Category: Translations

Notes on this edition: Obsidian Press published the Bulgarian translation of Julian Barnes’s novel The Porcupine prior to Jonathan Cape’s U.K. edition, thus making it officially the true first edition of the novel.

While in Bulgaria to promote the translation of Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes met his translator Dimitrina Kondeva, and they soon built a friendship. Barnes wrote to Kondeva for feedback and insights into a new novel he was writing, The Porcupine, which centered on a fictional country similar to Bulgaria. In addition to translating The Porcupine, Kondeva later became Barnes’s Bulgarian publisher at Obsidian Press. She describes and republishes much of her correspondence with Barnes in the collection Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. [Kondeva, Dimitrina. “The Story of Julian Barnes’s The Porcupine: An Epistolary ½ Chapter.” Eds. Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs. Continuum, 2011. pp. 81-91.]

Barnes scholar Vanessa Guignery has written an insightful account of Barnes’s development of The Porcupine based on an analysis of his correspondence with Kondeva. [Guignery, Vanessa. “Untangling the Intertwined Threads of Fiction and Reality in The Porcupine (1992) by Julian Barnes.” in Pre and Post-publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English. Publibook, 2007: 49-71.]

Descriptive Bibliography: Бодливо свинче. софия: обсидиан, 1992. (Bodlivo svinche. Sofia: Obsidian Press, 1992). Translated by Dimitrina Kondeva. ISBN: 954-8240-01-7

Title page: Джулиан Барнс | Бодливо | свинче | превод от английски | Димитрина Кондева | издателство | обсидиан | софия | 1992

Copyright page: JULIAN BARNES | THE PORCUPINE | © Julian Barnes 1992 | First published in Bulgaria 1992 | by Obsidian Press, Sofia | [rule] | Превод © Димитрина Кондева | Худ. Оформление © Hиколай Пекарев | ISBN 954-8240-01-7

Collation: Pp. [1-6] 7-17 [18-19] 20-21 [22-23] 24-25 [26-27] 28-29 [30-31] 32-127 [128]. [1]: ‘Джулиан | Барнс | Бодливо | свинче | обсидиан’. [2]: blank. [3]: title page. [4]: copyright page. [5]: ‘Hа Димитрина’. [6]: blank. 7-8: introduction. 9-127: text. [128]: ‘Джулиан Барнс | Бодливо свинче | Английска | [additional text in Cyrillic, as pictured above]’.