The issue wasn’t in the translation, they simply
did not want to believe that the country
their army had occupied
preemptively
wasn’t next to their border and was even
on a different continent.
We showed them the map.
They looked at it.
The girl asked: is this map Bulgarian?
They smirked.
Everything made sense to them again.

–Ekaterina Yosifova,
translated from Bulgarian by 
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
The Season of Delicate Hunger (2013)

Ekaterina Yosifova was born on June 4th, 1941 in Kyustendil. She holds a degree in Russian philology from St. Kliment Ohridski University in Sofia, and she has worked as a teacher, journalist, and dramaturg, and has served as Editor-in-Chief of the literary almanac Struma. Ekaterina is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently This Snake, published in 2012, for which she received the national Ivan Nikolov Award in Bulgaria. Additionally, books of her poetry have been published in translation in Macedonia, Hungary and Slovenia. She has received numerous national and international literary awards, and her poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives and works in Sofia.