Dear translators and writers,

I assume that I have been invited to speak here because I have some experience. And I will speak on the basis of this fragile and uncertain personal experience. Although I increasingly doubt its advantages. Experience is simply the alibi of getting older. And like any alibi—it is slightly suspicious. I have written poetry and prose, plays for the theatre, scripts for short films, criticism, literary studies, a doctoral dissertation, even a libretto for an opera and a graphic novel. I was for many years an editor at Literary Newspaper, I teach creative writing, and sometimes I think I have read more manuscripts than books. And after all this I can say directly: it never gets easier. The experience in our field doesn’t matter a lot. Every time you start from scratch with all your fears and anxieties, with all your hesitations.

When writing my first novel (I was about 30), I felt absolutely free—not because I knew how it should be done, not at all. It was my first attempt in this genre and I had the right to fail. This is a very important right—use boldly your right to fail, especially now, at the beginning. In fact, this entire craft of literature is a constant walking along the edge of failure. Let me say it again— you will never have it as easy as with your first novel. I hope I have not discouraged you. Take it as a form of consolation.

Let us talk about hesitation, because it is inevitable at the beginning. We live in a culture that does not tolerate hesitation very much. All the self-help books insist on how important it is to radiate confidence, to know what we want and to follow our plan step by step. There are many writers who claim that when they sit down to write, they know everything about their characters, they know how the novel will begin and exactly how it will end, even the first and the last sentence. This sounds rather depressing for those from the school of notknowing, to which I belong. If I must formulate something like advice—do not avoid hesitation, do not be afraid of it, cultivate your doubts. I find hesitation the most natural state of a human being (and of a writer), a sure sign of sensitivity, and this is the most important thing in our common craft. I don’t trust people who know all the answers, all the moves, and never have any doubts. Certainty is always suspicious. After all, we work with such a delicate, elusive, and ambiguous matter as language. One of the epigraphs in my debut Natural Novel reads: “I would like someone to say: this novel is good because it is made of hesitations.”

Speaking of language, let us dip a finger into its river for a moment. I am sure that everyone here has had that happy feeling of letting oneself drift along the waters of language, along its current. A sense of the pull of language, of the force with which it carries you away. One must only stay above its waters and follow it. Sometimes it is like rafting down a fast and dangerous river. Sometimes it flows slowly and calmly, spreading wide. Someone will say that language is important mainly for poetry, that prose is driven by other things. My experience is not like that. I come from poetry and in fact I have never left it. It is clear that writing a poem and writing a novel are two different disciplines, like sprint and marathon. In prose the distance is long; sometimes there are long and boring stretches, distraction, and so on. The most important question is how to keep your rhythm and breathing for a long time. For some time I practised both disciplines (sprint and long-distance running) literally, not metaphorically, and when the time came to choose only one, I quit.

There are novels that seem made of whole blocks (chapters, paragraphs), and novels made of sentences. The latter, for me personally, are more interesting. They are written by someone who knows about language.

When I sat down to write my first novel at the end of a summer, I knew it would not be a classical narrative. I had vague ideas that “I want to make a novel out of all those things that usually do not get into novels.” That it would be about disintegration, private and public, about the collapse of a marriage against the background of the turbulent 1990s. I had about twenty notebooks in which for years I had written down all kinds of things. I think the “anarchism of the novel” is partly due to these notebooks of mixed notes from which it was born. I wrote it relatively quickly, about three months of daily work. But the notes in the notebooks I used had been written over seven or eight years. My lucky discovery came through botany and natural history, that holistic, loving, allencompassing description of the world. Thus I chose the genre—Natural Novel is as much a title as it is a genre. I inserted into the text excerpts from scientific manuscripts by Linnaeus; today they sound like a novel. I dug into old botanical journals in the library among, found translations from a century ago. (I say this because writing the novel is one thing, but before it there is long gestation— thinking, contemplation, searching, taking notes, reading other books.)

If we now dismantle this Natural Novel or rip open its belly, as we did with old toys as children, many different and incompatible things will fall out: a natural history of the toilet, lists of pleasures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s (the last is the shortest), a tramp with a rocking chair, a natural history of flies plus a bible of flies, an old Irish recipe against pregnancy, overheard stories of infidelity, a collection of first sentences of famous classical novels, and so on.

What can connect all these seemingly incompatible things? I will answer immediately: a personal story. At least that was the case for me, I am sharing personal experience. The story is the glue. Whether it is about love, disintegration, death… Even if it is a story about the impossibility of telling one’s own story, as in this case. Of course, the expression “natural novel” is an oxymoron; no novel is natural. This book rather longs for the nineteenth-century novel, or for the idea of it—slow, dense, with beginning, middle and end, with clear causes and effects. Described by Stendhal as a mirror you walk along the road with, reflecting the world. Only that the mirror has long been shattered into small pieces. We see the world through them; we do not have a full and continuous story. Our own stories are stories of breaking, failure, points of silence. And so the main trauma, theme, and plot in the novel was how to tell what cannot be told. How to speak through continuous breakages.

In this sense, perhaps the word “story” is misleading. My questioning and doubt that we possess a solid and linear personal story is one of the themes I continue to think over and write about. But beyond this—must we always invent plots, surprising and unseen narrative turns? I have never been fond of such things. Borges wrote that there are only four basic stories in the world and they repeat forever. One is about a man crucified who rises again, another about a great war and the siege of a city, and so on. Anyway, craftsmanship, in my view, is not in inventing something strange and unseen (there is no such thing, believe me) in order to stun your reader or seduce Netflix to film your book. What is truly challenging for me is how to tell about a person sitting in a room at 3 p.m., when nothing happens except life itself, except one’s own sadness which cannot even be named. This is what interests me more and more. It is easy to tell what has happened, but how do you tell what has not happened?

All of us here come from, how shall I put it, small languages.

Why are translation and literature in translation so important today? We cannot close our eyes to the time we live in—a time of wars, populism, and aggression. A time of false narratives about humanity and the world. We, who stand on the side of stories, cannot remain indifferent. Literature, especially in translation, is a natural antidote to populism and propaganda. Literature in translation gives us the full picture of the world, the whole range of voices and stories—not only the dominant ones, but all narratives, including the muffled ones coming from “small” languages.

At the end of the 1990s I had my first public reading in Berlin from the newly translated in German Natural Novel. After the reading, a woman from the audience told me, with some disappointment: well, I expected somewhat different stories from you, especially as someone coming from the Balkans. I realized that she had expected battles, blood, murders, knives. I gently explained, with a slight sense of guilt, that even in Bulgaria and on the Balkans people have everyday life, they fall in love, get divorced, and sometimes die of natural causes, not with a knife stuck in their back.

This stereotype always exists. If you come from the periphery, you are expected to tell exotic and local stories. The big themes, so to speak, are reserved for the big literatures.

When three years ago I had to say a few words after receiving the International Booker Prize, which is awarded precisely for literature in translation, I did not fail to mention that small languages also have the right to speak about big things—love, hope, sadness, despair, trauma, unfreedom. And it seems to me they have more to say, because all this has passed through their bodies.

Before the actual ending, after everything we have spoken about—the right to fail, the right to speak of big things, to resist stereotypes, to trust language—let me say something very clearly to all of you, translators and writers.

Dear writers (translators, don’t listen), write only your best books. Everything else is hard physical labour and suffering. No matter how much you work, it will look, as we say, crooked. Just like in life. A task can be done with ease and love, or without love and in a painful way. It always shows which it is. And find a translator who truly likes what you write. Because translation too is an emotional act, an act of empathy.

Dear translators (writers, don’t listen), translate only books you truly like. I cannot imagine a translator who feels no passion while translating a text. Translation requires not just empathy but double empathy—empathy in two languages: first in the language you translate from, and second in the language you translate into. This is the real strength, skill, and burden—the ability to be empathetic in two languages. Let empathy be with you too.

Dear writers and translators (I speak again to all of you), leave to the AI the writing and translation of texts that don’t move you. Until machines learn to feel, emotion will remain our sign of humanity—for both writers and translators.

Many things remained unsaid in this text—for example editing and self-editing. Chekhov says one must cut mercilessly, to the point of tears. I would not argue with him. About irony and self-irony. About reading. About curiosity toward the World and the Other, which lies at the foundation of literature. The writer is one great ear, curious about the world. A voyeur of the ear. The world is full of untold stories if only we have an ear for them.

And yet, if we must strip away everything unnecessary and summarize what remains in the end as the existent minimum for every writer, it is this: extreme sensitivity to everything that is in pain—not only regarding your own body, but the body of the world. And a devilish sense for words, for the miracle of language. Nothing more, nothing less.