/ world today news/ National Literary Salon “The Ancient Phaeton” June 15, 2020
On the night of May 14-15, 2019, Velin Georgiev suddenly left this world. Poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, publicist. Creator and artistic director of the National Literary Salon “The Ancient Fayton”.
A person with a big heart and eyes open to the beautiful and the good. A reader with taste and insight into the word – as far as possible; to the extent imaginable. And further. A superb friend who did not betray. Adopted by God, according to what he believed for himself, if even in moments of pure his Velin-Georgiev stripping-sharing “to the end” he could also be seen as “adam’s bastard” (“Wild Tribe”). The saint and the gamen, according to how he perceived himself:
I am a saint and a gamen.
And don’t talk to me about God.
Speak to God for me.
Poetry for him was life, and life was poetry, no matter how hard he lived, especially in his last years. He breathed poetry. He fed on poetry. Poetry was stirring. It was poetry. To the end. I have never met a person who falls into such abysses, from which there is no way out, but despite the impossibility – to get out of the abyss. And he was going out. It came out even if only because it grasped the thin, golden thread of some verse, motif, cutting image. He enjoyed it like a child. He was smiling – more in his soul than in reality. On the face of it, he looked like a harsh, somewhat cut-off person, and when he wanted to show tenderness, he did it in a real manly way, in a manly way clumsy, somewhat timidly, as if he was ashamed.
Even from that time, that is to say – the time before the change of 1989, still at the beginning of his creative path, he is aware that he has a lot of work waiting for him. This is what he shared in his lyrical “Auto Interview” from 1972: “I am too careless for myself, / Otherwise, I work like a rotor“. It worked continuously, like a rotor, until the end. Nothing could stop him. And still he urged himself:
It works, my man, it works.
Every job needs work.
As long as you’re not aborted,
work and don’t scream.
Remember: you came into the world
to say everything yourself through work.
Come, sing, my hermit.
Work, brave bird.
“Your Own Arbiter”
He even chased death because, even if he was 86 years old, he was really busy. It was inexhaustible. It was a geyser…
„Since yesterday, I feel that death rears its head in me, hangs around my legs, something has set its sights on me. I say to her: “March from here, ma. Can’t you see that I still have work to do…” Only this…
He must have curled his tail.”
Just That (2018)
On May 12, 2019, just two days before he passed away, he wrote Sonnet of Light:
Don’t get stuck on yesterday’s text,
leave it to the reader, you new write.
You don’t care about sex anymore, we don’t care about exes anymore.
Leave that job to the neighbor.
Today you had a visit from one of the three
daughters – even after Easter,
it was still a good moment, huh
it is something like a homemade paneuritham.
I actually have a bottom man living inside me.
The heavens are my bottom.
As soon as I’m hanging on a sunbeam,
like a light I will sink…
To end the sonnet though,
i take the sun for tip coin.
He gave it to his daughter Boyka Velinova, for whom and in front of whom he apparently wrote it. Something like improvisation. But what!… And then you took a selfie. There you go. And his daughter said she would post both the poem and the photo on Facebook. And he proposed to write above them “TIME FOR TOGETHER…”.
There is time to be together. And time – for individually. Until a year ago, it was time to be together with Velin Georgiev. Now is the time for separately, though together. Because, although he is gone, we carry him in our hearts, in our thoughts, in our memories, in our words. Because with us and next to us are his numerous books of volcanic poetry, shocking prose, insightful literary criticism fragments and articles. Because with us and by our side is his immortal spirit.
* * *
He told me more than once: “I know when I will die. And I know you will be speaking in the Ritual Hall. I even know your words, which you will say.’ I don’t know if he really knew the date of his death. But we all witnessed that some time before he left us he fell into those states of his from which, according to what he himself shared in an inquiry, “very hard to get out”. So he really knew. And it was painful for him to live with the thought of approaching death. How painful – we can only guess, recalling the panic that gripped the entire humanity with the explosion of the news about the new coronavirus, how most people lost ground under their feet, and to this day they do not find it. Moreover, the danger was not even direct, but hypothetical – not tomorrow, not the day after tomorrow, or on a certain date, but maybe sometime, not knowing when… And he knew the day of his death and he knew that it would not pass him by. And I actually spoke in the Ritual Hall. And probably the words were ones he had already heard in his lifetime.
The survey I mentioned is of Maria Mushkarova with him. His last confession, in which he tells the story of his life to an escort – the story with the poem “Foreign Blood” and the stories that followed. It’s a fairy tale. Because a person turns into a fairy tale, into a legend, into a legend every nightmare and in general everything bad that he experienced, but was not able to fully perceive as reality. This is the way to move on, to live normally and forward to fulfill your true purpose. And the nightmare is just a “bonus” on the path he is on, the greatest luck, because it keeps him awake all the time, even when he is asleep, keeps him always on the alert, does not allow him to deviate or give up in the middle of the road. Even more – if he is a poet. And even more – if his class is superclass. As it was with Velin Georgiev.
Now that I think about it, it is actually still unknown to the Bulgarian reader in all its significance. We are yet to discover it in its unadulterated glory. He also saw this:
You will probably need it posthumously
to say: He was a poet, though poor,
whichever way you look at it…
Yes, and last Thursday
I filled you with lyrical poppies,
let’s say it even for the last time.
Any way you put it
you will need it sometime.
It will be on another Thursday.
“You’ll have to…”
His work can be fully explored only when viewed in the light of the story of the poem “Foreign Blood” and the events that followed it. And he was somehow shy to talk about his troubles. And he didn’t even publish his “persecuted” poems in a book after the changes, which was logically more logical – in order not to get involved in the society of “dissidents with dividends” (Bulgarian patent “dissidence” – when even the dissident himself did not know once that he dissidents, and subsequently, after the changes, decently cashes in on his former pretended martyrdom!). He published his former works individually, in the midst of new poems, and only put a date after them to indicate when they were written. I envy the future researchers who will deal with his work, with his archive (which will soon enrich the fund of the National Literary Salon). I envy them, because they will have the unique opportunity to discover the real, in their gigantic stature, the poet Velin Georgiev and his unadulterated poetry. Now without the intervention of timid editors, trembling for their post and purse. Without the shadows of local and metropolitan political and all other greatnesses, which made the life of the thinking and the able, the talented, difficult, did not allow him to stand up in everyday life to his full height, silenced his voice, took away his speech.
Velin Georgiev was not a dissident of that time, at least not in the sense in which a number of poets, fiction writers and playwrights were competing in the early 1990s to make ends meet. He was a martyr of the times. His entire work is marked by martyrdom. And in the olden time. And in today’s. A stranger among his own. One among strangers. Bird of God. And Edinak. He was five-man for a good word, for recognition, for adoration. Officially, not semi– And Not– legal. He was getting them after the change. But it still seems to me that we have missed the main thing – to give him the high, true assessment that he undoubtedly deserves. Let’s tell him categorically, without appeal, that he is one of the greatest. Well, it’s time to say it! Although late – for him. But not too late – for ourselves. Apparently, great poetry – according to an unfortunate Bulgarian tradition – is sanctified and renewed only by great martyrdom.
So it was. So it will be.
* * *
In his last poem on Planet Earth, which he gave to his daughter Boyka Velinova, he wrote:
As soon as I’m hanging on a sunbeam,
like a light I will sink…
Be with the light, Velina! Be a light!
17 May – 14 June 2020
Elena Alekova
#Elena #Alekova #sink #light.. #Posthumous #words #Velin #Georgiev
