Comment: Letter from Sofia

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Jarman, Mark

Dear H,

For the past six years the American University in Bulgaria has put on a week of American music at venues in Sofia, the capital, and Blagoevgrad, where the AUBG is located. For those who, like me, had no idea of its existence until recently, the American University in Bulgaria was founded in 1990, with grant money from the United States Agency of International Development, to expose Eastern European college students to a Western liberal arts education. I have read that the international financier George Soros was in on its conception. Last November, the composer Stan Link, my wife the soprano Amy Jarman, and I were invited to take part in the AUBG's American Music Week in Bulgaria, because Stan had composed a piece of music based on three of my poems, submitted it for consideration, and it had been accepted. The piece, entitled "Groundswell," is computer generated. My wife Amy sings and I read from the texts of my poems, as music plays which Stan controls at a soundboard. Stan and Amy teach at the Blair School of Music, and I teach in the English Department at Vanderbilt University, which was generous enough to provide us with funds to travel to Sofia. We performed Stan's piece in Blagoevgrad, at the American University, which is housed in the former headquarters for the Communist Party in that region. Amy also gave a recital of songs by contemporary American composers Robert Beaser, William Bolcom, and Lee Hoiby. Seeing ourselves, in a way, as purveyors of American culture to an Eastern European country thirteen years after what is commonly called "The Change" has made us reflect on the nature of that culture. As soon as we arrived in Sofia, the self-analysis began.

When we arrived, we encountered our own culture almost at once in the continuous amplification of rap music in our taxi from the airport to our hotel. One rap artist on the radio gave instructions, almost like a Berlitz language lesson, about just how to perform oral sex, while the beat throbbed and our driver wove his way through a traffic jam, created by a trade union demonstration in the heart of Sofia. At one point, venting his frustration, our driver tore down the block on the wrong side of the street, challenging vehicles that came at us head-on. Meanwhile the voice on the radio rhythmically instructed, "Lick me! Lick me! Lick me on the front!" American music of all kinds played in the background for the next week, at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but this particular introduction made us feel gloomy, if not surprised.

Below the looming silhouette of Mount Vitosha, the outskirts of Sofia are a great flatland punctuated by the depressing verticals of gray and dilapidated apartment blocks displaying drab laundry on every balcony. Once we neared the city center, we began to see that familiar American food franchises, KFC, Dunkin' Donuts, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's, had established their embassies. Later, when our favorite Bulgarian, Mario Angelov, Amy's accompanist, complained about American fast food, all we could respond was that we didn't eat it, and he didn't have to; the choice was his. As he picked at his shopska salad-a delicious combination of local tomatoes and cucumbers and grated white sheep's cheese-and sipped his rakia-a Bulgarian version of grappa-he considered this argument with the skepticism it deserved.

Originally we were to be met at the airport in Sofia by someone named Nenka. After going through passport inspection and customs smoothly (the examiner merely stamped our passports, but others who were not Americans were asked about their business), we entered the lobby where many were holding signs in different languages with names written in Cyrillic or Latin script. We did not see our names. I had studied Russian in college, so it was my job to recognize the Cyrillic alphabet, which Bulgarian, a Slavic language very close to Russian, employs. (Indeed, we learned that the eponymous St. Cyril was Bulgarian). As it was, we had arrived late by half an hour and began to suspect that Nenka had given up on us. I tried to use a phone but couldn't get it to work properly, mainly because my Cyrillic was dimmed by thirty years and a fading l.c.d. monitor. So we hired a taxi on our own. Our hip-hop taxi ride took over an hour for what, we learned, was a twenty-minute journey. Arriving at our hotel-the 100-year-old Sun hotel, known formerly as the Hotel Bellevue, in central Sofia near the Luvov most or Lion Bridge-we discovered that Nenka had been delayed in the same traffic that delayed us. She had called from the airport. If we had waited a little longer, she would have arrived. We learned that "Waiting for Nenka" in Bulgaria meant patience, things would happen eventually. As for the taxi, though I calculated that the time spent ferrying the three of us and our luggage would have reached some figure to make a New York cabbie beam, it came to about eight Bulgarian lev or five dollars. The driver accepted five euros, still a deal at six dollars.