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Birth and Death of the Trivial Kind

There is magic in birth and death. In birth, the magic is in the enormous potential of the unknown. When you look at your newly born child, there is no way you can know what he or she will become. Later on, you might have some glimpses of their future selves, but in that very first moment, all that there is, is hope, the potential for greatness. It is very similar, and yet very different at the same time, when we look at death. On one side, it is the end; on the other it is the beginning for something new. But above all, it is an opportunity for closure. Even in the very last moment of a life, the dying person can say or do something that could change the lives of the ones present. A simple look sometimes can make us see things in a different light. I will never forget my dad’s last days. We took him to a terribly expensive and a terrible private hospital in Bulgaria. I had the feeling that the staff there only wanted to extract the maximum amount of money from us without giving much b...
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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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