The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

 Unlike most of the poets at the con­fer­ence, who dressed down, Kiril always wore the same expen­sive brown tweed suit, which, by the looks of it, he’d paid a lot for in Paris. Behind his worldly facade, he struck me as odd and needy, and he took full advan­tage of the gas­tro­nomic nir­vana. When he became bored with the long con­fer­ences and media events that took up the time between meals, he would slip out to a Chinese buf­fet a few blocks from the hotel and load his plate with chow mein, sweet and sour ribs, fried won tons and other del­i­ca­cies you might not come across in Bulgaria. One after­noon he invited me to go with him for a late lunch, and there he asked me if I would trans­late a few of his poems from French to English. I agreed to con­sider it, and he gave me a copy of La mort de l’Hirondelle Blanche, a pub­lished col­lec­tion of son­nets. We ate together a few more times, and on our last day in Trois-Rivières, we vis­ited the stu­dio of a Vancouver-born woman who made livres d’artiste. Kiril spent a long time closely exam­in­ing the type­faces and papers, and talk­ing prices with the artist.

 

The fol­low­ing sum­mer I landed in Greece and found the copy of Kiril’s book in my lug­gage, hav­ing car­ried it with me from Kamloops to California to Germany. Now that I had a home for a while, I had time to unpack it and read it, and I liked it.

I trans­lated ten of the son­nets and emailed them to Kiril. He liked the trans­la­tions, showed them to friends, who also approved, and sent me more poems. He also offered to pay me — a pit­tance, but he was liv­ing in Sofia, and I found I enjoyed trans­lat­ing. It took me away from my own his­tory and into some­one else’s life through poems that were often lyri­cal and per­sonal, and some­times autobiographical.

 

 Before I knew it, I was buried in French trans­la­tions of Kiril Kadiiski, and striv­ing to com­plete the assign­ment and make some­thing in English that resem­bled what I imag­ined was the orig­i­nal Bulgarian, of which I knew not one word. It was heavy going and I also had my own book, which I was writ­ing in a wooden cabin behind the house on the island of Lemnos, a short walk from the beach, in 35-degree heat that knocked the cicadas out of the tree­tops while my Greek boyfriend threat­ened to cut off the elec­tric­ity to my lap­top if I didn’t stop typ­ing, typ­ing, typ­ing. As I sweated through the pages, I some­times thought, Kiril Kadiiski pub­lishes too much — he should be more selec­tive. I often felt like the maid, sort­ing through a man’s dirty laun­dry. I would throw out a few worn-out socks and keep the nicer shirts and ties. I remem­bered his suit, the one he had worn to all the read­ings in Trois-Rivières. An aca­d­e­mic kind of suit, but also ele­gant — noth­ing Communist about it.

 

Nothing very Communist about his poetry, either, for that mat­ter. As I trans­lated page after page, his painstak­ingly detailed biog­ra­phy took on life and drama. Born in the era of Stalinism, he emerged in the poems as an indi­vid­u­al­ist, a mis­placed spir­i­tual seeker deprived by his­tory of a monastery. What impressed me was his sin­cer­ity, a qual­ity of inno­cence, what one critic called a sense of won­der — rare com­modi­ties these days in the West. In his best poems, he shone like a choir­boy, in poems explor­ing the vast incom­pre­hen­si­ble fron­tiers that once divided Communism from capitalism.

 

It rains, it pours. Mayakovsky is alone in Moscow

And wears a sil­very futur­ist wig.

 

I will toast you from the cup of my skull, brim­ming with verse! 

…

 

Alas, I must be off. I have sworn to over­come all obstacles.

…

 

Up ahead, pud­dles of light. I’ll wade right across them,

I’ll march for­ward, side by side with the Moscow trees.

—“The End of the Day” (1979)

Perhaps later those fron­tiers dis­solved into a no man’s land of the Slavic, post-Communist soul. Or per­haps while wad­ing through mud and barbed wire in the Long March from one set of metaphors to the next, Kiril Kadiiski took a wrong turn? It’s hard to say. Sometime after 1989, his name was included on a list of intel­lec­tu­als banned from the Bulgarian media, and — as Communism fell — he took part in the first free lit­er­ary read­ing at the University of Sofia. In the ensu­ing chaos, as sys­tems crashed, he saw the out­stretched hands of fel­low poets beck­on­ing him to Paris, and he grabbed his chance.

 

From then on, he spent more and more time in France, where he became famous and made many friends, includ­ing Miriam Cendrars, daugh­ter of the poet-adventurer Blaise Cen­drars, whose ear­li­est pub­lished writ­ing, which had been lost for decades, Kiril mirac­u­lously dis­cov­ered in Sofia in 1995.

 

That much of his his­tory I knew, vaguely, from hav­ing trans­lated hun­dreds of pages in my cabin, and later in the tiny pub­lic library at Lemnos, presided over by the world’s most talk­a­tive librarian.

 

In 2004, Kiril moved to Paris to take up a posi­tion as head of the Bulgarian Cultural Centre. It dawned on me that he might actu­ally be impor­tant. That would explain the hand­some tweed suit. I tried, half-heartedly and unsuc­cess­fully, to nego­ti­ate a higher rate for my work. Kiril said he was poor at the moment, with a wife and chil­dren to sup­port back in Bulgaria, but when he won the Nobel Prize, I’d be on the plat­form with him. He emailed me some let­ters of rec­om­men­da­tion writ­ten by his friends to the Nobel com­mit­tee; these also need to be translated.

 

Two more years went by, and cor­rec­tions were beamed back and forth between Sofia, Paris, Lemnos, Montreal and Vancouver. Kiril found a pub­lisher for the poems, but the deal fell through.

 

Meanwhile, I kept trans­lat­ing his cv, which he was con­stantly updat­ing, with bul­leted high­lights of a life in poetry that began at age sev­en­teen, when he wrote his first poem. He was also a respected trans­la­tor who had once worked for Bulgarian state radio, and he had won some impor­tant European poetry prizes, includ­ing the Prix Max Jacob. In 1995, his chance dis­cov­ery of a rare copy of Blaise Cendrars’ The Legend of Novgorod in a used book­store in Sofia, Bulgaria, became the lit­er­ary event of the year in France, mak­ing Kiril the toast of Paris. Prizes and hon­ours fol­lowed, along with poetry cruises down the Danube and the Black Sea and around the Mediterranean, and an invi­ta­tion to the 1998 Poetry Olympics in Stockholm, where he won two poetry medals.

Finally, in 2006, the hefty trilin­gual edi­tion of his col­lected poems appeared in print in Paris and Sofia, co-published by L’Esprit des Péninsules and Saint Clement of Ohrid University Press, trans­lated into French by Sylvia Wagenstein and Nicole Laurent-Catrice, and into English by Ann Diamond. I couldn’t imag­ine this enor­mous black-jacketed pro­duc­tion, weigh­ing a kilo and enti­tled Poems & Poèmes, becom­ing a bestseller. 

 

Having missed the Paris launch, I awaited the reviews. None appeared, but then these things take time. And in June 2007, Kiril sent me an arti­cle call­ing him “the great­est Bulgarian poet of his gen­er­a­tion” in the pages of no less a pub­li­ca­tion than Le Nouvel Observateur.

 

In Greece that sum­mer, my boyfriend and I made a liv­ing by rent­ing rooms to back­pack­ers, includ­ing a group of three Bulgarian tourists, two of whom spoke French. I men­tioned my trans­la­tions of Kadiiski. They told me that an arti­cle on the “great­est Bulgarian poet of his gen­er­a­tion” had recently been pub­lished in Le Figaro. Had I seen it? No. They doubted that he was really the great­est, and their eye­brows remained raised for the rest of the con­ver­sa­tion. They were hid­ing some­thing, I could sense it. Their tone implied intrigue and lit­er­ary espi­onage. Besides, said one of them, who came from a town in the moun­tains of Rhodopes, his poetry is much too per­sonal for a Bulgarian. I said it was dif­fi­cult for me, a Canadian, to make such judge­ments, although I found his man­ners at times a bit over­stated, per­haps even com­i­cally so. Still, I said, he has writ­ten some very good and a few great poems. The Bulgarians nodded.

 

They went away after pho­tograph­ing our dog and epilep­tic cat, and high­lights of our day trip to the archae­o­log­i­cal sites of Lemnos. They promised to send email from Luxembourg. Again I waited for news, but noth­ing came. I let it drop. Too much else to do and think about.

 

In September 2008, Kiril sent me a new cycle of thirty-five son­nets and asked me to trans­late them. I was shocked by their melan­choly tone, bor­der­ing on sui­ci­dal. What had hap­pened? He phoned and asked if I could find him a North American pub­lisher. I said I would try. My hard disk had crashed, so I had to Google my own trans­la­tions of his cv to send out to editors.

That’s how I hap­pened to stum­ble upon a series of blogs and a French Wikipedia entry about a major lit­er­ary scan­dal in France. I also read the arti­cle in Le Figaro that the Bulgarians had men­tioned; it accused Kiril Kadiiski of forg­ing The Legend of Novgorod, the lost early poem by the leg­endary Blaise Cendrars, and sell­ing it to a Swiss col­lec­tor for $50,000.

Apparently, just as he was launch­ing his 792-page trilin­gual tome, a Russian doc­toral stu­dent exam­in­ing The Legend of Novgorod for her the­sis had dis­cov­ered cer­tain dis­crep­an­cies, includ­ing a computer-generated type­face that strongly sug­gested the book was a fake. Faked by whom? Suspicion had landed on its dis­cov­erer, Kiril Kadiiski. Blogs lit up with strings of witty com­ments by armies of ama­teur crit­ics, and the con­sen­sus was that the Bulgarian poet did it. There was no get­ting around the foren­sic evi­dence, specif­i­cally the com­puter font known as Izhitsa.

 

My heart raced as I read the blogs and com­ments. For the first time since our meet­ing in 2002, Kadiiski made sense to me. All along, I had under­es­ti­mated him as an odd­ity. The pecu­liar bear­ing, the expen­sive suit, the lists of pub­li­ca­tions and prizes that had failed to impress me, even as I laboured to trans­late them. Now his sud­den emer­gence as a lit­er­ary ras­cal hit me like news of a res­ur­rec­tion. Just as Sylvia Plath’s poems gained a ghostly res­o­nance once I’d soaked up the lurid details of her rela­tion­ship with Ted Hughes, Kadiiski’s stature seemed to grow along with the stack of unflat­ter­ing press reports. It was Negative Capability in action.

 

Had Kadiiski always wanted to be Blaise Cendrars? Both were sent to board­ing school and ran away to Russia. The Legend of Novgorod was itself some­what leg­endary. Said to have been Cendrars’s first pub­lished poem, its exis­tence has never been proven. In his mem­oirs, Cendrars claimed to have writ­ten it in French at age sev­en­teen as he crossed Russia on the Trans-Siberian. In Moscow a pub­lisher remem­bered only as “R. R.” later trans­lated the poem into Russian and pri­vately pub­lished a lim­ited edi­tion of six­teen copies, in a ges­ture aimed at encour­ag­ing the young Swiss poet, whose real name was Freddy Sauser. Sauser could have set­tled into a more pre­dictable life as a Swiss banker’s son, but instead he chose to become a writer, trav­eller, film­maker, fab­u­la­tor, under the pen name of Blaise Cendrars.

 

Kadiiski’s life (in a Communist coun­try) seemed des­tined to be more con­fined. In an early act of dis­si­dence, he rebelled against the lim­its of speech in Communist Bulgaria where “the only way to escape the sys­tem was to learn to make use of me­taphors and euphemisms.” Later he trav­elled to Budapest and Vienna, repeat­edly tried to pub­lish his poems, and was repeat­edly rejected for mem­ber­ship in the Bulgarian Writers Union. He mar­ried and set­tled down in Bulgaria, where he became a well– known trans­la­tor, work­ing for national radio. He had already set his sights on France when he began trans­lat­ing the great sym­bol­ists— Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire — into Bulgarian.

 

Did roman­tic enthu­si­asm change into per­ceived oppor­tu­nity at some point? If Kadiiski did get the idea that he could write Cendrars’s lost poem and pass it off as the gen­uine arti­cle, fate had handed him the means. He had mas­tered Russian. Having grown up in Bulgaria under Communism, he knew the cul­ture and his­tory by heart. How easy to imag­ine him­self as the seventeen-year-old Cendrars on a whirl­wind tour of a coun­try careen­ing into rev­o­lu­tion. Another par­al­lel: Kiril wrote his first poem at sev­en­teen. Later, as a young poet, he trav­elled to Russia as a guest of the Soviet writ­ers’ union. He went to Moscow and Leningrad and grasped the roman­tic men­tal­ity that fired the young Cendrars to travel the Trans-Siberian in 1905 and, two years later, to write a long poem for the girl he left behind, who died in a fire.

 

Cendrars, who never shrank from bat­tle, lost an arm in the First World War. After that noth­ing could stop him: the one-armed vet­eran learned to write with his left hand and climbed the ranks of sym­bol­ist poets. Then he left them behind to set sail on a round-the-world voy­age, and even­tu­ally washed up on the shores of mod­ernism, becom­ing a twentieth-century lit­er­ary hero. A man who believed in noth­ing, and everything.

 

Cendrars was prone to inven­tion and hyper­bole, to put it mildly; there­fore, The Legend of Novgorod may be just that, a leg­end. But Cendrars insisted that it had been pub­lished in Moscow. What an oppor­tu­nity for Kadiiski, a state-supported trans­la­tor at war with the appa­ratchiks of Bulgaria. A frus­trated poet attempt­ing to defect from the coun­try of his birth. A man with a fam­ily to sup­port. He had the con­tacts in France, who regarded him and his work favourably. He had the motive, the poetry and lit­er­ary back­ground to back him up, and the chance to cre­ate a sen­sa­tion. All he lacked was the means to emigrate.

 In a way, what could be more nat­ural? A scholar, trans­la­tor and pub­lisher of lit­er­a­ture. Someone who ran his own pub­lish­ing com­pany in Bulgaria. Someone with a back­ground in Samizdat pub­lish­ing, and a knowl­edge of the lit­er­ary world and an inter­est in small presses that pro­duce lim­ited edi­tions — as I saw in Trois– Rivières, where he showed such keen inter­est in the livres d’artiste.

 

Kadiiski may even have thought he was the rein­car­na­tion of Cendrars — a fairly com­mon fan­tasy among writ­ers, one that can throw open cre­ative doors. As Cendrars’s ghost, he could escape to Brazil on a freighter and become a well-known cap­i­tal­ist trad­ing in oil — or to Paris and hang out with gyp­sies and other famous poets. He could fol­low the path of fame with­out get­ting lost in the jun­gle—after all, if it worked for him, why not for me? Perhaps that’s why fraud is so attrac­tive, because a coun­ter­feit is at one remove from real­ity, and this adds a spe­cial excitement.

Mea nwhile, naïve and unsus­pect­ing in my spider-infested cabin between the cas­tle and the chicken coops of Lemnos, where my Greek boyfriend railed against the neighbour’s roost­ers, I had per­formed the hum­ble task of trans­lat­ing Kiril’s col­lected works. The hun­dreds of poems I laboured over were, to my knowl­edge, original. 

 

But all of this effort was noth­ing com­pared to the metic­u­lous plan­ning and exe­cu­tion that had gone into con­ceiv­ing, writ­ing, design­ing, print­ing, aging, plant­ing, dis­cov­er­ing and finally pro­mot­ing The Legend of Novgorod. How many late-night hours did the forger spend at the com­puter, cor­rect­ing pre-Revolutionary Russian spelling and gram­mar, select­ing fonts, pain­stakingly ensur­ing that every detail of the pam­phlet cor­re­sponded to descrip­tions scat­tered through Cendrars’s volu­mi­nous memoirs?

The only slip-up that could not be explained: the computer-generated font known as Izhitsa. If Kadiiski did it, this was a minor slip-up, con­sid­er­ing that all this time he was sup­port­ing a fam­ily in Bulgaria, gain­ing fame in France as a poet, mov­ing steadily upward in lit­er­ary cir­cles, win­ning major awards and becom­ing an inter­na­tion­ally known figure.

 

Can one scan­dal bury a man’s whole career? I must say, I am prone to root­ing for fallen angels like Kiril Kadiiski. He may have financed his escape from Bulgaria by fak­ing the discovery. 

 

And deep down, he may have felt that Cendrars would approve. Perhaps, like Alice chas­ing the White Rabbit, he spoke to too many Cheshire cats and talk­ing sheep in road­side cafés, or to Humpty Dumpty, who asserted that the self is a fic­tion and life is only a dream. Perhaps he believed he could wake from the dream in France, the land of poetry, through the mon­u­men­tal effort of imag­in­ing and cre­at­ing this elab­o­rate forgery, then arrang­ing to come across it by chance one day, in a used book­store in Sofia. What would Cendrars make of it? Something won­der­ful, I am sure.