Tsvetanka Elenkova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She has published three collection of poetry – The stakes of the legion, 1995, Amphipolis of the nine roads, 1998, and The seventh gesture, 2005, - and a book of Balkan essays, Time and relation, 2007. Her poems have appeared in translation in fourteen countries, from US and Chile to Turkey and Ukraine. She translates from English and Greek. Her translation of the anthology of medieval Indian poetry was nominates for the Hristo G. Danov National Literary Award. Her most recent translation is the anthology of Raymond Carver’s poetry. She also edits and translates a series of Modern English Poetry. She has co-founded the first private literary magazine in Bulgaria after the fall of Socialism, Ah, Maria, has been editor-in-chief of the socio-cultural magazine Europe 2001 and has edited the Greek cultural magazine Helios. She is co-director of the publishing house Small Stations Press.

THE WOUNDS OF FREEDOM

Some buy leather leads for dogs of definite length. Others prefer automatic leads with a real. You let the dog run at will but you decide when to retrieve it. I set mine free. But two or three times it run away and came back covered in wounds, so now I set it free but only in my yard. My dog howls at the squirrels, in the evening at the moon. And when we pile firewood next to the fence it climbs up and jumps over it. And again comes back with wounds. After that I decide to keep it on a chain. For my dog to be free of wounds.

MASOCHISTS

Because from an early age we endure pain. Expect for birth perhaps, which our mothers bear. And that’s why birth pangs are so strong. Until the walnut’s husk darkens, until it hardens, until the green outer covering falls away. Until it no longer dirties our fingers. Until the bitterness loses its taste. Until many months, seasons go by and someone cracks open the walnut. Fallen before from your grandfather’s sack. Because it is hollow – a real relic, the nut. From a metre sixty to a mere sixty. That’s why we are masochists. Inwardly.

WITH WINGS AND TEETH

Where is the difference? Is it in the lack of plumage or of teeth? Only people, I think, are born without teeth and all their life hope for wings. Demons and angel must have created them. Some lose their teeth, others only have teeth left. If you’re a treasure-hunter, you’ll understand. But I never found anyone with wings. Only with shards, which tormented my grandmother and bent her double – dung-beetle? When we buried her with two lilies of the valley, when a grassblade welled up from the sprinkling, I saw them. Growing transparent.

SMALL STATION

Like shadows we must be, stretching under the street lamps or under the slating rays of the sun, starting from the feet but also above – we are our own way. We must share the light but not stop, go on. Not the end but the direction is important. And when we sit under a vine, whose dappled shade so resembles the dawn and dusk, birdsong, a dog’s bark, it must be a stone along the way, where we sit and rest. Such stories of life and death! The arrival is like those small stations at which the train stops for no more than three minutes.

THE DAY

The day dawns rosy a baby’s bottom. Soft and smelling of fluff. With yellow around its mouth. And down on its little head. Only one small cloud of saliva as it sucks. The day dawn with birds cooing. Sometimes, if it’s a boy, in blue. Nappies of pure cotton. But we neither teach it nor mimic it. We do not give it rattles or teething rings. The day, lonely as an abandoned baby in front of an orphanage, waits for some to pass, to take a fancy to it, finally to show it on the news. Let’s hope the parents have it back.

THE SEVENTH GESTURE

With finger on mouth, when you do not want to wake someone or the teacher walks in. He puts a finger to his mouth when he wants to quieten the class. Or he tells you straight to shut up. But what intrigues me most is the way it slides down, pulls away from lips. After you’ve imposed the silence. Some just loosen their hand, other draw it out to point, others hold it longer like this. And a fold in the fingers, bliss from the tiredness of the unwonted gesture. This is how the Byzantine iconographers first painted them. The saints.

THE SPARK IN US

There is a wire between the thighs and palate. A wire on which the organs are hung like laundry. Trousers with their two legs, corsets, handkerchiefs of various sizes. In a gust of wind the line comes undone and they all fall down. There is a wire that conduct electricity, and at each end a small tongue. Sometimes there’s a short circuit and the electricity board sends someone out. They open the door of the meter affixed to the all, check the seals, you pay up. If you do not wish to pay, they lay your wire underground.