Peering over the Soviet Glasses? Dutch and Flemish Literature in Bulgaria from Multatuli to Panorama

At first sight, translations from Dutch-language literature into Bulgarian during communism seem to confirm the cliché of Bulgaria as the ‘Sixteenth Soviet Republic’. Whereas the first decades only saw the translation of works by Multatuli and Theun de Vries – authors that could easily be framed as communist(-minded) – the situation slowly changed in the second half of the sixties thanks to initiatives from Karel Jonckheere a.o. In the meantime, the cultural policy of the People’s Republic leader Todor Zhivkov had become less strict, partially through the mediating role of his controversial daughter Liudmila Zhivkova. The Bulgarian representation of Dutch and Flemish literature would reach its most diverse point through the founding in 1980 of Panorama, the journal of the Bulgarian Translators’ Union. The path thus laid encouraged the few Bulgarian translators to make some personally motivated choices when pitching the Low Countries, in Panorama, through translated excerpts, poems or short stories.