Boris Dralyuk
interview by Ali Hintz
You’re a translator, a poet, a human, and editor-in-chief at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). How do you balance your editorial and creative work? What about your literary work and day-to-day living?
Thank you, Ali, for giving me the chance to consider these excellent questions. The first one is especially important, and I feel I don’t give it nearly enough thought. That’s probably typical: few people reflect on whatever balance they’ve arranged in their lives until that balance is upset. In my case, the balance changes regularly, but it holds. LARB is certainly a full-time job—overfull—with new tasks emerging constantly, sometimes rather suddenly. At its core, however, the job is to edit new pieces, to oversee the work of our section editors, and to curate and present the texts in the most engaging way possible—to make sure that the brilliant writing we’re lucky enough to publish attracts as many appreciative readers as possible. Fortunately, although elements of my daily routine are less than inspiring, that core set of responsibilities never ceases to spur my creativity. Every day I learn something new from the writers and editors with whom I work—learn of a book or author, encounter a fresh critical approach, pick up a concept or even simply a word—and these kernels of learning sprout in unexpected ways. They might inform a review, essay, translation, or poem of my own. So the balance between my editing and my writing restores itself naturally. I do, of course, wish I had more time to let my mind wander, range freely, but I think most of us crave that; I try not to dwell on what I don’t have—that feels like time wasted, time that could be used for a little mental wandering down other, more fruitful alleys. And of course, family should come first. But putting that into practice can be difficult, especially if you and your partner are both busy people. Luckily, my wife, Jenny Croft, and I work in essentially the same field and understand each other’s responsibilities. We sympathize with one another, support one another, and, when necessary, drag one another away from our screens.
You say in your interview with Yelena Furman for Punctured Lines that as editor-in-chief at LARB, your goal is “to cast as wide a net as possible, and to ensure that we’re covering a diverse array of books and uplifting the voices of critics and reviewers who may not have access to other major venues.” LARB accepts pitches both from potential reviewers and authors/publishers who want their book reviewed. In the end, how does LARB decide which books to review? What does that process look like?
We work largely with freelance critics and are as open—if not more open—to new and emerging reviewers as we are to those who have been writing for us for some time. That openness alone ensures freshness and variety. We also actively seek out pieces by writers from a wide array of backgrounds, authors who come from communities underrepresented in criticism and academia. I think I can speak for all the editors at LARB when I say that we’re always happy to hear from authors and presses promoting their books. We give special consideration to presses that are less likely to attract reviews in other major publications: independent startups, houses specializing in works in translation or from other parts of the English-speaking world, university presses, etc. We do our best to match the books that intrigue us most with critics whose voices we value—ideally helping the author, the press, and the critic build up dedicated readerships. Of course, we’re unable to help everyone or even to respond to each inquiry from an author or press (we get hundreds each week, and many are simply form letters sent to dozens of periodicals). Still, we always respond to pitches from critics. If you send us a pitch and don’t hear from us within a week, send a reminder.
How is this process different for featured articles, interviews, etc.?
The process is exactly the same for essays and interviews. We give every pitch full consideration and respond as quickly as possible. Needless to say, our needs each week are different; we want to maintain as diverse a profile as possible, and so we may turn down an excellent idea for an essay—or even a completed essay—simply because it overlaps with something we’d accepted a minute ago. Precisely because of these unforeseeable circumstances, we always encourage promising writers to keep pitching us. A bit of bad luck shouldn’t discourage anyone.
In your interview with Melissa Beck for The Book Binder’s Daughter, you talk about how you started translating at a young age after you immigrated to the US from Ukraine and wanted to share a Russian poem with your English-speaking friend. When did you start writing your own poetry?
I think the first poem I wrote was a couplet about a bird plucking a fish out of the Black Sea. I was four or five. That doesn’t really count, does it? Maybe it does because, in fact, I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t fishing for poems. I’ve gone long stretches without catching anything, but not a day goes by that I don’t cast my lines. In my late teens, I sent a few poems out to small journals, and they were accepted. It was all very exciting, but then I realized that I wasn’t especially happy with the poems in print and stopped sending things out. I continued to write, and took workshops as an undergraduate with a truly masterful poet-critic, Stephen Yenser, who taught us not only to write but to read poems deeply, carefully—he taught us, I should say, that writing is born of this sort of reading. One should apply intense critical attention not only to the poems of others but to one’s own work. Write as freely as you can, yes, but then read and reread what comes to you—see what it’s telling you, what it’s trying to tell you, and help it along. I kept writing poems, and a few of them pleased me, but it wasn’t until about five or six years ago that I hit my stride. That doesn’t mean the poems I’m writing are any good, mind you—only that they’re the poems I want to see, poems in a voice, or set of voices, to which I respond.
How has your translation impacted your poetry?
I have always, from the very start, approached poetic translation as the writing of poetry, full stop. It calls for the same degree of care—care for each word, each sound—as the writing of one’s own poetry, and I feel the only way to muster and sustain that care is through inspiration, through transport. For as long as I’m translating a poem, I take on a consciousness that could have given rise to the original. I don’t become the human being who wrote the original, of course, but I step into some version of that person’s mind—the version contained in, or hinted at, or perhaps constructed by the poem in front of me. Minds emanate from poems, try to envelop and infect us as we read; they want to take us over, and, if their intricate plans come together, they do. Poetic translators go one step further than readers—our bodies possessed, we set to work on new poems in the target language.
And so, for me translating poetry has, fundamentally, served the same function as writing my own poetry: it has given me the opportunity to refine my craft. It has also allowed me to walk in other poets’ footsteps, to see and feel the world as they did, and to learn their methods of making poems that preserve those visions and sensations, preserve whole sensibilities.
Your debut poetry collection My Hollywood is coming out in April 2022. Ilya Kaminsky praised the “wit and daring of [your] rhymes and phrasing” and compared your poems to Donald Justice’s. Why write formal verse in the 2020s?
I wish I could give a universally valid response, but I can only answer for myself. I write in traditional forms because so much of the poetry I first came to love, in both English and Russian, is formal. I also rely on the limitations imposed by metrical patterns and rhyme schemes to send my poems in unexpected directions, revealing and condensing my hazy feelings and thickening my one-dimensional thoughts. Forms often free me from the straitjacket of my motivations. I sit down to write a mournful poem but the need for a rhyme turns up something surprisingly light; or maybe it’s a pun that brings me to the desk, but the best rhyme I can find uncovers a reservoir of dark emotion. Either way, the mood changes, becomes richer, more interesting. As it takes shape, the poem moves away from what I had intended to write while growing truer to itself—closer to some part of my psyche with which I wasn’t fully in touch when I sat down. I find that to be an exciting, uniquely fulfilling experience. The good news for me, in 2022, is that I sense very little resistance to formal verse. Unlike earlier generations of free verse poets, today’s practitioners don’t seem to look down on poets who write formal verse or to associate meter and rhyme with any sort of political ideology. Many poets are as comfortable deploying traditional forms as they are composing without them, and that’s wonderful to see.
If you were alone at the end of the Anthropocene and could only fit three books in your rucksack, what would they be and why?
It may have been a response to the trauma of emigration or some other early experience of instability, but in college, I did always carry a small number of books with me, on the off chance that I was detained? Cast adrift? I don’t know. In any case, one of the books happened to be Donald Justice’s Collected Poems, so I might as well pack it again. There isn’t a single poem in the volume that doesn’t move me in some way, not a single poem that hasn’t taught me something and will not continue to teach me. Would you allow me to compile an anthology of poems on my own? I’d include things like Wyatt’s “They flee from me,” Millay’s “If I should learn, in some quite casual way,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Bean Eaters.” Given enough time, I could just firm up the lines I know by heart instead of pasting together pages. Or I could select a readymade anthology like Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields’s unusual Quest for Reality, or a more limited but superbly edited one like John Williams’s English Renaissance Poetry or Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke’s Twentieth-Century American Poetry. There are, also, two anthologies of Russian poetry that almost perfectly match my taste – one by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the other by Vladimir Markov. The former is limited to the 20th century, but it’s enormous and astonishingly wide-ranging. In the latter, one hundred poets are represented by a poem each. Which do I take?
Okay, I imagine in this scenario the end of the Anthropocene is fast approaching, so I don’t have time to dither. Here goes: Byron’s Don Juan and, in Russian, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. They are endlessly entertaining, genetically related masterpieces. Pushkin’s is the superior work of art – more various in tone, more emotionally complex, more haunting – but the caustic wit and coruscating artifice of Juan are irresistible. It strikes me that I’ve loaded my rucksack with three books I greatly enjoy rereading, but also ones from which I feel, at this moment, I can learn the most about craft. Why bother improving your poetry when you’re stranded all alone at the end of the Anthropocene? “To make some hour less dreary,” I suppose.
Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator, poet, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he taught Russian literature for a number of years. He has also taught at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012) and translator of several volumes from Russian and Polish, including Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (Pushkin Press, 2015) and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2016), Andrey Kurkov’s The Bickford Fuse (Maclehose Press, 2016), and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). His collection My Hollywood and Other Poems will appear from Paul Dry Books in April 2022. He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly.