In certain places, not always, there are moments where I tried to convey in English a sense of foreignness. I wanted the reader to get the sense that another language is being spoken.

Helpful to me over the years was some of Ernest Hemingway's writing, for example A Farewell to Arms. You have characters who speak Italian or Spanish to each other. It's been helpful to me to study and try to emulate that in that way.

I don't find English restrictive, but it brings a level of discipline to my writing that I wouldn't have in Bulgarian. My control of English, however you define it, my ability to work in English, is more limited than in Bulgarian. That means out of necessity I have to develop a style that goes for clarity of expression which I may not have done otherwise.

I have done literary translation because the University of Arkansas, where I did my MFA, was program of creative writing and translation, and it's a very different experience. You're trying to honor the writer. You shouldn't allow yourself, for example, to encounter a sentence that's three lines long and break it up into four smaller sentences.

I'm interested in the way our world is defined by language, the living word. How restrained we are by the concept of language, but when you tweak it a little bit your eyes can be opened and your world is totally changed.

Words physically have power to bring things into existence.

The clash of religion. We've had to coexist for hundreds of years in Bulgaria, in the Balkans, and we still don't get along. It's a reason for so much tragedy.