Poetry Travels with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: MING by Iana Boukova, translated by John O’Kane and Ekaterina Petrova

The only way to photograph a snowflake
is to hold your breath.
There is a mortality rate among the observers
(and among others as well).

An error within the system
characterizes the system better
than its normal functioning.

The oldest creature on the planet
—507 years—
was a clam that bore the name Ming
and died when scientists opened it
in order to measure its age.

What can I tell you…
Do not try these quantum tricks
alone at home.

By Iana Boukova

Translated by John O’Kane and Ekaterina Petrova

From Iana Boukova’s Notes of the Phantom Woman, translated from the Greek by John O’Kane and from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova, published by Ugly Ducking Presse, 2024

Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet and writer. She is the author of four poetry books, two short story collections, and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman was published in 2018 and received the National Award for most outstanding book of Bulgarian poetry. A Greek-language version of it was also published in Athens simultaneously under the title Drapetomania. English translations of her work have appeared in Best European Fiction 2017, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Absinthe, The Southern Review, and Exchanges, among others. She lives between Sofia and Athens, where she is an editor on the board of the influential Greek poetry magazine FRMK.

John O’Kane was born in New York City in 1940, majored in Classical Studies at Princeton University, then went on to do graduate work in Arabic and Persian at the American University in Cairo and the University of Tehran. As an independent scholar and specialist in medieval Sufism, he has translated eight volumes from Arabic and Persian, as well as five academic works from German that deal with Islamic history, mysticism, and Classical Persian poetry. For over fifty years he has been living between Amsterdam and the South of France with regular visits to Athens. In recent years he has become interested in modern Greek poetry and working closely with contemporary poets in Greece.

Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator and a bilingual (English/Bulgarian) nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her literary translations and nonfiction writing have appeared in various Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, and Reading in Translation. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which received a PEN/ Heim Translation Fund grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026.

Poetry Travels with Anna Blasiak and Lisa Kalloo: MING by Iana Boukova, translated by John O’Kane and Ekaterina Petrova

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