Recently, my short story “Salvaged”, originally published in Escape Pod in October 2022, was translated into Bulgarian (by me) and published on Valentin D. Ivanov’s podcast “Българска Фантастика”, a podcast for Bulgarian SFF.
This was a milestone for me. Though I now write in English, it’s not how I started. My first creative pieces were in Bulgarian. I began writing in primary school and continued to write in Bulgarian until my mid-twenties. After that, however, the words started to flow in English. I didn’t aim for this to happen. It just did. I presume the reason is that I have been using English in my studies and everyday life since the age of fifteen (after learning to speak English in Canada at the age of nine).
Now, nearly two decades later, I’m still writing in English. But when the opportunity to have my story available in Bulgarian came along, I seized it immediately. Until then, none of my stories could be read or listened to in my mother tongue.
But when I set about to translate my story, I realized that this was no easy task—which was a surprise. After all, Bulgarian was the first language I learned, and the story I was translating was my own. I intimately knew the nuances and colloquialisms I needed to transpose into Bulgarian. But to my utter surprise, it turned out that my Bulgarian is not what it used to be. I was grasping for vocabulary (yep, I used an English-Bulgarian dictionary) and even had trouble figuring out the correct prepositions.
Until now, I thought writing in Bulgarian would always be an option. I thought I would always have this resource. But now I know differently. I still speak and read Bulgarian without trouble, but creative writing is a different matter. Perhaps, given time and incentive, I would be able to reconstruct what I’ve lost. Or perhaps was it ever there? After all, I exited the Bulgarian education system in ninth grade.
Thankfully, I had helpers who edited my translation of “Salvaged”. (I’m so grateful to you, guys! Благодаря ви от все сърце!) Still, all this made me remember how in between my existence is. I write in English but live in Germany. I left Bulgaria so long ago that I’ve lived only about a quarter of my life there (even before leaving for good, I spent years away). In the meantime, I changed so many countries and picked up pieces of so many cultures, languages, and experiences that the only place I can truly call mine is, well, the in-between.
In-between is even how my knowledge is parceled, reflecting where I’ve learned the different pieces: science I can mostly talk in English, the names of some herbs I only know in Bulgarian, and my vocabulary for baby and kids’ related subjects is mostly German. These are my most active languages currently, but there was a time when, while I was writing, a word would manifest only in Danish or even Turkish. Thank goodness for the Internet because it would have been terrible to have to lug all these dictionaries each time I moved.
The question “Where are you from?” is becoming more and more difficult to answer for me.
P.S. Valentin’s daughter created the illustration that went along with the podcast episode of my translated story. It’s an amazing illustration and grasps so wonderfully the in-betweenness of the main character in the story.
Adriana Kantcheva 