site.btaPoet Zaharieva at 80: All Poets' Mission Is to Change at Least a Bit One Person's Soul for the Better

Poet Nadezhda Zaharieva turns 80 on Sunday. In an interview for BTA's Gergana Nikolova, she said that all poets' mission is to make effort to change at least a little bit a person's soul for the better, whoever that person may be, and then make the world better.

She said that last week she received the first copies of her new book, Nadka for Short. I called it that because my childhood went by that name - Nadka, the poet explained. "I didn't know I was listed as Nadezhda in the municipality. The priest from Sandanski wrote Nadka on my baptismal certificate," she added. The book will be presented at an anniversary celebration at Sofia's National Palace of Culture on November 7.

"The word 'inspiration' is well coined, but I think it doesn't apply to me at least, because as I am doing something else, suddenly something flows in poetic form," Zaharieva said. "I can't explain how it happens. Because really, too often as I'm travelling by train, by bus, or walking down the street... I don't know when, why or how something that probably works in the unconscious pops up in the conscious and I remember it," she added.

Zaharieva quoted an American psychoanalyst who said that good things should not be shared to make people happy longer, but bad things should be shared so that people can get rid of them. "I agree with neither. I think the good just doesn't give birth to as many ideas for poems, though I do have some poems - I'm Dressed in White/Happiness on Earth/Is Named after Me. But I'm always happy because I see some meaning in everything that happens, I see a lesson I can learn, and I see that it's better to be happy than sorry about something," she said. "The only thing that is irreversible, we know what that is. Everything else has to be accepted and one has to understand why it is happening to them. So I'm grateful for both the good and the bad because I learn from everything," she added.

She quoted her late husband, poet Damyan Damyanov, as saying that that whether they were poets would be known at least 50 years after they were gone, when their friends and enemies were gone and there were no biased people to give one or another assessment. According to her, it is a misconception that the understood poet is no poet and the enigmatic poet is the great poet. "From my point of view, if people do not understand what you tell them, what you want to impress upon them, if you do not try to say even the most complicated things in a way they understand, then I do not see who you want to impress, who you want to wake up for something," she noted. "For me, the example in life is Atanas Dalchev's attitude to ordinary people and his prayer. He asked God to teach him to talk to every person in his language," the poet added.

"There have been cases where I have been told that poetry is nonsense, mainly by men. I shall never forget one such case in Smolyan. It was at the time when people came somewhat necessarily to such events. But I read some poem on the subject of parents-children, and after the meeting the person who had told me this came up and asked, 'Can you give me this poem? I have the same problem with my child,'" she told BTA.

Nadezhda Zaharieva was born on November 3, 1944 in the village of Radovo (Western Bulgaria). Soon after, her family moved the town of Sveti Vrach, today's Sandanski), where she grew up. In the third grade she enrolled in the town library, where she began to read books and dreamed of becoming a writer.

For her, reading is a conversation with the author. The first writer she met was Marko Marchevski when she was in third grade and he was visiting her school. Zaharieva wrote her first poem in eighth grade, in her first literature class. The assignment was to reflect on the image of the Bulgarian woman in Petko R. Slaveykov's works. She wondered what introduction to write about the topic and at one point the text came out in the form of a poem.

She graduated in French Studies at the St Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia.

Her name is invariably associated with poet Damyan Damyanov, who she married as a student at the age of 19. Their marriage lasted until his passing in 1999. 

Zaharieva wrote more than 17 books of poetry and three books of fiction. Her first book of poems was published in 1979. Her works have been translated into English, French and Slovak.

She has written hundreds of lyrics for pop artists. She has worked as a technical assistant and editor in two publications of the Union of Bulgarian Writers. She has hosted a TV show for literature, Na Ti s Nadezhda Zaharieva. She was deputy minister of culture from September 12, 2005 to July 27, 2009.

On June 12, 2015, she was awarded the Hristo G.Danov Award for her overall contribution to Bulgarian literary culture.

For her 78th birthday in 2022, the poet published the poetry collection Capital, which includes 99 poems written over the past four years.