Bai Ganyo

By -
Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian, by Aleko Konstantinov

Everybody's doing 2017 halfway posts!  And that sounds like a really fun thing to do, but I'm going out of town for a few days, and rushing around getting ready, so perhaps I'll manage one when I get back.  Meanwhile, imagine me on a beach, and enjoy the single post I'm able to write before I go.

Aleko Konstantinov was a Bulgarian political journalist, and he wrote this comic novel around 1895 (two years before he was assassinated).  As far as I can tell, Bai Ganyo became an instant popular classic and has been a favorite ever since.  It's a collection of stories about Ganyo Balkanski, a seller of rose-oil.

Bai Ganyo is everybody's embarrassing uncle.  He blusters and barges in where he isn't wanted.  He is a master at mooching off anyone and everyone.  He pinches respectable shopgirls and propositions honorable matrons.  He needs to bathe more often, and he's vocal about his suspicions of people who want to steal his rose-oil, but he's kind of lovable -- in an awful way -- anyhow.  The first half of the novel consists of people telling about their run-ins with Bai Ganyo in the capitals of Europe.

The second half, after Bai Ganyo returns home to Bulgaria, takes a darker turn as he gets involved in politics and journalism, rigging elections and bribing people with aplomb.  Konstantinov uses his creation to satirize the thoroughly corrupt Bulgarian political process (Bulgaria was still quite a young country at this time, having previously been part of the Ottoman Empire; Russia helped it gain independence.  So there's a lot about those two powers).

It's an interesting read, with lots about Bulgarians' ideas about themselves and their national character.  I can see how Bai Ganyo became such a popular 'scrappy little guy' character -- a bit like Svejk with the Czechs, I guess.  In fact, in 2003 Konstantinov was put on the 100-lev note, with his masterpiece on the opposite side.
Bai Ganyo has been translated into plenty of European languages, but apparently this is the first time it's appeared in English (to my surprise).  A team of four Slavic translators worked on it together. 

Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more