Bulgarian poetry

This research work is focused on the interpretations of the letter as a literary image in Bulgarian poetry of the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as on the question of the sender and their complex relationships with the addressee. The image of the letter is presented in two ways. On the one hand, a letter received or sent becomes an expression of hope for the presence of the Other, despite the distance in space or time. On the other hand, the written messages do not always reach their addressee, or it may be difficult to reconstruct their content – the envelopes are sealed, the content is fragmentary and laconic. Therefore, they can awaken the fear of the absence of the Other – a fear that, during these years, is no longer devoid of post-structuralist intuitions about the vulnerability of the subject. The study is divided in three parts that consider the issues of the expected or unexpected letters; the unarrived, unwelcome, and unopened letter; the unwritten or written letters.

This article examines the relationship between sound and meaning, addressing the questions of the arbitrariness or (partial) motivation of their connection, as well as the related problem of the specific value of linguistic sound in poetic texts. The analytical section of the article comments upon three poetic texts: an episode from the third book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (ca. AD 8), Ivan Vazov’s poem “Echoes” (1884), and Nadezhda Radulova’s poem “Echo” (2020). The article argues that these three texts share a common poetic strategy that functionalizes sound by combining the repetition of words or word fragments with a transformation of meaning. Thus, new meanings arise through the repetition of an already existing acoustic image.