I’d waited for months to see pages from Marius’s first book in English and, when he finally gave it to me, I read it all in one sitting. It was brilliant, with all of his humor and energy, his stream-of-consciousness sentences and his wild and funny characters. But there were some problems as well. There were some strange ticks and stylistic affectations that didn’t work and, while these flourishes might have made sense in Bulgarian, they didn’t make sense in English. There were usage problems as well, and every so often the prose felt like it had been inexpertly translated from another language into English. I loved his book, but he needed to work out some of these problems.
“I’m an experimental writer,” he said, when I tried to talk to him about particular passages. “My writing is going to be a little hard to understand. It doesn’t matter if I write in Bulgarian or English; that’s just the way I do it.”
“But making sense is important,” I said, shuffling the pages in my hands. “English is your second language. You have to master it before you start experimenting.”
“I don’t think,” he said, removing the pages from my fingers, “you understand what I’m trying to achieve.”
He wanted me to tell him that the pages were brilliant, that they didn’t need to be changed at all, that he was ready to publish a book in English that minute. He’d performed, and he wanted applause. But it didn’t seem fair to tell him that the writing was perfect when it wasn’t. I owed it to him—as his wife, but also as a fellow writer—to tell the truth. He needed to work out the kinks. And so I set about helping him in the only way I knew how: I suggested he apply to writing programs in the States.
“It will be great,” I said. “Getting a MFA will help you perfect your English and you can also teach one day, if you want.”
“But I’ve written two bestsellers,” he objected. “I’m overqualified.”
“You’ve written two bestsellers in Bulgarian,” I reminded him. “But that’s not going to help you write a bestseller in English. You’re talented—there’s no question about that. You just need a little fine-tuning.”
“My academic history isn’t good enough,” he said. “I never graduated from high school.”
“You didn’t?” I said, taking this in. I’d had so many surprises in the past year that I shouldn’t have been unsettled, and yet I was. “You told me you went to college in Boston.”
“I did.”
“So how did you get into college if you dropped out of high school?”
“They let me in after hearing a tape of my music,” he said. “They waived all the requirements and gave me a full scholarship.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. I had to admit: Why finish high school if you get that kind of treatment?
“And then I dropped out of college,” he added, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to throw away a free ride at one of Boston’s more prestigious schools. “And went to India.”
This I knew. He’d told me that he’d left in the last semester of college for Dharmasala, to study Tibetan Buddhism. And still, I was amazed that he’d been so rash, so ready to give up on his degree. I compared his situation with mine, something
I shouldn’t have done, but did nonetheless. I struggled through my undergraduate years, taking loans and working full time while going to school, graduating with $35,000 in student loan debt. Marius had been given a free education and he had just walked away from all of it.
“Creative writing programs aren’t too worried about your transcripts,” I said. “They tend to focus on the writing itself.”
“Will they hold India against me?” he wondered, warming up to the idea. “I can say it was good material for my writing.”
“It was good material,” I said. “Don’t worry. You’re talented. You’ll get into a program. I’m sure of it.”
This was a particularly American belief, that with hard work and talent one will inevitably succeed, and Marius eyed me with suspicion when I said it. I knew he was thinking of the Chopin competition, where it had been connections, not talent, that paved the way to victory. I knew that deep inside, under all the armor of his confidence, he was still the wounded teenaged boy who should have been going to the Chopin competition in Poland. I could feel how hard it was for him, to put his writing out for judgment, to be vulnerable. I wanted to help him get past that fear. I wanted to help him trust the world again.
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To reach Dani, email DaniTrueRomantic@gmail.com.
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Rumpus original logo and art by Max Winter.