Cultural Translation: Miroslav Penkov's "East of the West"

Abstract

The paper focuses on the much awarded collection of short stories East of the West: A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov (2011) from the perspective of cultural translation as a form of dynamic transformation of self in the act of movement between languages and cultures. The analysis illustrates and brings together two important tendencies. Firstly, the practice of cultural translation, which Homi Bhabha interprets as the process of human migrancy marked by the emergence of the “translational transnational” (173) and the understanding of the postcolonial diasporic writers that “we are all translated men” (Salman Rushdie 16). Such an approach provides for a perspective on translingual and transnational identities and cultures. The second tendency is the recent explosion of writing by Bulgarian authors depicting Bulgaria often, but not exclusively, through the eyes of an immigrant. These recent books stand apart from the large body of texts, mostly nonfictional, often autobiographical exilic narratives of forced immigration during the totalitarian years, published in the last two decades. This recent interrogation into the nature of Bulgarianness in the local community and in the global world lies at the heart of these mostly fictional texts engaged with cultural translation. Examples of such texts are Penkov’s collection of stories, Zachari Karabashliev’s "18% Gray", Deyan Enev’s "Circus Bulgaria", Alek Popov’s "The Black Box" to name a few. The majority of texts was originally written in Bulgarian, and then translated in English. Among them Penkov’s "East of the West" stands out as being written originally in English and then translated by the writer himself in his native Bulgarian. The paper will examine the meaning of this act of translating oneself “backwards”, alongside the main questions the collection posits: What does it mean to live in translation? How is national belonging, identity and self reconstructed when transmitted from one language and culture to another?