The texts that Dralyuk translates are often sprinkled with good humor—from Andrey Kurkov’s mischievous comedy in Grey Bees and The Kyiv Mysteries, to Isaac Babel’s wonderfully observed characters in Odessa Stories. This sense of humor, as well as sumptuous lyrical language, can also be found in his translations of Maxim Osipov’s dark tales about contemporary Russian backwaters, Mikhail Zoshchenko’s satirical prose, and Babel’s poetically rich Red Cavalry. And then there is the more serious business of poetry itself. Dralyuk contributed to the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, and regularly translates poets from Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish. A glance at his blog tells the story of an individual deeply engaged in his work—and a dedicated translator right at the heart of literary translation networks.
Dralyuk’s outlook is also evident in his most recent project—his contribution of an introduction, and translations, to musician Vernon Duke’s memoir Passport to Paris. Born in 1903 as Vladimir Dukelsky, Duke’s life followed a series of geographical transplants similar to Dralyuk’s, moving from Ukraine to LA, albeit with an interruption of almost a century. In his witty, infectious prose, Duke describes his childhood in Ukraine, his family’s exile during Russia’s civil war, and his subsequent colorful life in Constantinople, Paris, and finally the United States. First published in English in 1955, Duke’s autobiography offers us a snapshot of the American music scene between the 1930s and ’50s as he writes about his friends the Gershwins, and Prokofiev, among a cast of many other famous names.
Duke continued to write poetry in Russian throughout his life, often exploring themes that resonate with those in Dralyuk’s own poems. Drawing inspiration from Duke’s English-language lyrics—such as the classic “Autumn in New York” (1943)—Dralyuk introduces his poetry to a new audience, celebrating the cultural heritage they share. One senses that, had they met in real life, the two men would have gotten on famously. Dralyuk’s poetry collection My Hollywood, which also includes translations of some of Duke’s work, evokes the émigré community in Los Angeles that Duke himself would have known well.
I was delighted to correspond with Boris Dralyuk for this interview, which he generously fitted in between his many projects—having hung up his hat as editor-in-chief at the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow, editor-in-chief of Nimrod, and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa. The conversation that follows offers insight into Vernon Duke’s astonishing life, and also into Dralyuk’s—his thoughts on translation, emigration, poetic voice, and the joy of working on what truly moves you, regardless of what the world expects. Dralyuk also responds to the ICE immigration raids which were taking place in LA in mid-June 2025—threatening the émigré communities that are an intrinsic part of Angeleno life.
—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
How did you first discover Vernon Duke’s poetry, and what drew you to translate it?
It’s lovely to speak with you again, Sarah, and especially to talk Duke! I arrived in Los Angeles at the age of eight, having fled the collapsing USSR with my family just months before it finally went to pieces. The choice of destination wasn’t accidental. A few family members had already established themselves, albeit precariously, in Southern California, which at that point was welcoming tens of thousands of refugees from behind the Iron Curtain every year. It was a wave that deposited me on the West Coast—the Third or Fourth Wave of “Russian” Emigration, depending on how you count. I put quotes around “Russian” because many of the new arrivals were, in fact, Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, etc.—a range of identities subsumed under the imperial culture and lingua franca of the Russian and Soviet systems.
The first order of business for eight-year-old me was to assimilate as quickly as possible, to avoid bullying (mission only partly accomplished, I must regretfully report). But soon enough—in fact, as soon as I began to take my adolescent scribbling seriously, too seriously—I felt the urge to seek out a community, not so much among the living as among the dead. What I hungered for was a literary tradition into which I could slip myself. I found one in English easily enough; there is no shortage, contrary to popular opinion, of great Angeleno poets from times past. To my surprise, however, I also found, with a bit more digging, a most impressive body of Russophone and Ukrainophone writing from and about my adopted city. I included a few gems from that casket of treasure in My Hollywood, and among them were two sly, sprightly, melodious poems about the Hollywood scene by the composer and lyricist Vernon Duke, who had been born Vladimir Dukelsky and who had fled from Ukraine as a young boy—like me, only nearly a century earlier. There was more where those poems came from, much more: four books of verse Duke had privately printed in the 1960s, the last happy decade of his eventful life.
Duke writes about his dual identity, and even appears frustrated by it, in the first pages of his memoir Passport to Paris. He is either Vernon Duke, friend and collaborator with George Gershwin, and composer of American Songbook classics like “Autumn in New York,” or he is Vladimir Dukelsky, who writes classical music and is friends with Prokofiev. How do you interpret this duality, and does it resonate with your own experience as a poet and translator born in Ukraine but writing and living in America?
I’m nowhere near as accomplished in any field as Duke was in four, if you count his charming prose and irresistible poems as well as his classical and popular musical compositions. In his memoir, with tongue partly in cheek, he presents his story as a kind of cautionary tale: Beware, young artists, or you’ll be counted as a jack of all trades, master of none. But the distance of years allows us to see him more clearly as a master of many trades. His classical work is still performed and applauded, his popular songbook will never vanish, and I sincerely hope that the republication of Passport, along with my translations of his verse, will shine a spotlight on that long ignored part of his artistic legacy. So I take a different lesson from Duke’s example: If you’re passionate, do the work, and if the work is good, it will last. Don’t limit yourself ahead of time—others will gladly do that for you.
Why do you think Duke continued to write poetry in Russian, when his memoir and lyrics demonstrate that he had excellent English? What does this tell us about the importance of language in the émigré experience? Is this something that could apply to your own literary work?
Duke’s English really was flawless—not only flawless, but supple and stylish. But he began to write poetry as a young man in Russian, and I believe that when he returned to it seriously in later years, he found that he still found greater inspiration in, and had a greater mastery of, the Russophone poetic tradition and Russian verse technique. He knew a great deal about Anglophone poetry and translated a wide range of US poets into Russian—everyone from Emily Dickinson to Ogden Nash—but he wasn’t as freely in command of anglophone verse language as he was of Russian in all forms. In my case, the opposite is true: I’m an anglophone poet who knows Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish well enough to appreciate poetry in those tongues.
In your introduction to Passport to Paris, you mention that Duke’s song lyrics formed a “template for what his verse would have sounded like had it been written in English.” Could you tell us more about how his lyrics for songs influenced your approach to translating his poetry?
I might as well just quote the intro, if you’ll allow it. I mention Duke’s lyrics to “Autumn in New York,” in particular the line “It spells the thrill of first-nighting . . . ” And I describe the mood of the speaker thus: “Lovingly attentive, sparklingly inventive, and enjoying every moment precisely because he knows it has to end.” That goes for Duke’s Russophone poems, too. Take this one, for instance:
Nature Morte
Is this Crimea? Is it the Pacific?
Same salty water, same sweet sun, same view:
a picture-postcard seaside panorama
beneath the same clear sky, same shade of blue.
The water has the smell of fresh cucumbers.
A jellyfish coils like a blown-glass snake.
Rising behind him with its snowy lining,
a wave’s thick shirt descends to overtake
and drape a swimmer. On the shore, a crab
offers his well-worn communistic greeting
and millions of fish with crimson gills
commence their International’s big meeting.
Yet in Alupka I was but a boy,
while Santa Monica’s my denouement . . .
The smoke of time swirls like a curly cloud
above the figure of a tanned old man,
who lies with fingers laced behind his head.
He smiles, recalling his unlikely story.
America, Crimea—does it matter
where I cross over into Purgatory?
Musicality and poetry seem to be shot through the texts you translate. It is in Isaac Babel’s vivid imagery, the sonorous prose of Kurkov’s Grey Bees, and Duke’s LA Poems to name only a few. Are you particularly drawn to writers with strong sensory or lyrical styles?
I cannot tell a lie—I am. The music of the original text is different in each case, but unless I can hear it, I have little interest in trying to devise an equally musical English. I find it impossible to write tuneless verse or prose. My tunes may not be to everyone’s liking, but they keep me tapping at the keys.
Do you believe one needs to be a poet to translate poetry? How does your poetic practice shape your approach to translation, especially when working with texts like those mentioned above?
I would say yes, one needs to be a poet to translate poetry, but one needn’t necessarily write entirely original poems to be a poet. Great translators of poems are poets by virtue of having written great poems in their target languages based on poems in other languages. And what I’m saying isn’t original, either. I’m just expressing in my own way a point that has likely been made by many others. That’s what translators do: We find original forms of expression for unoriginal material.
Many of the texts you work on are either written or set in the early to mid-twentieth century. Kurkov’s The Silver Bone and The Stolen Heart, Babel’s wonderful Odessa Stories and Red Cavalry, work by Lev Ozerov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and now Duke. What is it about this period that continues to speak to you?
I have given this question a lot of thought, and I suppose it comes down to the fact that I grew up steeped in the languages and literatures of that period—a period of great tumult and innovation. The events of that period still reverberated for us, the children of the 1980s and 1990s, and the range of linguistic styles in which the literary artists who witnessed those events captured them mesmerized me. They drew me back in time, transported me. The least I can do is to try to bring some of them forward in time through translation. It occurs to me now that I write quite often about hauntings, about housing another’s spirit in my mind and body, as I do in this recent poem.
With the current political context, how do you navigate translating Russophone texts, especially as someone of Ukrainian origin? Has this changed your relationship to the work?
It’s not easy. But, as I’ve written elsewhere, I have in any case always been particularly drawn to the Russophone writing of authors with roots in Ukraine, from Babel to Kurkov, from Zoshchenko to Ozerov and, now, Duke. But I am also drawn to the work of Russophone émigré poets from the early to mid-twentieth century, regardless of whether they had Ukrainian roots or not. About a year after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I contributed an essay on this topic to The Palgrave Handbook of European Migration in Literature and Culture, writing that what these poets “left behind was not an affirmation of clichés but their interrogation. Their poems are a piercingly nuanced record of their own shifting, conflicted attitudes towards their displacement.” I conclude that “all migrants would instantly understand [this record], nodding and shuddering in recognition.”
What are you working on now, and what’s next for you, as a poet, translator, and editor?
I’m knee-deep in my translation of the third of Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries and am also slouching my way towards another collection of poems. What a rough beast that promises to be . . .
As we write, protests are taking place in LA against the immigration raids carried out by ICE. What impact is this likely to have on the émigré community? On LA as a whole?
There is always the danger, when speaking about LA or any other region of its size, of lapsing into generalizations. Los Angeles is an enormous city in an enormous county. I spent most of the weekend of June 7 and 8 on the road, driving from the neighborhood of Silver Lake to the city of Lynwood, from Lynwood to Hollywood, and then back again. All I saw were a few peaceful assemblies, scattered here and there. Most of the people in the street were going about their difficult or pleasant days. And I saw flags of all nations, this cosmopolitan metropolis’s glory and pride. My impressions stand in stark, disorienting contrast to the images broadcast from a very small section of LA’s downtown, near the Federal Building, and in even starker, more disorienting contrast to the venomous lies spewed forth by members of the Trump administration. The threat posed by the protestors to anyone near the scene was fleetingly small; the threat posed by the words and actions of certain federal authorities to the whole fabric of Angeleno society is incalculably large. An attack on LA’s immigrant community is an attack on the city as a whole, which not only prides itself on its ethnic diversity and its status as a sanctuary for refugees, but also relies heavily on the contributions of immigrants in ways both visible and invisible. The fear ICE raids strike into the heart of a single undocumented person reverberates throughout that person’s family and throughout the social and economic networks in which that family is enmeshed. The aim seems to be to demonize, humiliate, and undermine Los Angeles itself, to undermine all cities like it. I say good luck . . . LA has seen worse—and nothing draws its disparate communities together like a disaster, be it natural or manmade. We rebuild, we recover, we move on. It’s what we do.
How is the literary community responding to these events?
The literary community in LA, too, is a set of communities. It is not uniform. But on this subject I think everyone is in broad, resolute agreement. Not a single author I’ve spoken to, not a single author I follow on this or that platform, has expressed anything but support for the people targeted by ICE at worksites, schools, and in the street, and disgust at the people handing down orders meant not to restore sense to our immigration system, but simply to hurt and enflame.
