Balkan connections

 

Although several of my forebears had connections with countries like Russia and the Netherlands and, through their business interests, with the East Indies and the Virginia Colony, I’d yet to find any links to SE Europe anywhere in my family history.

Given that my mother’s ‘official’ maiden name was Joan Thompson – even though her biological father was my grandmother’s then lover Eric Butler rather than her estranged husband Percy Thompson – it seemed possible there might be a connection, albeit a somewhat indirect one, via Frank Thompson, the British officer who liaised with Bulgarian partisans during the Second World War, was captured and executed by the Nazis, and has a Bulgarian village named after him. That Percy and Frank Thompson’s fathers both lived in Oxford at one time was suggestive, but if there is any ancestral relationship between the two Thompson families, I’ve yet to find it.

It was when I happened to follow up links to a number of academic papers about one of my Elizabethan ancestors, Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe – of interest to historians as the chief collector of custom duties for Elizabeth I – that I discovered one of his grandsons was granted a hereditary peerage and made the first Viscount Strangford (a so-called ‘Irish peerage’). This grandson was the son of Sir Thomas Smythe, Customer’s most well-known son, and not my direct ancestor (my family line runs through Customer’s third surviving son, Henry Smythe, reputedly the family renegade), but, out of curiosity, I looked up the Viscounts Strangford online. The Viscountcy came to end in the nineteenth century, but the sixth Viscount’s brief online biography revealed that he’d worked in the British diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople and had an interest in Balkan languages. It was his younger son, Percy, the eighth Viscount Strangford (the seventh, his older brother having died without an heir), and, more importantly, his wife, Emily, daughter of Admiral Beaufort (of the famous Beaufort Scale) that provide direct links to both Bulgaria and Albania.

The two met in unusual circumstances. Emily (pictured) was an avid traveller and published a book about her travels in Egypt and Syria. Percy, newly returned from Constantinople owing to ill health, gave it a sneeringly negative review, but this resulted in a correspondence with the book’s author and, with surprising rapidity, their marriage. In 1863, Emily set out on her travels again. This time her journey took her to Albania, partially retracing Lord Byron’s steps to Ioannina (now in modern-day Greece) and then northwards to Butrint, Saranda, Durres and Shkodra. Her account of the journey, On the Eastern Shore of the Adriatic in 1863, was published soon after, with her husband – who’d not accompanied her – providing supplementary material of a rather drier historical nature about the parts of northern Albania she’d not visited herself. The book places Emily among the female pioneers of travel to this part of the Balkans – of which there were several – who serve as precursors to Edith Durham, the great champion of Albanian independence from the Ottoman Empire.

Like his brother, however, Percy Smythe died relatively young (and without an heir), and it was the now widowed Emily who turned her attention to Bulgaria at the time of the 1876 April Uprising against the Ottoman occupiers. Appalled by the brutal suppression of the uprising, she travelled to Bulgaria and engaged herself in humanitarian work, earning herself a reputation as a ‘friend of Bulgaria’ that is now memorialised in monuments and street-names in various parts of the country – most notably, a sculpture in Hisarya and a street-name in Plovdiv. The great Bulgarian poet Ivan Vazov even wrote a poem dedicated to her - 'На леди Странгфорд' - which is available online in Bulgarian here.

I’m no great believer in ‘destiny’ and Emily Strangford is not a direct ancestor of mine, but her husband Percy and I do share a common, if somewhat distant-in-time ancestor in the form of Thomas ‘Customer’ Smythe and it’s interesting that, of all the countries in the world, she had connections with two Balkans countries with which, more than 150 years later, I have developed deep and enduring connections.

Recent and forthcoming publications

Links to poems and translations both (by me and of my work) published in the last year or so, plus a couple of forthcoming book publications. NB In some instances the links are not directly to poems etc, but the relevant location is usually easy enough to find.   

Once There Was Spring: full-length collection of my translations of the poems and prose poems of Bulgarian poet, translator and literary activist Geo Milev from Worple Press, Oct 2025

Scripts of I Went to Albania and Coastal Defences translated into Bulgarian by Zlatko Enev, Winter 2025 

Five poems translated into Serbian in A Too Powerful Word, Winter 2025 - print only  

Four poems in The High Window, Winter 2025 

Interview in Bulgarian re: Geo Milev translations, Literaturen Vestnik 43, Winter 2025

Poems, translations of various Bulgarian poets and a guide to contemporary Bulgarian poetry in translation, BODY, Fall 2025 

Translations of poems by Tzotcho Boyajiev in Ballast and tr.review, autumn 2025

Poem on New Boots & Pantisocracies, July 2025 

Three poems translated into Bulgarian by Kristin Dimitrova in Sofia Metaphors anthology, May 2025

Translations of poems by Kristin Dimitrova, Ilanot Review, March 2025 

Translations of poems by Petar Tchouhov, Littoral 35, March 2025

Translations of Bulgarian poets, ‘Bulgarian supplement 2’, The High Window, March 2025: 

Four poems in Littoral 32, October 2024 

Three poems translated into Bulgarian by Alexander Shurbanov in Потомството на Чосър (The Descendants of Chaucer) anthology, autumn 2024  

Coming soon

Автопортрет с тютюневи мустаци (Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache), ДА издателство за поезия, 2026: new collection of my Bulgarian poems plus a selection of poems originally written in English and translated into Bulgaria by Kristin Dimitrova, Petar Tchouhov and Ivan Hristov 

A Moment Short of Perfection, White Pine Press, 2026: full-length collection of my translations of poems by Kristin Dimitrova

 

The Vermeer connection

 

When I was a child, among the family legends about a Victorian actress, bankruptcy, a World War One fighter pilot, a grandfather who shot a swan by mistake, unexploded bombs in the Blitz and a scientist who kept a pistol under his pillow, there was a story that one of my ancestors on my mother’s side had written a book. A Catalogue Raisonné of Dutch and Flemish Painting. I tracked it down via Bristol City Library. A multi-volume tome published in the early nineteenth century by my great-great-great-great-grandfather John Smith. That was long before the internet and quite a lot more information about him has seeped into the public domain since then, thanks largely to former National Gallery director Charles Sebag-Montefiore taking an interest in him and publishing a book of his and his descendants’ letters.

Born in Trowbridge towards the end of the eighteenth century, John Smith went up to London to train as a picture framer. He was obviously very good at his craft and, once he’d set himself up in business in New Bond Street, his clients included John Constable and the Prince Regent. This success is presumably how he was able to afford trips to the Hermitage in St Petersburg – without realising, I assume, that one of his first wife’s ancestors, Thomas Smythe, had been in the same city during the early days of Boris Godunov’s reign – and, more importantly in the longer term, visits to the Netherlands where he encountered the work of Rubens and Vermeer. Both artists not being especially valued at that time, John Smith began to buy their paintings and take them back to England where his picture framing business rapidly transformed into an art dealership. He bought and sold paintings for the rest of his life, as did his son and his grandson, before my own great-grandfather blew the profits on various indulgences and had to sell the business after a pleasingly complex series of Edwardian scandals.

On the one hand, it seems that John Smith was instrumental in creating the modern art trade and all its absurdities – it’s perhaps no accident that either Sotheby’s or Christies occupy the premises he once owned in New Bond Streets – while, on the other, he also seems to have played a key role in ‘saving’ Vermeer from oblivion. According to various scholarly sources, it was his inclusion of Vermeer in the Catalogue Raisonné and possible purchase of Vermeer’s works for his illustrious clients that led to the Delft genius being recognised as the important figure in European art he undoubtedly is. It would, of course, be pleasingly spectacular to conclude this story with the revelation that when the last of my ancestors on that side of my family – my mother’s aunt – died last year, we found a long-lost Vermeer in her attic. But we didn’t. It is, however, rather nice to know that my forebear played at least some part in putting Vermeer on the map.

 

Geo Milev translations now published in book form

 I'm delighted to be able to say that Worple Press has just published my translations of the poems and prose-poems of the late great Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev (1895-1925). The book, Once There Was Spring, includes all of Milev's major poems/prose-poems as well as a number of his critical writings and a brief introduction offering some context. In the UK, you can currently order copies from the Worple Press website via this link. I will also be in the UK to promote the book early next year and have a few copies in my hot little hands here in Sofia. Milev was undoubtedly a key figure in both Bulgarian and European poetry in the early twentieth century and I am indebted to everyone who has helped and supported me during the lengthy gestation of these translations. 

Pamphlets from Sofia

Here are the links to the five short pamphlets I've put up on here for free download over the last few summers.

How Much He Knew: prose speculations about my father

Scenes From Unfilmed Cinema - poems

And Now Rousing Music - poems

Foreign In Europe - poems

Present Continuous - poems

Ellerker Gardens

Learning to count to six, out of habit,

as, standing in Ellerker Gardens,

you’d watch, each night, the fire curtain

draw across the roofs of London;

you were listening for a silence in that storm,

the absence of an unexploded bomb.

Could you be so absorbed you’d not recall

an insect bite, a broken date,

the instinct for survival which ensured

you kept well clear of the house

until your father had been and gone?

Just heroism of the ordinary sort

among lattices of blown-out beams

would see you safe, in some way at least,

as you searched through the blackout and blast

for whatever fate was lying, waiting,

cradled in the sixth silence.

AI Horror Show 3

 And finally, before my brain collapses, here's what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it to write a poem about rakiya in the style of my own book Unknown Translations:

Rakia: A Translation

It starts, they say, with the first fruit
on the far side of the valley,
where vines twist into language
and the sky pulls at its seams.
Rakia,
thick as a laugh shared in the dark,
it slips from the bottle like a long breath
held too long,
and burns with the promise of forgetting.

I watch as they pour it,
clear as the first line of a poem
you’d never write,
the golden light caught in the glass
shimmers with the quiet scandal
of things unsaid.

One sip,
a sudden leap into the afternoon's gravity,
where thoughts bend like branches,
too heavy to hold in your hand,
and your tongue thickens with something
close to truth,
but not quite.

"To the mountains," they toast,
hands low, steady
like the rise of dusk,
like the curve of a road that doesn’t quite
meet the horizon.
They speak of home,
of ancestors,
of rivers swallowed in one gulp,
as if the words too might dissolve
under the weight of the drink.

But here,
between laughter and the haze
of forgetting the last word,
the land becomes something else.
What were you holding onto?
Nothing.
You hold nothing now,
just the pulse of fire,
the quiet hum that runs through
the veins of anyone willing to listen
close enough.

Another sip,
and the names start to lose their shape,
the drink a language
too old to be remembered,
but never quite forgotten.