The Heart of the Project
A few months ago, a beautiful lady walked into our office carrying something more precious than a business contract. She had a collection of poems written in Bulgarian – verses she had composed for her grandchildren. Her wish? That her “heart’s work” could live in English, so her grandkids could truly understand the love tucked between the lines.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
In Bulgaria, we treat translation with a certain reverence. We grew up reading the works of Valeri Petrov, whose translations of Shakespeare breathed a new, rhythmic life into it. Petrov showed us that a great translator is a magician who finds the “secret frequency” of a poem. Just as Alexander Shurbanov brought the weight of Milton’s Paradise Lost into our language, or Neli Dospevska captured the whimsy of Dickens, our task was to find that same sparkle.
Translating for children is a high-stakes tightrope walk. You have to be simple, but never shallow.
- Bulgarian and English dance to different beats. Bulgarian is often more “syllabic,” while English loves its “iambic” bounce. To keep that “sing-song” quality that makes a child’s eyes light up, we had to “transcreate” – rebuilding the rhythm from the ground up.
- Bulgarian is a language of affection. We have a thousand ways to make a word smaller and sweeter (the -che and -tsa endings). English is more stubborn here. To avoid sounding repetitive, we had to find warmth in imagery and tone rather than just suffixes.
- A rhyme shouldn’t feel forced. It should feel like an inevitable, happy accident. We fought to keep the simplicity of a child’s world while ensuring the “grandmotherly” warmth remained the North Star of the text.
The Result: A Verse Reborn
We hope we kept the hug intact. Below is a glimpse into how the “mischievous knee” of a Bulgarian grandson found its way into English.
| Bulgarian Original | English Localization |
| Баба казва, че съм силен, | Granny says I’m strong and brave, |
| но съм палав и немирен | But I simply won’t behave. |
| и затуй е в кръв обляно | That’s why, as you’ll always see, |
| вечно моето коляно. | There’s a scraped-up patch on my knee. |
| Всеки път се тя зарича: | Every time she makes a vow: |
| „Няма аз да те обичам!“ | “I won’t love you, starting now!” |
| и с целувка по главата | But then she wraps my wounds so neat, |
| ми превързва колената. | With kisses soft upon my cheek. |