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
Poetry by Maria Virhov
