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Homage to the Muses

I am desperately trying to remember an idea that I had earlier. It was so vivid, so good, that I was certain that I will remember it for years to come. A few hours later — nothing. Not a single shred of memory apart from the fact that it was good and important.  Where do our thoughts come from? Are they stored somewhere, and we just put our hands down, grab one by the neck and take it to the surface of our mind? No? Do we produce them? I guess that is the answer of most. ‘It is my thought! I built it myself’?  ‘Out of what’, I would ask. I always had the feeling that the thoughts do not belong to me. It always feels rather magical to have an idea and most of the time I don’t feel happy receiving the credit for it. I feel like a fraud, like a pretender.  People in older times were somehow humbler. They believed in the existence of the Muses, and I find this very agreeable. How wonderfully humble that idea is! I produce something, but only if I am inspired by the gods. So ‘...
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At the End of 2022

 

Another year's leaving! 


I believed... I wanted... and I lost some things ...

I kept on falling, getting up... 

I cried out of joy... and out of sadness... 

I kept forgetting... and forgiving... 

I smiled... and I was sad... 

I had my ups... I had my downs... 

But kept on going forward...

Some things I lost... 

And I received some things... 

One thing however now I know with certanty:

As the years pile in person's life, 

the list of things that one desires shrinks.

And at the end there is only what cannot be bought with money left. 


Valery Petrov






This is a very imperfect translation of a short poem of the Bulgarian poet Valery Petrov (1919-2014), who is revered as the master of modern Bulgarian poetry. A poet, a translator, a journalist and a script writer, he was very well known and loved in Bulgaria. When I was a student, we knew his lyrics by hearth and often recited them out laud. In spite his Socialist believes, he became at odds with the Communist party after refusing to sign an official petition denouncing the awarding of Nobel Prize for literature to Solzhenitsyn in 1970. He was not allowed to publish so instead he took on translating the complete works of Shakespeare in verse - a colossal work that took him 10 years to finish. His relationship with the post Communist regime in Bulgaria did not seem to be much better either and in his later poems he openly refers to mafia-style capitalism in present-day Bulgaria. Petrov died in 2014 at age of 92 and although he said in one of his poems "There’s nothing in our life today that makes me happy to have lived to 92', the people of Bulgaria are grateful that he lived that long and gave us not only his poetry but also his wonderful translations and his love to Bulgarian language. As he puts it in an interview, his only regret is 'that my language is so small that I can’t show its beauty to the world'.

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