73 - Boris Dralyuk, Russians in Los Angeles

Today, we have an interview with Boris Dralyuk. 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 many books and is a wonderful translator and has won many prizes for his work.  His new book is called My Hollywood and Other Poems, which was published early this year. It is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet’s own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, 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. Our conversation here is focused around Russian history in Los Angeles, Russian immigration, the war in Ukraine, his time as an editor of the LA Review of books and more. Please enjoy our wonderful conversation and buy his equally wonderful new book.