One of the first words in Izidora Angel’s English translation of Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes is “Mama” (4). A child asks her mother if they can have ice cream together. It’s a moving conversation that touches on the child’s insecurities and the mother’s status as a single parent and that culminates in each declaring her love for the other. That hazy, familial vignette is the first block in the construction of Deleva’s world. A world filled with trauma, loss, and heartbreak. But running through it all is a savior: Hope. Most of the time it is concealed in Angel’s lexical choices, but there are moments, brief but powerful, where that hope breaks through. Manifesting in the form of recipes, stories, or flashes of memory, these moments keep the first-person narrator Leah above the murky waters of her world.
Four Minutes defies boundaries—of genre, of narrative, of languages and geopolitical realities. The narrative thread is nonlinear—twisting and turning, it interrupts itself. Leah returns constantly to memories from her childhood, remembering her time in a Bulgarian orphanage simply referred to as “the Home.” Trying to document her lack of identity or foundation, she collects and lists objects, memories, and other domestic paraphernalia—many of them imagined or wished for, many of them the markers of what she pictures is a normal childhood in a normal family. One chapter consists of Leah’s “treasure chest of things [she’s] never had” (95) where she includes “birthdays or relatives,” “Christmas,” and homemade food, “homemade anything.” But as she collects from her past, she looks forward in time, hopeful for a life where she can share these things with her future daughter.
Further blurring the boundaries of genre, stories of similarly ignored and marginalized people interrupt the main narrative. Each of these is meant to be read in four minutes, a connection to the novel’s English title. Deleva’s collection of these stories gives these characters a voice, shining light through the darkness of being forgotten—similar to how Leah’s collection of objects and concepts solidifies her within her world. Four Minutes, free-floating like the people in the narrative, serves as a Home for the homeless, for the forgotten, for memory. It is a collection of snapshots, of “untold stories” (133), that provides a fluid yet fixed textual space for the ones who do not fit into rigid boxes predetermined by society. And for Leah, assembling the fragments of a life she never had becomes “a substitute for her own missing history” (133), as she comments on an article about a photographer who collects other people’s family photographs.
An impressive feat of Izidora Angel’s translation from Bulgarian lies in its ability to communicate the sense and culture of a foreign place while still providing a universal, relatable message. The presence of Bulgarian culture is strong—yet it does not prevent access or hang readers up on the foreignizing details. It invites them in. No part of the text is cold or inconsiderate: phrases like “I had no idea what chujbina meant” (71) accommodate the reader in the narrator’s perspective by using more colloquial language, before defining the foreign word with vivid diction: “For me, this accumulation of sounds, the sing-song buzzing of chujjjj-bi-na carried no importance. Yet somewhere deep inside, I must have felt the meaning: the unfamiliar and therefore shiny and coveted Other” (71). Using English grammar and vocabulary, Angel defines the Bulgarian Other while animating different modes of otherness and invisibility—from a Roma child to a disabled man to a sex worker to a retired and forgotten prima ballerina turned cat lady. She bridges two cultures with one language.
Together, Nataliya Deleva and Izidora Angel have crafted a rich and affecting story full of hardship yet warmed by an underlying feeling of hope through remembrance, aspiration, and storytelling. The novel’s ending circles back to the beginning and revisits the mother-daughter pair, albeit in a different configuration. This time mother and daughter are headed home—it is unclear whether it is real or imaginary—but all it takes to see it is to close your eyes: “Here it is. Close your eyes!,” says the mother.
Deleva, Nataliya. Four Minutes. Translated by Izidora Angel. Open Letter Books, 2021.
Max Schiewe-Weliky studies comparative literature and literary translation at Oberlin College. Max translates from Spanish and is interested in the works of Silvina Ocampo, Norah Lange, and Clarice Lispector. They are captivated by literature that explores the hidden aspects of the human condition, and study authors who challenge traditional ways of thinking and writing.
Hey,
Nataliya’s story hits deep, four minutes of raw hardship turned into a testament of raw resolve. That kind of grit and faith under pressure? Truly badass.