Notes of the Phantom Woman

Iana Boukova

Translated by John O'Kane, Ekaterina Petrova

POETRY, TRANSLATION  | $20

November 2024
Read an excerpt

(Wherever I go, I find meanings,
just like wherever Poirot goes, murders take place.)

 

Contact with reality
produces a lot of movement.
Or, as one of my friends puts it:
they hit one another
because they like touching each other.

The sky—as Kepler discovered—
is not a dome; it’s a siege.
His noetic onion
of perfect Platonic solids
collapsed.

It came to be mathematically proven
that every orbit possesses two centers,
and one of them is emptiness.

(Kepler displayed amazing sangfroid for someone
whose mother was almost burned at the stake as a witch.)

Only much, much later, there appeared
the science of economics, according to which
the unlimited reproduction of archetypes
leads to their inevitable devaluation.
Hence terms emerge such as
“light pollution.”

 

(And each time it’s in a new way inauspicious
when people suddenly stop what they’re doing
and look up at the sky.)

With a near-compulsive insistence, Notes of the Phantom Woman addresses the question of what reality is and how we construct it. Ranging in subject from the presence of pigeons in the city, the dead ends of logic, how geological time becomes personal, and the boundary between statistics and Hell, the poems are connected by a rigorous inquiry into the illusions of thinking, the blind spots of utopianism, and the trouble with moral positioning. Results of such a task are—predictably—unpredictable; a healthy dose of black humor helps the poetry go down.

About the Author

Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet and writer. She is the author of four poetry books, two short story collections, and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman was published in 2018 and received the National Award for most outstanding book of Bulgarian poetry. A Greek-language version of it was also published in Athens simultaneously under the title Drapetomania. English translations of her work have appeared in Best European Fiction 2017, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Absinthe, The Southern Review, and Exchanges among others. She lives between Sofia and Athens, where she is an editor on the board of the influential Greek poetry magazine FRMK.

Praise

We are simultaneously the spider web and the spider, Boukova’s poetic work seems to indicate, with its continuous engendering of connections. It transforms the trivial and self-evident, adds itself to the mystery without solving it, aware that it is a part of it, and expounds its unrelenting logic, stretching it to the point of absurdity. At the same time, this is a deeply political book which methodically revisits, with a scientist’s soberness and a poet’s inventive imagination, with both irony and directness, human cruelty, hypocrisy, and the disguised totalitarianism of idealist intentions. Although it frequently leans towards horror, it is saved by the humour and beauty of the poetic statement.

Katerina Iliopoulou

This book brings in contact the essay form (the philosophic, metaphysical exploration) and poetry (poetic explosion), like two ever-moving, rotating grindstones that hone one another.

Orfeas Apergis

Iana Bukova does not want to make things easy, touching, or elevated . . . She wants to cause concern, to mess with the status quo, to frighten us and startle us–she is straightforward, even at the risk of sounding unpleasant. While reading these part sarcastic and part terrifying (what a combination for poetry!) verses and poems, the reader gradually realizes that this is precisely the language and the manner that nowadays can be used to philosophize, to speak about the life around us in its entirety–from our internal torments to politics, from nature to concentration camps, from writing and writers to insanity…

Silvia Choleva

About the Translators

John O’Kane was born in New York City in 1940, majored in Classical Studies at Princeton University, then went on to do graduate work in Arabic and Persian at the American University in Cairo and the University of Tehran. As an independent scholar and specialist in medieval Sufism, he has translated eight volumes from Arabic and Persian, as well as five academic works from German that deal withIslamic history, mysticism, and Classical Persian poetry. For over fifty years he has been living between Amsterdam and the South of France with regular visits to Athens. In recent years he has become interested in modern Greek poetry and working closely with contemporary poets in Greece.

Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator and a bilingual (English/Bulgarian) nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her literary translations and nonfiction writing have appeared in various Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, and Reading in Translation. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026.

Links

Interview with Iana Boukova at Reading Greece (Greek News Agenda)

“Iana Boukova, or The Relentless Search for Meaning(s)”, Ekaterina Petrova introduces Iana Boukova on Asymptote

Interview with Iana Boukova on Apofenie

Conversation of Iana Bukova and Ekaterina Petrova with Tynan Kogane, editor at New Directions, broadcast by Trafika Europe Radio

Publication Details

ISBN: 978-1-946433-00-8
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 88 pp, 4.5 x 7.25 in
Publication Date: November 15 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)