Hollywood and “high lit” wouldn’t seem to be natural buddies, but they form a piquant alliance in the poetic sensibility of Soviet-era Jewish immigrant and Angeleno Boris Dralyuk, the brilliant and multi-faceted editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in The New York Review of Books – and check out two great poems over in the current The Hudson Review here. He is a gifted translator from the Russian, too – see his renderings of Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and others.
We have written about his poems here, and also here and here. And we’ve collaborated with him on a number of LARB ventures – a Q&A with Russian author and poet Maria Stepanova among them.
But here’s a new reason to celebrate him: his debut poetry collection, My Hollywood and Other Poems, will be out with Paul Dry Books this spring. (Paul Dry also published Dana Gioia‘s Studying with Miss Bishop recently; it’s gone into multiple printings. We wrote about that venture here.) Boris’s brand new collection My Hollywood is dedicated to Dana Gioia, another Angelino.
“My Hollywood features appearances by such cultural heavyweights as Thomas Mann, Laura and Aldous Huxley, and Arnold Schoenberg,” says L.A. poet Timothy Steele. “But Dralyuk also treats us to tours of now vanished landmarks of L.A. like the Garden of Allah hotel and the Bargain Circus discount barn; and he chronicles the careers of some of the many entertaining misfits, including a ne’er-do-well uncle of Isaac Babel, who have passed through Southern California on their earthly pilgrimage. Dralyuk is as well a lively technician—a clever rhymer who is particularly deft at sonnets. Anyone interested in fine verse and Los Angeles will relish this book.”
The collection describes, in formal verse, the experiences of migrants in Los Angeles, as well as the seedy bars, the visiting luminaries, the fading stars – in ballades, in villanelles, in Pushkin’s swift iambic tetrameter sonnets, and more. According to the dust jacket: “… the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. … honors the vanishing traces of the city’s past, and, in crisp and evocative translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke.”
This, from llya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa: “There is that old concept of the ‘genius of a place,’ which, as it enters literature, makes an atmosphere all its own—impossible to forget. I keep thinking of this as I read My Hollywood and Other Poems, in which Boris Dralyuk, the brilliant translator of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories, now gives us Los Angeles: a theater of being, captured in beautifully crafted sonnets, pantoums, and hymns full of longing and character and verve. Anyone who has ever visited the Russian immigrant shops and restaurants of Los Angeles, or stopped in parks where old men play cards and grandmas watch kids while spreading gossip, will instantly recognize the music of memory in Dralyuk’s virtuoso performance. The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the twenty-first century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art.”
My memories of Los Angeles are scattershot and brief, but my beloved in-laws lived in Glendale for at least a half a century; it is perhaps the biggest Armenian stronghold west of Asia. So I appreciated Boris’s lovely translation of a poem by Peter Vegin (1939-2007), a half-Armenian poet I didn’t know (Boris has brought so many poets and writers to our attention). Boris describes Vegin on his personal website this way: “a poet and painter who had rubbed elbows with Andrei Voznesensky and other leading figures of Thaw-era Soviet culture in the 1960s. He emigrated to the United States in 1989 and soon settled in Los Angeles, where, throughout the 1990s, he was a major contributor to the Russian-language press. But a series of setbacks in the 2000s — including a fire that destroyed a number of his manuscripts and canvases — plunged him into depression. He passed away on August 10, 2007, at the age of 68.”
He adds: “One of the things my friends (and especially their émigré families) had in common was a reverence for Mount Ararat, whose breathtaking snow-capped peaks rise to roughly 13,000 and 17,000 feet near the intersection of Turkey, Armenia, Iran, and Azerbaijan. Very recently I came across a Russian poem that expressed this reverence with such witty candor, such sweet music that I just had to translate it.” And so he did. See below. And below that, two more original poems of his own from the volume.
