Bulgarian-born Sofronieva is a prize-winning author, physicist, philosopher of science, and poet who resides in Berlin. In this interview, Sofronieva discusses her experiences as an international writer and publishing Multiverse with an American press.
You’ve given poetry readings in America on a number of different occasions, including when you had a chance to co-read with the editor of Multiverse, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs. You’ve also participated in poetry readings in Europe. When comparing America and Europe as places to give poetry readings, what comes to mind?
Well, this question is a sweet one … I mean, it makes me smile.
In the U.S. (since America is a big place and the style of readings can differ a lot) readings must be very short, especially if they are not in front of an academic audience. The attention is less concentrated, and one needs to give a bit of a show.
Performance is not less popular in Europe but not the main thing. In Europe (and this is all over the E.U. and far beyond the E.U. in Europe, from what I know) it is never expected of a poet to read only ten minutes. Often one has a long reading and even more often the reading is followed by a long set of questions from the audience or a moderator or both. Usually I am invited to events of ninety minutes altogether, and the least would be to read thirty minutes and discuss with the audience another thirty.
Only in a marathon reading with many poets during festivals one at times needs to read shorter but even then a half an hour is the desired time frame as respect for both poets and audience.
In the U.S. the poet seems to sell their poetry in events, the reading seems predominantly a market instrument. In Europe this tendency also manifests but is not a rule yet.
Were there any obstacles that popped up in the translation, editing, and publication of Multiverse? Was distance a factor? How were obstacles overcome?
One obstacle in such a project is to separate the biographical from the poetic.
Distance was sure a problem in the process of preparing the manuscript.
But in many ways from a non-American author the press expects an accessible volume in English translation only or at most a bilingual volume. So in the beginning the communication on who will do what and how to structure the project was done in E-Mails. Then the choice of poems and communication on this as well as the communication in the editing process was a pretty time consuming amount of work because we could not meet in person.
And then the whole time difference … I often worked after midnight to be able to talk to Jennifer after she had come back from teaching at St. Olaf and had brought her child to bed. She would sometimes start her day before dawn to be able to work with me. I was completely exhausted due to the “editing jet-leg”. I guess, she was, too. But we managed.
In your prose you’ve talked about how poetry can remind you of what is really needed in your own life and writing. I’m wondering if you could share what needs you’re thinking of. Which needs would you say are felt by all poets and which do you sense may be more personal? In what ways did the writing of Multiverse help complete you as a writer?
Poetry means to open the senses to the worlds we live in and to the worlds of our imagination. Poetry keeps us curious and moving, and it is the curiosity and the movement that keep us alive. Poetry allows insights and courage to go on. Insight is a combination of analysis and emotion. Poets offer both, and they analyze aesthetically and playfully, they share ideas and emotions, both imaginative and with density.
Poetry is for me one of the means of understanding the world we are born into and at the same time our own selves through the interaction of words, sounds, rhythms, thoughts, images, inherited paths, new created spaces … It is a path in the aesthetic investigation of the question of what it means to be human and how can a human in (an in fact pretty hostile) universe establish love as a force to oppose (and perhaps beat) death and destruction, or if there is no chance to win in that, how can humans reconcile with death and killing and destruction without losing themselves and their dreams.
Poets feel the vibrations of the cultural background we live in (the turbulences in science, the shifts in the economic structures, the mixture of traditions and expectations for the future, the density of knowledge accumulation, the desires in society, and more) and mediate them in a way that readers can embody even without a full knowledge of it all.
Poetry allows us to establish deep relations to others and never feel alone in this world anymore – not in history, not in geography, not in timespace of cosmos.
Multiverse took me to my deepest layers. Multilinguality is an immanent feature of contemporary literature, and especially poetry, not only in terms of national languages, but also dialects and indigene tongues, lost words, new words, mathematics and the languages of the natural sciences, artistic and cinemographic images, various types of silences, and more. Contemporary poetry includes all this and communicates with all this.
At first, I felt these languages like parallel universes between which I was moving and balancing. Later I knew that it was not the languages that made the world different but rather it was I who needed to learn to trust my own multiverse. We need different points of view, various ways to inquire and perceive; and we need these again and again differently woven and intertwined in ever new self-organizing processes. This seems to me to be the normality in both Nature and History. The world is complex, and we should not be afraid or confused from this. Multilingualism offers access to this.
It is always an overwhelming experience to get acquainted with words that describe something for which up to this moment I had not had words. Old forgotten words, dialect words, foreign words, unknown words – if their sounds and meanings echo inside me, it means that I encounter, that there is less emptiness in my world. Even if later on I do not use these new discovered words, they remain inside me. When I am on the shore of the North or Baltic Sea, I drink the light of the pastel colored landscapes; on the Mediterranean I embrace the clear lines and the intensity of the bright colors. My eyes do not forget the light of each of them even when I am far from it. Invention needs a departure from the known, but in fact the supposed lost is always present.
We live in a moment when—in America anyway—it would seem everything is political, including, given a certain perspective, the very air we breathe. Do you see the act of translating poetry or publishing poetry in countries you do not live as a political act?
Writing poetry is inevitably political, even if we do not intend it. But it is not political in terms of national or party politics. Poetry shares very personal points of view and very unique imagination, which is politics in many ways, and then the choice of the means for this sharing is the language, which again is very political itself. You can use and misuse it. You need to make choices.
Translation is also a political act par excellence. You interfere, you bring in an irritation. This is all very political.
Political in terms of “concerning others, mirroring the affairs in the cities”. (Excuse me for the Greek origin but this is a kind of a disease – I must look at the origin of the word and in the phenomenon it meant when it was first used, if we know about it). Poetry and translation are related to decisions and power relations. If I bring poetry from a life in systems you have not experienced it is subconscious warning. If I bring poetry that embodies views, images and linguistic structures new to you, it is making you open a window or even a door to a new possible universe, and you at least are able to realize that we live in a multiverse. And you are forced to question your existence in it, you need to take decisions and to order priorities and to identify borders and to deal with them. You can avoid this of course, but then you recognize somehow subconsciously your own fears, and this is also a political act.
And how do we define “political”? Do we stress on cooperation or on conflict, do we stress on performing power or on negotiation in society?
One of poets’ tasks, if we accept that we have some and if we take the responsibility to have some, is to keep and develop the language for what is valued by a society. We cannot leave this to the politicians because they very often misuse words and rape the language.
It’s been suggested—at least as far as poetry is concerned—that to be well-rounded, a poet must at some time practice the literary translation of poetry. How do you see your experiences with the translation of poetry influencing your poetry, or your work as an editor of poetry collections?
If we, poets, are honest, we will confirm that our own work influences a lot our translating and editing. Our poetic thinking and our education and reading, our own poetic narratives and knowledge have an impact on all our work in the field of literature. Being aware of this I am always very careful in translating poetry.
Good poets are usually obsessed in their own search in the world of poetry and the work of others has not such a big impact on their work as one may expect.
However, it is absolutely sure: if a poet does not read a great amount of poetry and if poets do not translate other poets and if one sits only in one’s own poetry space, one cannot contribute to innovation in poetry.
There is nothing more boring for me than poetry that is written today and repeats poetry already existing in history or in other languages. And to know poetry by others means translation. Reading poetry is also itself an act of translation.
In what ways do you see the act of translating poetry as a way to improve the world?
Oh, there is no way to really improve the world, if you ask me … there are only ways to attempt a better world. Poetry helps not to despair and dive in desolation, but rather to keep on dreaming and going, gestaltend, and not feel alone in the universe, and also not alone in the multiverse. Poetry deals with the question of what it means to be a human being in the deepest manner. Who are we and why are we ready to kill, why do we accept and nurture the crime of murder–both the murder of other people and social groups and the murder of nature, both the brutal murder of torturing humans and living creatures and the slow violence against the planet, polluting and destroying it?
Tzveta Sofronieva Цвета Софрониева is a poet, writer, playwright, essayist with origins in Germany and Bulgaria. She is the author of over twenty books, including Multiverse (2020), a collection of new and selected poems written originally in German, Bulgarian and English and A Hand Full of Water (2012), translated from the German, the recipient of a 2009 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant and the 2012 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Her poetry has been translated into nineteen languages; her theater work has been supported by Bulgaria’s National Cultural Fund.
Ian Haight is an award-winning writer, translator and poet. With T’ae-yong Hŏ, he is the co-translator of Spring Mountain: Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn and Homage to Green Tea by the Korean monk, Ch’oŭi, both forthcoming from White Pine Press. His prose, poetry and translations have appeared in Barrow Street, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere.
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