translations

The text interweaves personal memories of Assoc. Prof. Nedka Kapralova, PhD, with a presentation of her most significant literary contributions to the field of the Bulgarian National Revival. The paradoxical connections between various themes, figures, and works outlined in her research is traced here to present sketches of the colorful and multifaceted image of the National Revival period, as well as the importance of her numerous translations – some of them foundational for Bulgarian literary studies and culture.

This paper looks at a series of “fearful” translated fictional texts around the short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1856) by Edgar Allan Poe that appeared in the periodicals after the end of the Crimean war (1853–1856), offered by authors such as Todor Shishkov, St. S. Bobchev, Konstantin Fotinov, Hristo Vaklidov, Nikola Mihaylovski, Dimitar Blaskov, Pandeli Kisimov, et al. These texts corresponded to the old human interest in horrors and the supernatural that gain new force in the mid-19th century in Bulgarian literature. In this context, their similarities with the Gothic novel are traced. Some transformations of the originals in the process of translation are marked, such as the shift from anti-Catholic line to anti-Greek, and also their influence on the original Bulgarian fiction from that time.

This article attempts to outline the contours of a critique of translation that does not focus on the “losses”, the inaccuracies of translations in relation to the original, but rather investigates the co-rrespondence between the originеl text (the so-called original) and the text continued through translation into another language (the translation), the way the translator – as a writing reader, i.e. the only reader who turns his reading into writing – responds to the call of the text.