Мари Врина-Николов

From century to century - the Bulgarian literature between tradition and freedom (the beginning of 20th century - the beginning of 21th century) One of the typical features in the beginning of the Twentieth century is the declared wish of the "young" (people), which in periods follows the bulgarian literature - for "making up for" the "time lost" and "catching up" the European literary achievements. This process meets with resistance of the "old" who are afraid that Bulgarian literature will loose its genuine image. A century later with the end of the forty-five years communist dictatorship the conflict "old" - "young" is in particular revived with the reproach of the first that the others are obsessed with the temptation to imitate western literatures in order to gain not only a national audience, lost after the communist regime, but also a presence and role in the so called "world literary republic". In both cases europeisation means modernisation, literary research and experiments, whereas the "self-closing" in "genuine Bulgarian" is interpreted to be a turning back to tradition and thus - to realism in writing. In both the genre which is in step with the fashion and reacts faster and more flexible to the change, is poetry. But these similarities are not to conceal some delicate differences. The attitude towards tradition of these two turning-points is not the same. In the beginning of the twentieth century it is rejected, taken as out of date, whereas a century later tradition is pursued beyond its erasion, distortion and manipulation by the forty years communism.

The novel “Time Shelter”, by Georgi Gospodinov, parodies both the ideological arsenal of communism and that of nationalism, with their symbolic dates, kitsch, and material legacy. It made me think about what and how I was trying to convey them through my translation: much more than "culture" that is transmitted through education, whether in the family, at school, or in society, and which is, therefore, more or less consciously assimilated, it concerns the imaginary on which ideologies rest, since the imaginary contains many emotions, irrational and unconscious things. Yet the notion of “imaginary” has been surprisingly rare and belatedly included in critical reflection on translation, even though philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and literature have been interested in it since the mid-twentieth century. In this paper I seek to answer the question: is the power of the imaginary translatable in “Time Shelter”?