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By Oscar Duffield

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One of my favorite symptoms of reading is empathy. In a 2015 interview with Marilynne Robinson for The New York Review, Barack Obama said “…the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays…” For me, this statement gets at the core of what makes literature so valuable, no matter how frivolous a pursuit it might seem at times. But in Bulgarian poet Olya Stoyanova’s award winning 2013 poetry collection Happiness Street, translated by Katerina Stoykova and published in 2025, empathy is not merely a byproduct of the reading experience; rather, it is something that permeates and motivates each of her poems. 

Happiness Street is both spare and poignant. In it Stoyanova takes already small, anecdotal blocks of reality and pares them down even further to get at their emotionally raw cores, not allowing any inessential or extraneous words to get in the way. Many of these poems seem to arise from observation, as if Stoyanova were taking her readers on a trip (around the world and even to the distant past, perhaps along this so-called “Happiness Street?”) and pointing out little scenes that captured her interest. 

But once she has pinned down her subjects, it’s as if she overlays a thin veneer of reality on top, an interpretive layer. This is where the impression of empathy comes in for me: Stoyanova is a master at pulling readers with her into other minds, fictional or otherwise. She deftly uses the third person, free indirect discourse, a proliferation of hyphens, and an interesting anonymity (the only proper nouns are place names, rather than people) that all conspire to produce a wonderfully empathetic, slivered view into these minds and lives. Take this poem, called “An Idea”:

Whenever he feels unhappy
he notices every detail—
how the smitten man
carefully hugs his plump wife,
how the child holds
her mother’s hand, 
how the dumb songs 
the neighbor plays
incessantly repeat
my love,
my love. 
He notices each gesture
of that man—
how he places his hands
on the wide midriff of his wife
how she smiles
and leans her head to the side. 
He sees how the child 
insistently looks up, seeking
her mother’s eyes
as she stares straight ahead 
and says:
“Come on, 
hurry up, hurry up.”
Then it occurs to him
that only a very sad God
could have created 
all these details.
Because it seems as though 
happy people need
much less.

Like many of her poems, this one has an emotional momentum to it, gaining more impact as it goes. But even her heaviest and most melancholy poems have a gentle optimism to them, and the layer of loamy empathy that they sprout from leaves a beautiful and warm (figurative) aftertaste in my mouth.

As a reader and translator, I would have loved even a brief translator’s note as a preface to this collection, to help frame and/or guide the reader’s experience. While I appreciate the idea of letting the work stand on its own, the truth is no translation operates as a completely translucent window onto the original, and it can be interesting and enlightening to hear the translator’s insights into the work and learn about some of the conscious choices they made. 

But perhaps this is in keeping with Katerina Stoykova’s overall approach: her translation is fluid and doesn’t draw much attention to itself. If I hadn’t been aware in advance that Happiness Street is a translation, I likely wouldn’t have guessed. Stoykova seems to opt for an approach that centers legibility and a smooth reading experience, retreating to the background and allowing the poems to take center stage. 

Many prominent translation theorists including Lawrence Venuti, Antoine Berman and Fredriech Schleiermacher have in various ways suggested that all translations fall somewhere on a spectrum that spans from “domesticating” to “foreignizing.” A “domesticating” translation would prioritize reader’s comprehension and comfort, whereas “foreignizing” seeks to maintain the linguistic and cultural features of the original, even to the extent of alienating readers.¹ See, in particular, Venuti’s 1995 book The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.

I think it’s safe to say that looking through this lens, Stoykova’s approach tends towards domestication. And just to be clear, I mean this as an observation rather than a judgement; either approach can be valid and justifiable, and Stoykova does a wonderful job bringing readers a text that brims with empathy and doesn’t distract with needless unapproachability. In the poem “Personal Experience,” Stoyanova/Stoykova writes: “Seeking / the right words— / like mushrooms— / some outright poisonous, / others— / even more unsuitable.” If this is true (and I think that it is!), it seems that both Stoyanova and her translator must be overdue for a certification in verbal mycology.

Stoyanova, Olya. Happiness Street. Translated by Katerina Stoykova. Accents Publishing, 2025.

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Oscar Duffield is an emerging translator from French, Spanish, and Italian. His translations have appeared in Asymptote and elsewhere. He attended Oberlin College, Ohio, where he studied comparative literature, literary translation, and music performance. He is currently working as a baker and an interpreter on guided tours of Yellowstone National Park and intends to pursue graduate studies in literary translation.