The Hungarian Institute of Culture will host tonight the Sofia premiere of Dinosaur Memories – the new book of Rumen Stoyanov. The famous translator has gathered moments from his 50 years of experience in “word transferring” from and to Spanish and Portuguese. The edition is included in the Masters of Translation series of the Ab publishing atelier. The date – April 1 is not a coincidence, as well as the subtitle Ridiculum vitae. “I opted for the perspective of humor over that long period. I do prefer to see the bright side of everything life offers us,” Rumen Stoyanov says. The short stories are full of humor, self-irony and picture long-forgotten images of socialistic life. The author uses newly compiled words. He has translated One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, works of Cortazar, Borges, Carpentier and many others. The idea for the compilation occurred to Rumen Stoyanov during one of his lectures at the Sofia University, when one of the girls exclaimed on the info that his first translation was published in 1963: “My mom wasn’t even born then!” The title was picked up because of two reasons: the interest of young people to anything, related to dinosaurs was the first one.

“I think that maybe in this way someone will pluck up the courage to open this book, quite big actually, and read something. All the thoughts, impressions, observations, stories etc. are not chronological. These are the memories of a translator from 5 decades. These are really dinosaur ones. They have an assessment of the socialist society 25 years after its end. I don’t want anyone to judge the labor of the translators then, without taking into consideration the technical and ideological situation during the communist era. It’s much easier to work this today. I am aware that most students barely know how a typewriter looks like. They are amazed that we call a great name a translator, who has translated barely 5 -6 books across his/her entire life. They cannot picture the lack of handbooks, dictionaries etc. Translation has always played a huge role in our literature. The Holy Brothers Cyril and Methodius, who invented our alphabet, used to be the first translators, before turning into our first teachers, because they had translated excerpts from the Bible,” Rumen Stoyanov says in conclusion.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev