A playwright, scholarly writer, and accomplished translator, Merjanski is a formidable presence in the Bulgarian literary and scholarly world. I was first introduced to Merjanski in the early late 90s through his work as literary manager and playwright at Sfumato Theatre, one of the most esteemed and influential theatre companies in Bulgaria. His dramatic background comes through clearly in his poetry, which is full of motion, sound, conflict, and visual imagery.  His close affiliation with history and the classics also impact his poetry in collections like Selected Epitaphs from the Decline of the Roman Empire and The Myth of Odysseus and the New Bucolic Poetry, though as a recent article by Yoana Sirakova in Classical Receptions Journal (2013) argues, Merjanski’s poetical histories “do not search for a reconstruction of the past but for a construction of the present by means of the past.”

Merjanski’s poetry often contains traces of symbolism and magic realism, but these forces are always grounded in the reality of human physicality; in “Evening,” for example, the rain, dull and interminable, merges with the concept of a love gone numb to the beloved’s presence. The end of the poem brings us back to the concrete world of the body—and in fact the speaker seeks this grounding in the physical reality of the body as a way of reconnecting. In “A Breath of Air,” the intangible world of shadow and air resonates with symbolic meaning but is yoked to the physical presence of the bodies beneath a curtain. What drew me to both of these poems was their concrete physicality which arrives as clearly and vividly in translation as in the original.