Poetry
Вечната и святата
Not translated into English
Elisaveta Bagryana · 1927
Synopsis
The collection opens with “The Eternal One” and closes with “The Holy One”, the two poems that give it its title. Between the two, the woman who speaks calls herself the free one, the wanderer, the unruly one, and sides with the forces of nature against the man who wants to tame them. She has no portraits of ancestors and no family book, but she feels an ancient, nomadic blood beating in her, and hears the gallop of a horse under the whip. Other pieces take up the folk song.
Context
This is the author's first collection, published in 1927, when she had been publishing in journals for some twelve years, and the first signed with the name Bagryana. It engages with the Bible and with popular tradition, in a cycle of ancient popular images. The poem “Потомка” has become a set text of the Bulgarian matriculation exam, and the author said that the title of the book was the one that expressed her most completely.
Who it is for
Short poems. The collection does not exist in French; poems by the author appear in a Choix de poèmes published by Seghers in 1957.
Prizes and reception
The book was a great success and earned its author the recognition of her peers; the following year Ivan Mechekov devoted a study to her.
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