Izidora Angel works magic with words. Her latest translation from Bulgarian, Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains (forthcoming from Sandorf Passage and Peirene Press in early 2026) ensnares you into a contemporary world of ancient patriarchal law and guides you through its perilous territory on an intense journey of identity (trans)formation, family commitment, and love. This is not the first time Angel has proven a master storyteller in English of Bulgarian women’s writing. Her translation of Nataliya Deleva’s Four Minutes uncovers another layer of contemporary reality — the lives of those relegated to the margins of society. And in Angel’s translation Yordanka Beleva’s haunting short stories mine the depths of sorrow and loss, death and unfinished business. But there is joy and there is beauty in the texts Angel translates from Bulgarian, and above all — the promise of rebirth and salvation.
From left to right, She Who Remains in the USA, Bulgaria, and the UK, respectively.
She Who Remains bridges genres and forms to tell the gripping story of two women, one Bulgarian and one Albanian, and the cultural and geographic barriers between them. For her work on Karabash’s novel Angel won the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation judged by Katrina Dodson. As Dodson writes, “Izidora Angel’s translation from Bulgarian thrillingly captures the novel’s dense tapestry of hypnotic language, arresting imagery, and an acute sense of the rural mountain setting … and creates a passionate and propulsive rhythm in English that carries the reader through the difficult subject matter.” And when Katrina visited Oberlin College in April 2024 to give the keynote address at the annual Jed Deppman Translation Symposium, she reiterated to me her admiration for Izidora’s translation.
After reading She Who Remains, or better yet, after devouring it (to echo an important literal and metaphorical element in the novel), I was compelled to continue to explore the many fascinating and challenging aspects of the text. In this interview with Izidora Angel, she generously answers my questions and unravels some of the mysteries behind She Who Remains, discusses her choices and decisions as a translator, and hints at some of her own creative writing projects.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva: How did you decide to translate Rene Karabash’s novel? What drew you to it? And how did the translation come into being? (I am also wondering how – in general – you choose a book to translate.)
Izidora Angel: In general, the book needs to grab me and be pretty pitch-perfect because I can’t turn mediocre writing into good writing. It’s funny because this book knocked on my door several times before I figured out to grab it. It kind of waited for me until I did. I first heard about Rene Karabash and Остайница in 2020 from Svetlozar Zhelev, one of the torchbearers of Bulgarian literature, and it was on Svetlyo’s recommendation that I read a short excerpt in English. That excerpt was actually done really well, but my mind was just elsewhere at the time. Nataliya Deleva also mentioned Rene Karabash to me while we were working on Four Minutes, but at the time I gravitated towards another remarkable writer she’d mentioned to me—Yordanka Beleva—whose stories in Keder would go on to quite literally change my life. So when I finally read Остайница in Bulgarian at the end of 2022 I knew instantly it was an extraordinary piece of literature. It grabs you from the first line and does not let go.
There was interest from a Big Five publisher, but anytime you get into conversations with the major houses, you need a ton of people to weigh in and eventually maybe say yes. And we just wanted a publisher who really believed in this book and told us so. And that was Buzz Poole who runs Sandorf Passage. He read it, was blown away, took it on, and was then instrumental in bringing on the brilliant Peirene Press in the UK. The two presses will now publish it almost simultaneously—end of January and early February, respectively (and both books are available to pre-order). But before we were under contract, I just kept translating, first to get my footing and then to get some sense if this experimental work could get traction in English outside of my own head. So I workshopped early drafts with my collective, TCTC, and my colleagues there were crucial during that fragile incubation period where you’re not quite sure if something works. When Katrina Dodson awarded me the Gulf Coast Prize for an excerpt, I knew it was on. About a year after that I got the PEN/Heim, who called the book “culturally profound” — so it was obvious we had something truly special on our hands. You just feel it when you do. So for me everything has happened slowly but so fully—my translation work has introduced me to the most incredible women writers and translators, given me a master class in writing and this solid base from which to build my own writing, and given me the privilege and responsibility to then mentor the next generation.
SMR: It’s a story set in Albania and partially in Bulgaria, in the 2000s, and yet it portrays a traditional patriarchal society observing archaic laws. How does it read in Bulgarian? What were your favorite aspects of the novel?
IA: In Bulgarian it reads as in English: like a “dark fairy tale” to quote Katrina Dodson. It’s absolutely cinematic and evocative of two completely different worlds. (A movie, adapted by Rene for the big screen, just recently finished filming.) The narrative itself is as innovative structurally as it is astonishing thematically. It’s written almost entirely in a stream of consciousness style, there’s no formal sentence structure but rather a collection of free-flowing passages and paragraphs that are incredibly lyrical. Instead of periods, the text is punctuated with pauses and spaces and sometimes italics. And yet it’s so beautiful and natural to read, like taking a deep breath. Even within four lines Rene might—and does—switch perspective, timeframe, chronology. This delicate thread is, as you might imagine, incredibly difficult to render in English without hitting a false note or misinterpreting the perspective and losing the reader. There is also a ton of repetition which is so effective as a device because each time it leads to someplace different. So I loved all of it—the sapphic aspect especially, but just as much I loved the feel of the numerous village scenes, which were so reminiscent of my childhood summers in Bulgaria, and I loved the intimacy and the almost folkloric feel of certain sections.
SMR: I’ve been reading about the transgender phenomenon of “sworn virgins” or when a woman becomes a social man, renouncing her sexuality and performing a male identity as a kind of third gender that’s neither man nor woman. Bekija, the protagonist, takes on the identity of Matija, after she refuses an arranged marriage and her father is killed for it, as the law dictates. I am curious if you found aspects of the language itself, of the narrative strategies or structure of the novel that perform a kind of transformation or metamorphosis?
IA: I think this aspect is done really well in the book. The so-called male and female aspect flow into each other, and sometimes the male takes over and other times the female does. They are obviously inextricable. It is worth noting that the Bulgarian is very much a gendered language and in some instances it relays even whether the speaker is a man or a woman. This gives a really interesting accent in the original, because Bekija never refers to herself in the masculine, even after renouncing her womanhood by taking the oath of the sworn virgin. So it is a transition that is neither confined to nor defined by pronouns. But I do love that English is gender-neutral as this helps the in-betweenness of Bekija/Matija in my translation to become fully realized at the sentence level. There’s a really nice passage in the text early on, which describes the masculine flooding the feminine:
Bekija’s murder is the smartest thing I ever did,
they gave me a shotgun and a watch, now I can smoke
and drink and move with the men, go to the pub and
visit the men’s social clubs, they teach me to stand like
them, legs apart, the kids in the neighborhood begin
to call me Bate Matija, I roam the narrow streets of
the village every night practicing my new walk, getting
used to it, getting used to my now immeasurable worth,
getting used to wearing a watch, daddy’s boy
SMR: What are some of the choices and changes that you made as you translated? What were some of the challenges? For example, I am curious about the intense lyricism and formal experimentation of the text, about the spellings of the characters’ names, and various word plays such as the Bulgarian word “sin”(син) which means both “son” and “blue.”
IA: Yeah, it was challenging for sure. As a translator, I had to walk this tight rope between the nuanced, the subtle and the powerful and it’s something which, in the wrong hands, can become trite. And yet, because the text is so experimental, it gave me a license, I think, to experiment on my own end. I thought a long time about the word for “son” and “blue” being the same word in Bulgarian, as well as how the masculine imbues the color. It’s a throughline of the entire book but we lose that in English. So I did something different; in some instances, I let the Bulgarian stay, like when Bekija, still in her mother’s womb, hears her father, Murash, say iskam sin – I want a son; I want blue; in others, I took it a bit further as an interpretation—I wrote “blue must be a color, the color boy.” I subtly referenced Toni Morisson in one chapter heading which also used the color/son interchange and which was completely defined by Matija’s loneliness, isolation and otherness by calling it The Bluest Boy.
SMR: I love the creative license you took with “the color boy”! And since “boy” is the privileged gender identity, I also think about the process of translating a book about gender-based violence and trauma. Did your identity as a woman (and mother) affect in any way your translation approach or even experience of reading and translating the book?
IA: I don’t know if I can so clearly define my style as a woman translator, what I do know is that I have a very specific taste in literature, and this is, ultimately, why I will choose a certain book and render it uniquely. I come from a background completely outside of academia and the MFA world, so my words are lived. And I do think we are still treating translators as somehow secondary to the process, as somehow interchangeable, like it doesn’t really matter who translates a good book. But when you consider the thousands of choices you have to make when translating a full length work, all those incremental decisions add up to change the whole in ways that are profound. What I saw in this text was not just the pain of gender and patriarchal constraint but the resilience and complexity of identity forged at its margins, and what I was struck by is how much love Rene gives to all the characters, even the rapist, even the most complex, contradictory people, who could in anyone else’s hands be straight up villains, and that is something I have to think about every day in writing my own memoir, especially as I draw a very complicated central father-daughter relationship. So to me, this is a vital, urgent story, and as someone who lived through the collapse of a parallel world order, it struck a deep personal chord. In a sense, I translated it not only with attention but with complicity—what it means to remain when everything else falls away.
SMR: You are right – it’s a novel about resilience and survival! It’s also a queer love story about women of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. Is that story unusual for Bulgarian literature?
IA: That’s a great question. I think that yes, it absolutely is very unusual. Of course Nataliya’s book Four Minutes also dealt with the love between two women, but that aspect was woven in as one of many collapsed relationships for the protagonist, whereas in She Who Remains, it is the fulcrum of the story. In Bulgaria, the novel was awarded the Elias Cannetti prize—the highest literary prize in the country, and it was shortlisted for all national awards. And yet, the central queer aspect of the novel was glossed over, seldom mentioned until the book premiered at the Apolonia Festival, and the moderator, Nikolai Kolev, decided to ask the audience: “When will we stop pretending that this is not a gay love story? We have the first serious queer novel in Bulgaria and no one is daring to call it that.” So everyone just got hung up on the ‘exotic’ aspect of the sworn virgin construct, completely missing the love story. I don’t mean to downplay the way the Albanian cultural aspect of sworn virgins was treated in the book—we all took it very seriously and Rene Karabash in particular is a dedicated reader and student of Ismail Kadare’s books. But—and Rene might or might not agree with me on this—part of me feels that the queer narrative was at least partially nestled into the sworn virgin aspect of the book precisely so that it could slide under the door, as it were, what writers did during communism to evade the all-seeing eye of censorship. Also, keep in mind Bulgaria today is still very much at odds with LGBTQIA+ rights. Gay marriage is still banned in Bulgaria.
SMR: You are at work on a literary memoir set in Bulgaria, England, and the United States, which follows a girl’s coming-of-age through fortune and dislocation, immigration, exile, and the wreckage of two failed utopias: communism and the American dream. Recently you published a longform personal essay for The American Scholar about your childhood and its abrupt end. Reading the essay, I was immediately taken back to my own childhood in Bulgaria in the 1980s – with all the objects, rituals, and deprivations that marked our lives. The Trabants and the Moskvitches, the coveted bananas, the Bulgarian rhythmic gymnasts – our “golden girls,” the electricity and hot water regime…Can you say more about your memoir? How does your creative path as a translator relate to your linguistic and cultural identity?
IA: Thank you so much for reading that essay. It’s the longest piece of personal writing I’ve published, so it was a huge deal for me. And I’m so glad you related to it, that means I was able to do that strange tail-end of communism justice. As far as my book, it’s all really quite simple: without my translation work, I just wouldn’t be where I am today as a writer. I feel so lucky to get to carry my mother tongue over into English, and I say lucky because this process has been my life, not just what I do. I’ve been able to live my art. So my memoir has been gestating for a long time, really since I immigrated to Chicago as a twelve year-old. But my story has not been an easy thing for me to get my head around. The beginning of the book is on the lighter side, even as it explores the not always funny absurdities of communist-era deprivations, but the themes that slowly enter the narrative—the open wound of immigration, forced familial separation, parental incarceration, addiction, the quiet, lethal wreckage of systemic corruption—they all add a ton of density and were, as you can probably imagine, quite difficult for me to live, process, and then dive into and write about. Now that the pain of it all has alchemised into narrative, I can tell the story fully. Having said that, the humor is still very much there. The first time I read from my memoir, last November in Milwaukee, it was actually in front of some of my most decorated translation peers. So not only did they howl and holler at the funny bits — which was incredible — but their overwhelming and immediate and loud response for me confirmed something else too: this isn’t only my story, it belongs to a larger conversation.
SMR: Thanks to your work as a translator from Bulgarian into English, along with the work of a few other translators such as Angela Rodel and Ekaterina Petrova, I can teach at Oberlin College an entire course dedicated to modern and contemporary Bulgarian literature in English translation! I am hoping to put together and launch this course next academic year. I’d like to know what you are translating next – so that I can include it on my syllabus!
IA: I love that! And I love Angela and Kate, they are rockstars, and they have some really exciting books coming next year—you should definitely put them on the syllabus. I actually don’t know what I’m working on next! I’m always tempted to start translating something new, but we’re launching She Who Remains early next year and that will be a part-time job in itself for a few months, not to mention the memoir, of course, which needs massive amounts of my time, and there is the business side of the writing, which requires a lot too. It’s all very exciting stuff, of course, it just reminds me of that quote about work, that even doing work you love is a cake-eating contest and the prize is… more cake.
SMR: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions, and in such detail at that! Looking forward to reading more of your writing and translations! Благодаря от сърце!
Izidora Angel is a Bulgarian-born memoirist, essayist and literary translator based in Chicago. She is the author of four novels in translation, including Rene Karabash’s She Who Remains, which won the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation and received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and which is forthcoming from Sandorf Passage and Peirene Press early 2026. Izidora’s writing has appeared in The American Scholar, A Public Space, Astra Magazine, Best Literary Translations 2024, Chicago Reader, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, English PEN, Bread Loaf, and the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, among others, and she has held residencies at ART OMI and Rochester University. She is at work on a memoir.
Stiliana Milkova Rousseva is a Bulgarian-born literary critic, translator, and writer. She is Professor of Comparative Literature at Oberlin College (USA) and the editor of Reading in Translation.