Four Minutes is the English title of Bulgarian author Nataliya Deleva’s debut novel, translated by Bulgarian-American writer and translator Izidora Angel in 2021. Published in Bulgarian in 2017, this novel follows the life of Leah, an orphaned young woman who grew up wishing to become invisible within the orphanage she calls “the Home,” and who struggles to regain visibility and agency over her life.
Leah is dismissed from the Home upon turning 18 alongside her friend and female lover Naya. Together, they venture into post-communist Bulgaria, where food is always short and their love, frowned upon. They work in restaurant kitchens and move into an attic room where they smoke out the window and reminisce on their childhood, their entire lives together, wrapped around them like an asphyxiating trauma bond. Eventually, Naya abandons Leah and the weighing memories of their formative years. Leah follows suit in her efforts to re-imagine herself and begins volunteering at an organization that provides care to special needs children. She admits: “It took me seven years and too many restaurant kitchens before I was honest enough with myself to realize my life would never be any different from how it was in the Home unless I did something to change it” (62). This change will manifest itself in the form of a girl named Dara, who becomes Leah’s vehicle to healing by striving to give her the childhood neither of them had. However, her single marital status, her precarious financial situation and her queer sexual orientation render her ineligible to adopt her.
Wildly imaginative, Leah’s dreams permeate her life like they permeate the pages of this novel as she deconstructs faux memories of a mother she never had, and re-constructs her own self-imagination. Angel highlights the difference between these two registers from the beginning of the book, visually separating the dream from reality by delimiting dialogue within quotation marks and without previously establishing the speaker. Chapter 1 breaks this haze. In Angel’s words, Leah explains: “That child was me. But my mother wasn’t there. I made it all up: my mother, the conversation, the ice cream” (7). These register shifts reflect in some way Deleva’s journalistic background. In an interview for Reading in Translation, Deleva comments: “I see Four Minutes as a natural transformation of my writing practice from journalism to fiction, exploring the same burning topics that have been my driving force.”
Nine other stories of equally invisible members of society are patched into the narrative fabric of this tale, narrated, at times, in a similarly-journalistic fashion. One chapter directly cites news articles which describe infanticides carried through by desperate(ly hungry) parents. Another chapter describes the Amnesty International Poland project “Look Beyond Borders,” carried out in 2016, which proved that looking into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes is the most powerful way to bring people closer.
During her visit at Oberlin College in September 2024, Izidora Angel discussed the choice to change the title as one directed towards a more hopeful and empathetic reading of this devastating(ly beautiful) novel. The title highlights the act of reading in translation as one of understanding–and seeing–the other who is no longer invisible. In a translated narrative centered on characters transformed by displacement, the title alongside the text has been transformed as well. As the translator describes in an interview her path as a translator from Bulgarian into English, “The literary journey of translation mimicked the physical one and I found some sort of comfort in the pain of carrying words over, as though I could somehow bring the world I left behind.”
After all, it is the idea of comfort within pain that propels this novel forward. The motherless protagonist, now re-birthed in translation, emerges as an individual specially equipped to help those who need it most, and finds in her abilities a reason to keep going. At the end, she walks alongside Dara and they both get lost in the horizon of the book, speaking in quotation marks, only a block away from home. By then, we have learned what the imagined sections look like and are able to recognize another, but we are hopeful. This moving novel will elicit empathy and emotion in all who are lucky enough to read it, and leave them in awe of humanity’s latent desire to love and be loved, even in the worst of times, for more than four minutes.
Deleva, Nataliya. Four Minutes. Translated by Izidora Angel. Open Letter Books, 2021.
Daniela Jimenez Ochoa is a Cuban-born pianist and literary translator from Spanish studying Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College & Conservatory.