I am the queen of felo de se…
I am the queen of felo de se
of sands and of the shattered glasses
I have a world of first-born children
and each one has a different father
all the world’s fathers
I am the queen of foppery
of yellow froth of the grey drizzle
I have a clock of a flary frog’s eyes
and by it I lull my own flesh
my own flary flesh
I am yester year’s foliage queen
of the wet winter and the dry death
and once summer arrives I am turning away
to watch how quietly flowers the fungus
oh how quietly flowers the fungus
We are all powerless to pass the door erect…
We’re all powerless to pass the door erect
The door becomes a mesh and clamps us
Bending us coiling and calking us
The tongues swelling they blackening
The tongues are thickening, they are benecktied
Off the butcher’s the Angus Dei is tongue-lolled
With a muscle that is bitten and benumbed
We’re powerless in passing straight the final
Of flesh like this, of its gray gristles
Left is not the exhale decapitated
And left is not the sense of much ponder
Not the one who never grows a truth
Because there is nothing real at its end
Translated from the Bulgarian by Stanimir Panayotov
Author
Maria Virhov
Maria Virhov (1969–2011) is a Bulgarian poetess who has studied Russian Studies at Sofia University, Bulgaria, and has published the poetry collections Yellow Poetry (Sofia: Hermes, 1995), The Wind a Dead Language (Sofia: LIK, 1998), Dances (Varna: LiterNet, 2005), the Russian-language collection Nikomeya (Moscow: Avtokhton, 2010) and a theater play titled Doctor 5 (Varna: LiterNet, 2000). In 2009, she was long listed with Nikomeya for the Russkaya Premiya award in the poetry category. Virhov translated from English and Russian into Bulgarian works by Nick Cave, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Peter Murphy, Anton Chekhov, Velimir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yanka Dyagileva, Sergey Bugaev, Sergey Shipenko, Pavel Goldin and many other contemporary Russian poets, while she was collaborating with Literaturen vestnik and later with websites such as LiterNet and Grosni Pelikani. In the late 1980s, she dabbed in the Russian Siberian punk and underground (sibpunk) movement as part of the band Association Pykh, with whom she released the album Bystree zhizn’ prozhit’ (1988). In 2000, she collaborated with the electronic duo 3 TeLeTa who created a spoken word album with her voice and poetry called Io (produced by Sofia’s Dyukyan Meloman in just five copies, later re-released online in 2007 by the net label Mahorka), and by the mid-2000s and beyond she was also loosely associated with the Rambo 13 poetry movement. Her poetry is inextinguishably linked to experimental music and sonority, also testified in the title of the anthology with selected poems and translations Virhov Blues (ed. Bilyana Kurtasheva, Plovdiv: Janet-45, 2021).
The poem ‘I am the queen of felo de se…’ is originally published in: Maria Virhov, Zhalta poeziya (Sofia: Hermes, 1995), p. 18; it was republished in: Maria Virhov, Virhov Blues, ed. Bilyana Kurtasheva (Plovdiv: Janet-45, 2021), p. 29.
The poem ‘We are all powerless to pass the door erect…’ is originally published in: LiterNet, № 4 (77) (4. 4. 2006), https://liternet.bg/publish2/mvirhov/bezsilni.htm. An earlier and much different version of this translation was published in the same issue of LiterNet, https://liternet.bg/publish2/mvirhov/bezsilni_en.htm.
Photo: City of Yambol State Archive
Author
Stanimir Panayotov
Stanimir Panayotov is research fellow at the Department of Literary Theory, Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Logic, Ethics and Aesthetics, Sofia University (2023–2026). He completed his PhD in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University, Budapest (2020). Previously, he taught philosophy and cultural studies (Tyumen, 2021–2023), was postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Sofia (2020–2021), and taught various courses in humanities in Budapest, Jerusalem, Skopje and Sofia. His most recent publications are as editor of O-Zone: An Ecology of Objects (punctum books, 2026), and as co-editor of Soul, Body, and Gender in Late Antiquity (Routledge, 2024) and Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023). Since 2020, he is editor and initiator of Zlatomir Zlatanov’s publications, and has published his English translations of Zlatanov in Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism and Translation and Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture. He has translated from English, Macedonian and Serbian/Croatian (Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Peter Burger, McKenzie Wark, Mihajlo Markovic, etc.), as well as poetry and prose from and into English, Bulgarian and Macedonian (e.g. Thomas Ligotti, Diamanda Gallas, Adrienne Rich, Hristina Pandzharidis, Maria Virhov, Ilinka Crvenkovska, etc.). Panayotov has published three books of poetry: God vs F31 (Ars/Scribens, 2011; Black Flamingo, 2020); Axiom and Grief (Metheor, 2020); Dark Becomings (transversal texts, 2024, in English, with Artan Sadiku). He is also the co-author of the award-winning radio play Transferatu (Bulgarian National Radio, 2006), and is currently writing up a play on John Balance, to be published in 2025.
Photo by Geo Kalev
