I have visited Bulgaria often for short periods over the last few years. I feel cheerful and at home in Bulgaria. Even as a foreigner who doesn’t know Bulgarian.

What does a foreigner do with time on his hands some evening in Sofia? This one goes into a large bookshop and looks for English translations of Bulgarian literature. I am pretty ignorant of Bulgarian literature, but have read the translations I found with pleasure.

One such evening I was pleased to find a translation of Dimiter Tomov’s The Eternal Katun: Gypsy Stories (2004), and bought it promptly. One rarely comes across translations of contemporary Bulgarian literature. Tomov, I gathered, is a most distinguished author. Quite a few of his books are available in English (must get hold of the others). He is director of the prestigious St Kliment Ohridski University Press. This book received the Nikolay Haytov Award.

It was also pleasing to find a literary work about Roma in Bulgaria. Even in short visits a foreigner becomes aware of Roma quarters bordering villages, towns, and cities; a feeling of different worlds which overlap and are nevertheless distinct. Curiosity is inevitable.

Coming from Britain, this visitor couldn’t but have been aware of recent xenophobic outbursts there about forthcoming invasions of Gypsies from Eastern Europe, and indeed xenophobic anxiety about anyone migrating from Bulgaria, alongside patronising observations about discriminatory attitudes toward Gypsies in Bulgaria.

So, one is curious. This curiosity can be easily satisfied to an extent by looking up well-informed scholarly takes on the internet, such as Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov’s (http://balkanologie.revues.org/index323.html). But stories are stories, and one can hope to find dimensions in them which cannot be conveyed in scholarly writing.

And I did in The Eternal Katun. Here’s what I read in it:

The Eternal Katun
These stories struggle to find a coherent and balanced attitude towards its Roma subjects. Authoritative fictional-but-all-too-real sort of insights are provided by an ‘I-narrator’ who knows these peculiar compatriots well by dint of having lived next door to them and having played with their kids in childhood. Or, alternatively, by the "voice-of-the-prototypical-
Gypsy" ostensibly speaking on behalf of his brethren. The results are torn between two positions.

First, sentimental sympathy for "our" ethnic minority of Gypsies, especially now that we Bulgarians are going to be bona fide Europeans, and because we must bear in mind that our Gypsies are Bulgarian, too (perhaps). This is bolstered by nationalist allegiance to the current post-Communist democratic European Bulgarian nation.

This is nationalism with pride in a history of relative tolerance towards minorities (with occasional embarrassments, bravely faced up to), extended by a majoritarian national ethos. Admittedly, though, Gypsies can be seen in but don’t belong to this ethos. At most, they are outside or at the portals of institutions, on the borders of villages and markets, occasionally passing by, ultimately a barely registered and yet nagging irritant in the national psyche.

That’s just how it is. A bit our responsibility, a bit theirs.

Second, repeated confirmation of all the usual stereotypes – variously and contradictorily: Gypsies are thieves, too-fertile and waiting to take over Bulgaria, hyper-sexualised / animalistic / infantile, un-teachable (uninterested in learning), a threat to the West which they will invade after accession (and a good thing too, let those Westerners find out), freedom-loving-nomads, tribal-primitive, dark-skinned-curly-haired, of the soil and dirty, of non-European / distant-but-indelible Indian heritage, wise in a primitive "other" way, victims but understandably so, etc.

A full plethora of racist stereotyping masquerading as benign sympathy. All those delivered with a knowing we-know-these-stereotypes-conform-to-our-experience wink.   

Have I misread or misunderstood the stories? I can put in loads of quotations from the translated version for each point. Do I need to?  That’s really the question. If I need to then I must be misreading them, and this is written because I wish to be set right. But there’s more.  

False notes
Apart from troubled negotiations between these two positions which do not quite gel, I also found what I think of as "false notes". Like cacophonic moments in a piece of music. Let me list some.

(a) From title and through every story an impression of a uniform Gypsy sensibility is constructed, which lauds the freedom of the road and makes spontaneous poetry of it. It must be possible for different Roma persons to feel differently about this – otherwise there won’t have been sedenterisation (which has a long history and wasn’t always forced, indeed more often not). Not all Roma move nowadays, very few do. Moving constantly in a European context deprives people of property, assets, education, recognition.

Always has, and no amount of well-meaning liberalism has been able to make it otherwise. Not that there’s been much effort. Some Roma must feel these immovable deprivations keenly. And who is likely to be more sensible of the poverty and hardships of the road and the caravan than Roma?

(b) There’s the attribution of some kind of faithfulness among Roma to some establishment notion of nationality and religion and boundaries at the same time. This seems an unlikely presupposition to me. Why should they? There is little reason for such faithfulness that I can see.

(c) There’s the constant attribution of a carnivalistic, devil-may-care spirit that uniformly butters all Gypsy characters. They don’t much brood, think, wonder, reflect, reason etc. Can this idealised living-life-to-the-lee lot really be human?

(d) There’s the attribution of particular interest among Gypsies in the "West", in "Europe", in European integration as ideas – albeit interest in the spirit of planning an invasion. Both the attribution of interest in these abstractions and the planning of invasions seem invidious to me. But I may be wrong, am I?

(e) One story, Road to Brigitte Bardot, makes a metaphor of Bardot’s rescue mission and reservation for bears, embraced so virtuously by Bulgaria. Here a rescued bear is shown pondering Bardot’s good intentions, but missing the freedom of the road with its Gypsy owner of yore.

Bardot’s good intentions are a metaphor for well-meaning minority policies that have to be implemented in the run up to accession. As a stand-in for Europe in the metaphor Bardot presents a peculiarly ironic case, since her love for animals is attended by intemperate dislike for foreigners (particularly Muslims – she has been convicted five times for "inciting racial hatred" and was an enthusiastic supporter of Jean-Marie Le Pen).

Misunderstanding?
I must be misunderstanding everything, I decided. Perhaps the author can give guidance. There are interviews with Tomov to look to. Here are a couple of comments from the author to be found at http://www.bgbestseller.com/catalog/information.php?info_id=26. Informative stuff.  

Your stories are filled with compassion and sympathy for Gypsies, but they are normally seen as an infestation?
My view is directed towards the human dimension in the stories. It is about being compassionate and lacking a sense of divisions based on racial or religious principles.

The Gypsies manage to sense very acutely when rules exist in a given society. Even before September 9 1944 according to what my father had told me, also before November 10 1989 when the government was strong enough, the Gypsies were a tribe, which could observe rules. After 1990 there is a dramatic change in their physiognomy.

They became more insolent. And yet I don’t see any difference between a pickpocket in the street and a credit millionaire, who robs on a larger scale. When Gypsies see that the central authority has been loosened they start cutting down woods unmolested, stealing rail tracks, conducting organised crime in the big cities, even in Europe. In other words, the way our Gypsies are is the way our state is.
 
The words of your character old Inko that: "if so many people are leaving this country, be they Turkish, then the Bulgarians won’t stay long in it either. Then our kingdom will come – the Gypsy one." ("Road to the Bosphorus", p68) –  perhaps this is not simply a literary metaphor?

There is another prophetic phrase there: "It is a good thing that our present-day statesmen signed the Convention on Minorities. In a couple of years’ time, we, Bulgarians, will be at least protected" ("When the Gypsies Weren’t Roma Yet", p29). I don’t think this forecast will come true and I don’t want it to, but I don’t like the way in which the integration of minorities is being conducted. Bulgarian inhabitants keep emigrating, while the birth-rate among the Gypsies is enormous.

In the 2001 census 4.6 per cent of the Bulgarian population identified themselves as Roma. I must be misunderstanding these comments too. Both interviewer and author seem to take it for granted that the stories are expressive of the author’s extraordinarily humane attitude to Gypsies, and yet these comments seem to me typical of racial prejudice. Do I need to explain why?

I need to be put right by someone who understands the Bulgarian context better. Perhaps I will be told it is only inexperience of living alongside Gypsies in Bulgaria which gives me pause.

I worried a bit about writing these thoughts down. No doubt questions about this book have been aired in Bulgaria widely, and have been cleared up to Tomov’s credit. Perhaps such discussions should only be undertaken within Bulgaria and in Bulgarian and foreigners should listen respectfully or not listen at all.

It sounds too much like holier-than-thou interloping where foreigners have no business. And least of all such as I, with no experience of living in Bulgaria for any extended period, with no expertise in things Bulgarian, with no Roma roots that I am aware of. With a doubtful claim to Europeanness even.

But then it occurred to me that Todor Shopov has taken the trouble to translate this book into English, and the National Museum of Books and Polygraphy to publish and make it available – this English translation is meant for readers like me. And it is a small courtesy to repay that effort with a response.

But then, perhaps it is the translation that has led me astray. It provides a rather indistinct shadow of what, I suspect, is a beautiful literary style in the original. At times the translation is fairly impenetrable.

A translated phrase from the prefatory observations of the late Marko Semov, for instance, beats me completely: "No idealisation, no passing over of the Gypsy passions and known little sins are to be found in this book – only an explicit sympathy, which is not the sequential pre-European obsequiousness …" (p7). What does "sequential pre-European obsequiousness" mean?   

Suman Gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History in the English Department,
Faculty of Arts, at The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes