’ll hold your hand as if it’s another’s
and finally ask for forgiveness.
Translated by Tom Phillips
The time is ours
3
No terrible disaster befell us,
nor did we lose – to our horror – anything.
We were just sad,
steam was changing places with fog,
the cats were dying in front of the block,
in the evening we came home despondent,
of course, sometimes completely fine,
at least that’s how it should have been.
Otherwise everything stayed somewhere,
brought to mind only insofar as
while you’re slicing onions in the rented kitchen,
something small suddenly strikes you,
buried beneath the thoughts of another,
suddenly any old afternoon turns out to be important,
no, sorry – the most important –
how you sit on a bench and count
the leaves fallen at your feet.
Translated by Tom Phillips
Those who were speaking
Then I saw your hand displacing air,
you were probably talking, defending yourself,
you clenched it into your fist and let it go
like someone who firmly believes something,
and understood that your image in front of me is already past –
from now on I will see you as if through fog,
hidden still in the secret forest of the unknown,
my call for you to come would bring you only as far as the porch,
where you sat in the afternoons before we met,
but you would never fully step out of your home,
and so I knew that I’d return to the valley of this memory
and at the moment when a threat flashed up before me,
I’d be transported here and lie in the long grass,
to remember or imagine –
if there’s any difference at all –
that you have been brave and loved,
that you have been bold and spoken of it.
Translated by Tom Phillips
What is poetry?
The core of the human soul.
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Ivanova