A short story volume about Bulgaria written across the Atlantic
“God works in mysterious ways. And success works in even more mysterious ways”, Amélie Nothomb wrote in her novel Fear and Trembling. A boy from the town of Gabrovo in Central Bulgaria, has tested her statement in practice by entering the anthology The Best of American Short Stories as the only Bulgarian featured in the volume that was released in 2008.
Miroslav Penkov was born in the town of humor in the summer of 1982 to a family dominated by medics. When he was 5 the family moved to Sofia where his surgeon father came to specialize. Against the odds Miro chose not to borrow his vocation from family history. “Medicine failed to intrigue me, I was keen on writing”, he explains, and is grateful that he was left to pursue his dream. “Writing requires a degree of naivety and also a little bit of folly, because it is a very tough job, and besides everything great has already been written by other people”, he admits. Nevertheless in 2001 when he graduated from the First English Language School in Sofia, he left for USA to study psychology and chose Arkansas because back at that time the university paid decent scholarships to students from Bulgaria.
“My idea was to write, but I thought it was not pragmatic to go for English Language and Literature from the very start in USA. I had decided that I would need a few years to listen to the language and talk more, and only then go into writing. And because I didn’t believe I could find a writing job in America, I took up psychology. My idea was to work as psychoanalyst and write in my free time. However, there is a turning point in the life of any writer, a moment of fateful choice. For me this moment came in 2005 when I graduated in psychology, and realized that a further career in that sphere would mean an end to serious writing for the simple lack of time and commitment. At that point I knew I wanted to write and enrolled in the creative writing program of the same university in Arkansas.”
Miro says that the title “writer” is something that should be deserved and should be proved time an again, on a daily basis. For now he is an academic. Holding the degree Master of Arts in Creative Writing he now lectures in creative writing at the University of North Texas where he lives with his Japanese wife, and for the rest of the time reads and writes professionally. It took Miroslav five years for a breakthrough. It was only normal, given that English is not his native tongue.
“I was not in a hurry to send my stories as I was aware that their quality was not good. In 2004 I wrote my first story about Bulgaria. Its new version is included in the volume East of the West. Its title is Devshirmeh, the Turkish word for blood tax. After I got some positive feedback about it, I dared send it to a few literary magazines in America and to my great surprise it was approved very quickly by one of the best – The Southern Review released by Louisiana State University and founded by Robert Pen Warren. Then there was a period of two years when I was sending stories and all I got was ‘no’. I I was on the brink of despair when in 2007 I sent the story Buying Lenin to the same publication. Three weeks later the editor-in-chief called me to say they’d liked the story and wanted to publish it. Buying Lenin is about two extremes – the generation of the grandfather who has devoted his entire life to communist ideals, on the one hand, and a little boy from the generation void any faith at all. As an allegory, the story could be interpreted as the life story of the same person – the grandfather is that part of our nature that is clinging to the past, to the roots. The young boy is that part of us that drives us forward. Buying Lenin was published in the autumn of 2007 in The Southern Review and won the prize for the best story of the publication that same year. This annual prize has been named after the great American writer Eudora Welty. A few days later I was informed that Salman Rushdie had selected the story for the annual anthology The Best American Short Stories in 2008. From my perspective, my presence in that book was a great achievement, as many people knew about me; the story was translated into many languages but all this was not enough to release a book. I had to sit down and go on writing, the most ordinary thing for a writer. A short story does not make a book. Neither does it make a writer.”
In 2009 with the assistance of a literary agent Miroslav Penkov signed a contract for the release of his first book in USA, the short story volume East of the West. In 2011 the volume was finally delivered to America’s bookstores. So far the book has been translated and released in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Holland, Norway, Israel, UK and Canada. In Bulgaria East of the West was translated by the Bulgarian-American author himself, as Miroslav Penkov is known across the Atlantic. “People love to see the world arranged in pigeonholes. How on Earth, can I be an American writer when everything I write is about Bulgaria? On the other hand, am I not a Bulgarian-American writer? I write in English, and have learned a lot about literature and writing in America”, Penkov comments. Is it possible for someone to get assimilated in a foreign culture for just 10 years and is this needed for his or her success?
“No, and I gather that this book reveals my Bulgarian nature. It makes clear how it was a matter of honor for me to continue being Bulgarian, to keep my roots and blood as Bulgarian as possible. I took a different path: instead of struggling to destroy and break my fetters, I have tried to transform them into wings. Time will tell whether this will work”, Miroslav Penkov says and admits that his priority in the new year is to learn how to the thankful for everything that has been happening to him here and now.
Translated by Daniela Konstantinova
