Making travel a sensitive erudition is an art to which the author of Bulgarian origin applies herself brilliantly, book after book.
Whether you close “Lisière”, his first work translated into French or “L’écho du Lac” just published, you come out each time with the tenacious impression of having made yourself, reader, a great journey… of the kind that “make you or break youas Nicolas Bouvier used to say.
The Swiss travel writer, we find him on the way to Kapka, since she received in 2020 for “Lisière” the Nicolas Bouvier prize, awarded by the great French festival “Étonnants Voyageurs”; but also because Bouvier had perceived very early on, what Kapka, a Bulgarian child born in 1973 in the shadow of the iron curtain, experienced in his flesh: either the strength and the fury of the Balkans, lands of tears and music, of mixing and exodus, of fallen empires and sick nations, of singular destinies which, together, combine in the plural our great human history.
Installed today in Scotland in the Highlands, after years spent on the roads, Kapka Kassabova decided to return to the places of her childhood, on the borders of Europe, in order to deploy the mental and physical map, in border areas with a “traumatized” geography for Lisière or around the Prespa and Ohrid lakes, between Macedonia, Albania and Greece at the crossroads of civilizations and cultures for “L’écho du lac”.
The natural elements: the forest, the mountains or the lakes irrigate the poetic and mosaic writing of Kapka Kassabova, as they guide her steps along the way. And then there are the men and women who live in these places, often survive there, sometimes haunt them. As a true disciple of Herodotus, Kapka listens and collects the romantic – but true – destinies of these inhabitants. Combining family stories, ancient myths and local legends, she then gives her stories an epic, almost magical breath, but also a choral dimension that goes beyond her only trip, listening to places long passed over in silence.
Travel to the east and south of Europe, between Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey or even Macedonia and Albania, in the company of a writer for whom geography shapes the history and soul of peoples.
Show originally aired on October 3, 2021.
Bibliography:
– “The echo of the lake. War and Peace in the Balkans», Kapka Kassabova. Marchialy editions. Translated from English by Morgane Saysana
– “Edge. Journey to the edge of Europe», Kapka Kassabova. Marchialy editions. Translated from English by Morgane Saysana.
