By Annie Wyner
In 2016, Amnesty International Poland conducted a social experiment based on a 1997 experiment by psychologist Arthur Aron. Two strangers, one a Polish citizen and one a Syrian refugee, stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes and emerged forever changed: all mistrust, all biases, all preconceived notions, fell away. Those who they once called strangers became their peers, people with unique dreams and aspirations just like them. It is this experiment that gives Izidora Angel’s translation of Natalya Deleva’s Невидими, or Invisibles, its name. The change in title from Invisibles to Four Minutes was a decision made by Angel and Deleva with the intention of imbuing the novel with a newfound sense of hope and compassion. This ethos of empathy for the other defines Four Minutes, a novel that is both bleak and life-affirming in equal measure.
Four Minutes primarily focuses on the life of orphan Leah as she attempts to carve out a meaningful life in post-communist Bulgaria. We follow Leah from her childhood orphanage, only referred to as “the Home,” to adult life as she navigates life as a queer, working-class woman trying to make a difference in the life of children like her, giving them “the life [she] never had,” but repeatedly being denied the right to do so. It is impossible not to feel for Leah, who, for her entire life, is starved of affection and nourishment, both physical and emotional. Her fantasies are laden with candies, desserts, and toys: even in adulthood, Leah’s life remains haunted by the ghost of the childhood she never had.
It is Izidora Angel’s translation that brings Leah’s inner world to life. A Bulgarian American food writer, travel journalist, and translator, Angel renders Leah’s fantasies with the sort of precision and richness that only a writer of her caliber could accomplish. For example, Leah imagines a recipe book compiled by her mother and lists, lovingly and longingly, its non-existent contents:
The notebook with recipes is a day planner from nineteen-eighty something. The recipes are handwritten and carefully arranged by my mother. They’re of my favorite dishes I’ve never tasted, of cakes, sweets, and baklavas, of stuffed grape leaves, moussakas, and creme caramels, of chocolate cakes, of lamb liver with rice for Easter, and bean stew for Christmas, of spinach soup and tarator, of mish-mash, and carp with walnuts for St. Nicholas Day, of Bundt cake–the sugar halved, of egg-free almond cake, apple strudel, and semolina cake (Lencheto’s recipe), of chicken in bechamel, gyuvetch in clay, of stuffed peppers sprinkled with parsley. (97)
In a recent interview at Oberlin College, Angel described her translation approach as a “shedding of layers.” Through this shedding of layers, she captures the vulnerability, hope, and sorrow of this story, bringing Leah’s voice from the periphery to the center.
While Leah’s story serves as the heart of Four Minutes, hers is not the only one we read: interspersed throughout the novel are nine vignettes capturing the lives of others like Leah, people who float, ghostlike, on the margins of society. These vignettes, which can be read in four minutes or less, shed light on the lives of those that tend to be pushed to the margins of society– the elderly, the poor, the disabled – forcing us, as readers, to look into the eyes of those we so often choose to ignore. Amidst the bleakness of Leah’s story, these vignettes serve as a glimpse of hope, a reminder that we are all human beings, people with their own rich interior lives.
In this way, Four Minutes serves as a sort of literary response to the Amnesty International experiment. Angel’s translation foregrounds a language and a history that have long sat in the margins of the Anglophone literary imagination, highlighting the stories of the people who often fall through the cracks of society. Through her translation, Angel implores readers to examine their treatment of the “other,” to acknowledge the humanity of the people who are so often reduced to statistics and newspaper clippings.
Deleva, Nataliya. Four Minutes. Translated by Izidora Angel. Open Letter Books, 2021.
Annie Wyner studies classics, comparative literature, and literary translation at Oberlin College. A translator of ancient Greek, their interests include Greek lyric poetry, Euripidean tragedy, and the intersections of classical literature and modern pop culture.