WILD TALES
Haitov’s tales are set in the small villages of the Rhodope Mountains in south-east Bulgaria, one of the most remote corners of Europe. They are related in a robust, down-to-earth style by a series of finely realized narrators, most of whom look back to the early years of this century and beyond, when brides were stolen and bandits roamed the hills. These men – shepherds, shoemakers, coopers and foresters – speak to the reader directly, involving him in their triumphs, their disappointments, their exploits in love or in business. Each has a tale to tell, and tells it superbly; indeed, so vivid and engrossing are their stories, and such is the skill with which Haitov utilizes the rhythms and idioms of colloquial speech, that one seems to be actually listening to rather than reading these stirring tales of ‘those far-off days when men were men’.
This collection, superbly translated by Michael Holman, reveals Nikolai Haitov as one of the contemporary masters of the short-story form and provides an ideal introduction to the little-known literature of Bulgaria.
NIKOLAI HAITOV was born in 1919 in the village of Yavrovo in the Rhodope Mountains. He left Yavrovo at the age of fourteen to work for three years in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city, before returning to the village to become a forester. In 1954, after more than twenty years in the forestry service, Haitov began to turn his experiences into literature; his collections of short stories (Tales From the Forest, 1956; Rivals, 1957; and Sparks From the Hearth, 1959) essays and historical works reveal and reclaim the cultural heritage of the Rhodope people.
Contents
Introduction by Michael Holman
When Men Were Men
Retraining
When the World Stopped Wearing Baggy Breeches
Fear
A Tree With No Roots
A Forest Spirit
You Never Can Tell
Ibryam-Ali
The Litde Black Bird
A Naked Conscience
Getting Wed
The Test
Paths
When the Engine Whistles
On the Scrap-Heap
The Seed of the Dervishovs
Glossary
To Jenny
Introduction
Born in 1919 in the small village of Yavrovo, which nestles in the folds of the rolling, thickly wooded Rhodope Mountains, Nikolai Haitov came late to literature. Although now a senior member of the Bulgarian Writers’ Union and with justification one of Bulgaria’s most popular contemporary authors, he did not turn to writing until he was almost forty. He therefore belongs both to the generation of literary figures who emerged after the ‘thaw’ of 1956, and to that generation of Bulgarians whose socially conscious life began well before the end of the Second World War and the establishment of the People’s Republic.
After a childhood passed in ‘minding the cattle on the hills, studying for school and reading Mayne Reid’, Haitov ‘emigrated’ at the age of fourteen along with all his classmates to Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city. There he went through a succession of menial jobs in the time-honoured fashion of country lads seeking their fortune in the big city : grocer’s assistant, bar-hand, hotel-boy, oven-tender in a bakery, labourer in a gravel quarry – he tried them all. None brought him personal satisfaction (or great riches!) and three years later he returned to Yavrovo, where he eventually found work as a woodsman. The next fifteen years of his life were intimately bound up with the world of forests, rivers and mountains, for his spell as a woodsman led on to three years studying forestry in the capital, Sofia, from which he returned to the mountains and a post with the Bulgarian Forestry Commission. Promotion through the ranks of the forestry service came quickly, and it seemed as if he really had found his vocation. In 1954, however, he was summarily dismissed for what was euphemistically called ‘insubordination’. ‘As always,’ he wrote later, ‘I insisted I was in the right. The officials, however, refused to listen and my name was crossed off the foresters’ register. Two years later it turned out that the whole thing had been a mistake and I was offered the opportunity of returning to my job. But in those two years the winds of fate had blown me in a completely different direction…. All of a sudden I began to write, quite unexpectedly, by chance and under the pressure of circumstances. One thing led to another, and at first tongue-in-cheek and later in greater earnest I too began to call myself a writer.’’ In the words of the narrator of You Never Can Tell . . ., one of the most appealing stories in this collection : ‘This old world of ours is a crazy, topsy-turvy place. There’s just no telling the good from the bad, or how things will turn out in the end.’
Haitov had spent the greater part of his first thirty-five years in the Rhodope Mountains, observing, listening and taking decisions. He had been gathering experience – not consciously and at one remove, as is frequently the case with established writers ‘doing a piece’ on collective farmers or forestry workers – but in the world and very much part of it. Now, prevented through no fault of his own from actively participating in that world, he set about translating his experience into literature. Works filled with the joys, sorrows and wisdom of the Rhodope people flowed in rapid succession from his pen : collections of short stories such as Tales From the Forest (1956), Rivals (1957) and Sparks From the Hearth (1959); historical monographs on his native village (1958) and the nearby town of Assenovgrad (1965); essays and sketches on Rhodope crafts and customs; semi-historical, semi-literary ‘documentary tales’ telling of the Rhodopes’ most illustrious brigands and fighters for freedom; plays for children and adults; highly successful film scripts and, more recendy, journalistic pieces such as The Barbed Rose (1975), in which he takes up the cause of environmental control in an age of wanton industrialization. Of all his works none has enjoyed more lasting success than Wild Tales. First published in 1967, the collection earned Haitov the Dimitrov Prize for Literature – Bulgaria’s highest literary award -in 1969 and firmly established his position as a major figure in contemporary Bulgarian letters. In 1974 it was voted the most popular work written by any living Bulgarian author since the end of the Second World War, while in 1978 it entered its sixth edition, bringing the total number of copies sold in Bulgaria alone to over 300,000. Outside Bulgaria too Wild Tales has proved Haitov’s most popular collection of stories. Translations have been published in Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia and Turkey.
For the non-Bulgarian reader the geographical setting of these stories will be alien and exotic. He will know little about the Rhodope Mountains, except, perhaps, that they rise to the south of the Thracian Plain, stretch across Southern Bulgaria into Northern Greece and are still one of the most remote corners of modern Europe. He will similarly have but scant knowledge of the stories’ historical, political and cultural setting. This ignorance, however, in no way diminishes our enjoyment of the stories. The majority of Haitov’s Bulgarian readers, in fact, find themselves very much in the same position. They may well have been told that the Rhodopes were the traditional home of Orpheus and that it was there, in more recent times, that the twin cultures of Christianity and Islam first clashed and then mingled. They may also have heard tell of the primitive Pomak people, descendants of Bulgarians forcibly converted to Islam by the Turks in the sixteenth century and until very recently considered by the Christian Bulgarian population not to be Bulgarians at all. They will most certainly have visited the tourist centres on a school excursion or a family holiday, much as we would visit the Scottish Highlands or Snowdonia, but the customs and the times of which Haitov’s heroes tell will be alien and remote to them as well. They too will initially find the stories ‘wild’. In fact it is precisely for such fundamentally ‘ignorant’ readers, no matter what their native language or culture, that Haitov writes.
Without doubt he is a first-class story-teller, but he also sets out to enlighten. He is a man with a mission, and his whole literary output can be seen as an impassioned, single-minded campaign to reveal, reclaim and perhaps even to revive the cultural heritage of the Rhodopes. Whether he writes as historian, ethnographer, publicist or one-time forester with plenty of good tales to tell, his overriding concern is to ensure that the traditional wisdom of the Rhodope people, especially the Pomaks, be rescued from imminent oblivion. Acquired through centuries of struggle against (and accommodation with) foreign oppressors, this wisdom could do much to enrich the life of a generation enthralled by technological innovation and obsessed with material comfort. Only a proper understanding of the past, Haitov believes, can serve as a reliable guide for the future.
In the hands of a less accomplished writer such a programme of cultural enlightenment and moral re-education would have rapidly become both parochial and boring. Haitov, however, well knows the stultifying effect of overt didacticism. He may be a writer with a mission, but he never exploits his privileged position as narrator to harangue and browbeat his readers. In fact he retires from the stories completely, leaving his individual story-tellers to be undisputed masters, if not of their fate, then most certainly of the tales they tell. And as we move from professional bride-stealer to one-time shoemaker turned sausage-seller and peddler of ‘yellow piddle called beer’, and then on to a master-cooper who ‘had ridden a mad barrel bareback round the gorge’, we have no time to be bored. Whoever the narrator, we are immediately involved, taken up and drawn into the story. The narrators address us directly and invite us to share their hopes, their fears, their delights and their dilemmas. We cannot stand on one side and observe.
All Haitov’s narrators are men and the world they inhabit – as one would expect in an area strongly influenced by the traditions of Islam – is very much a man’s world. A world of violence, courage, passion, commitment and honour, where a man’s word is his bond. A proud, harsh world in which mistakes once made cannot be undone and conscience and tradition are the only arbiters. It is also a world of great tenderness, devotion and understanding, where women too have a vital part to play, arousing men’s passions and providing men with opportunities to display their courage and defend their honour. In the main these male narrators take us back to the time when they were young, long before the foundation of the People’s Republic, when weddings were arranged and brides stolen, when bandits roamed the hills and you still called the boss Sir instead of Comrade. Sometimes, however, as in A Naked Conscience and When the Locomotive Whistles, the events related span the two periods of pre- and post-1944 Bulgaria, while a few tales are set firmly in the People’s Republic, with co-operative farms, Party members, East German motor-cars and numerous other attributes of the modern socialist state. Thus, in Retraining, for example, the narrator contrasts the sensitive love-play of a Caucasian Merino ram with the brutish sexual impatience of most men in his village, while the narrator in A Tree With No Roots compares his purposeful but hard life in the country with his comfortable but useless existence in the town lodging with his son and daughter-in-law. Although the historical setting is clearly important, Haitov does not demand from the reader either a precise knowledge of current political terminology or a detailed understanding of specific historical events. His narrators do, it is true, occasionally mention events and dates whose significance would probably not be immediately obvious to the non-Bulgarian reader, but they are never of crucial importance to the story. Thus we find references to the abortive left-wing uprising of 1923 – the so-called ‘September Uprising’ -to the ‘Block Period’ of the early 1930s, when a coalition of centre ‘democratic’ parties briefly attempted to govern the country, or to Liberation Day on 9 September, 1944, when invading Soviet troops backed up the home-grown resistance movement and toppled the monarcho-fascist regime. The narrators refer to them, however, much as the English might refer to the General Strike, the Battle of Britain or VE Day. They are points of historical reference and little more.
Whatever the historical setting, Haitov’s narrators are active, concerned individuals, whose emotions run strong and whose loyalties are lasting. Their roots reach deep into the soil. Paradoxically, at one and the same time they strike us as old-fashioned and, as is so often the case with people who have lived long and experienced much, extra-ordinarily modern and up-to-date. On the one hand their high-principled refusal to compromise and their willingness to stake all on a single card presents a complete contrast to the uniformly utilitarian ethic of modern society – East or West – where bets are hedged and values relative: Haitov’s characters walk tall, think big and constantly court danger and disaster. On the other hand their life of personal involvement is very much in tune with – and perhaps also part of – an emerging emphasis in urbanized, industrialized, computerized societies on the primacy of conscience and the search for ‘new’ values. Of course the ‘new’ values invariably turn out to be ‘old’ ones, and who better to illustrate and exemplify those values than the inhabitants of primitive, ‘wild’ regions, untouched by modem civilization!
In their quixotic, but immensely good-humoured battle with their consciences and their past, and also with unreasoning authority, Haitov’s narrators have something to say both to rootless utilitarians and to men of purpose and high principle. Determined involvement may have taught them much about life; however it has brought not peace of mind but rather new problems. Whether committed to an ideal of love, as in The Seed of the Dervishovs, to high professional standards, as in The Test and When Men Were Men, or to the belief that people should be allowed to go their own way and ‘do their own thing’, as in Paths, the narrators for the most part remain frustrated and unfulfilled. To be sure this frustration and lack of fulfilment is not always openly expressed. Especially in stories where the events related took place exclusively in the pre-1944 period, we sense the dissatisfaction with modern life more in the narrators’ obvious enthusiasm for the style and spirit of the ‘good old days’ than in any explicit condemnation of contemporary reality. Such heroic times, we are to infer, when life had more passion and the choice between right and wrong seemed more clear-cut, have, along with youth, gone for ever. And more’s the pity! This is not to say that Haitov’s narrators close their eyes to the evils of the past. They don’t. They see the violence, the brutality, the injustice, the suffering and the social inequality, but, as with the shortcomings of contemporary society, they choose not to place such things at the centre of their attention. Where they tell of events set in the post-1944 period they do not avail themselves of any implied contrast between the past and the present and give expression to their personal frustrations far less ambiguously. No doubt this forthright criticism of contemporary society accounted for much of Haitov’s early popularity, but he is not in the first instance a social satirist. His main concern is not to attack the inadequacies of any particular social system, but to observe and record the reactions to life of those spirited, principled, stubborn individuals who manage to tread their own path no matter what society they find themselves in. Such individuals have always had and will always have a difficult time. Commitment has to be sustained to be of any real value and sustained commitment demands constant sacrifice.
It is when such strong-willed, stubborn individuals find they cannot understand life any more, when nothing makes sense, that tragedy threatens and the stories transcend their regional inspiration to achieve an appeal that is universal. Whether this tragic potential is realized because ‘progress’ has destroyed the more worthwhile values of former times, as in A Tree With No Roots, because a single cowardly action in the past poisons the present with crippling self-reproach, as in Ibryam-Ali and Getting Wed, or, as in The Seed of the Dervishovs, because the need for love and the desire for revenge cannot be reconciled – not even in a modern socialist society – we come to understand and feel for Haitov’s Rhodope villagers. Their stories and their fates – if
not their regional setting – suddenly cease to be distant, alien and ‘wild’. We find that the cultural gap has been bridged and the narrators have won us over to their way of thinking, feeling and looking at life. This they have achieved by their directness and sincerity, by their earthiness, their robust good humour and ability to laugh at themselves, by their disarming readiness to confide in us, their full-blooded involvement in life and, last but by no means least, by their ability to hold our attention by spinning a really first-class yarn.
These stories have not been easy to translate, for in the realm of language too Haitov sets out to reclaim and revitalize. It is impossible, for example – other than in an introduction! – to convey to the English-speaking reader the liberating effect they have had on Bulgarian literature. In Bulgaria a wide gap has traditionally separated the written from the spoken word, and when these Wild Tales were first published in 1967 they both shocked and delighted the reading public. In their directness, simplicity and lack of cant they do indeed go a long way towards bridging the gap between colloquial speech and literature, for although we seem to be listening while the narrators are speaking, in actual fact Haitov is writing and we are reading. The oral tradition to which Haitov turns, furthermore, is that of old people living in an area far from the centres of literary activity. Thus, while using the oral register to expand the literary compass, he again seeks in past patterns a reliable guide to future development. Here too the translator faces considerable difficulties.
Haitov’s aged narrators draw on a rich store of colourful words and expressions so colloquial, dialectal or downright obscene they have not merited an entry in standard Bulgarian reference works. Indeed I was frequently only able to discover the true meaning of such words by having recourse to Haitov himself. The narrators also pepper their speech with words of Turkish origin embodying concepts and attitudes which cannot be adequately rendered in Bulgarian. Although once in common usage, these words are for the most part incompletely understood by the Bulgarian reader today. They are, however, still felt to be spicy, earthy and pregnant with meaning – the kind of words that somehow sound warm and solid. It is precisely these folksy, non-standard elements which give Wild Tales its specific flavour and which, inevitably, lose so much in translation. The most the English translator can do to render Haitov’s revitalized archaisms and to indicate the true nature of the original text is to adopt a colloquial, non-literary, conversational style with the occasional addition of regional words, phrases and intonations. Which particular region the translator chooses matters little. However, as Yorkshire is a county of hills and sheep (as well as towns and factories!) I resolved to run the risk of transforming ‘primitive’ Bulgarian Pomaks into homegrown Yorkshire yokels and introduced the occasional Yorkshire regionalism into their speech. That this was not an ideal solution, I would be the first to admit, but all translations, alas, must needs remain approximations, and this particular approximation seemed to come acceptably near the true language of Haitov’s heroes.
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