ANDRAL
ANDRAL

The main objective of the magazine ANDRAL is to be the first serious periodical covering Roma issues and providing "inside" information about the problems of the Romani ethnic community in Bulgaria. We should not let others talk about us instead of doing it for ourselves. ANDRAL strives to fight against any trends of racism, segregation, social inequality, suspicion and human malice. The aim of this magazine is to provide objective information about the processes in the Romani community, mainly in Bulgaria. Special attention is paid to linguistic and cultural processes. Due to the fact that there is not a standardized Romani language, Andral uses Latin characters as an alphabet since at one of the last conferences of the International Romani Union the Latin characters were accepted as an alphabet of the Romani people. In the fifteen issues published until now, we translated the whole poetry of Hristo Botev, the feuilleton Political Winter and Balkan Mountains, legends by Jordan Jovkov, ancient Egyptian poetry, poems by Francesco Petrarka and Federico Garcia Lorca, the first chapter of Bhagavadgita and we undertook the challenging task to translate Dante’s “Divina Comedia” in Romani. Nineteen songs of this great Florentine are already published and I hope that we will finish the translation of his work by the end of the year. Those efforts are based on the idea to build up the layers of the literary Romani language, because until now it has not been brought into focus and from a linguistic point of view has become poorer. Thus we introduce the values of the European and world civilization to the young generation and it is done in their mother tongue. We also aim at subscribing people to the values of humanism and integrate them in the remarkable European culture. In addition, in ANDRAL we publish different folklore and cultural materials in Romani, in particular in various Romani dialects, thus sharing our culture, thoughts and views about life with other peoples. There is another dimension as well - we establish contacts among different Romani communities since Roma living in Europe have always been separated from one another and never had strong relations. Andral has been following its objectives and ideas for three years now. It has become a necessity for the Romani intellectual circles as well as for non-Roma who show deep understanding and tolerance towards us and work side by side with us. This is namely the right path. Swerving from it leads to inhumanity, invoking hostility and conflicts, which unfortunately we are now witnessing on the Balkans.