Dora Gabe

Dora Gabe (1888-1983) was a Bulgarian poet, writer and translator whose output ranged from poetry for adults and children to travel books, short stories and essays. She is considered one of Bulgaria's best-known poets of the early twentieth century, and her translations of Polish, Czech, Russian, French and Greek writers made her an important link between Bulgarian readers and the literature of neighbouring countries.

She was born near Dobrich, in the Dobruja region, into a family of Jewish immigrants. Her father, Peter Gabe, was a journalist and public figure. She studied natural sciences at Sofia University and French philology in Geneva and Grenoble, and in 1907 she began teaching French in Dobrich. In 1911 she married the professor and literary critic Boyan Penev, and for the next two decades the couple lived abroad, in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France and Britain. They separated in 1923 but never divorced. She later wrote about how the marriage had absorbed her own inner life.

Her poetry is intimate and often nostalgic, shaped by sentimental themes and a sensibility close to Symbolism, as her first lyrical collection, Violets, shows. Between the wars she lectured on Bulgarian literature and on the fate of Dobruja, and with S. Andreev she edited a children's series for the Ministry of Education. She also edited the children's magazine Window. She helped found the Bulgarian-Polish Committee and the Bulgarian PEN Club, which she led for many years.

After the communist takeover of 1944 she published Vela (1946), a collection praising the partisans, and later returned to more private concerns. From 1947 to 1950 she was cultural counsellor at the Bulgarian embassy in Warsaw. She died in Sofia in 1983, aged ninety-five. She is remembered today for her children's verse, her intimate lyric poems and her long service to literary exchange across Slavic and wider European traditions.