VERNON DUKE, (TRANS. BY BORIS DRALYUK), IN THE NEW OCEAN STATE REVIEW
Beverly Hills
A chauffeur lazily maneuvers
an elephantine Cadillac—
his insolence meets with approval
from the grande dame who sits in back.
The car is crawling, barely inching
beside a shop’s gilded display.
The mannequins are all bewitching;
the lady scans them with a sigh.
“What foolish dresses—simply funny.
I see the skirts are long this year…”
This woman won’t spend any money
but she will have something to share
with her dear friend, who follows fashion,
over the evening’s game of bridge,
once she returns to her big mansion—
well built, and colder than a fridge.
Boris Dralyuk on “Beverly Hills”:
My family left Odesa, Ukraine, in 1991, shortly before I turned nine and the Soviet Union collapsed. We came straight to Los Angeles, with only a brief layover at JFK, where a distant relative bought me my weight in candy bars. Utterly disoriented, I was also fiercely determined to find my footing in English. Years later, footing found, I began to root around for my roots – that is, to fortify my command of my native language and also to connect with kindred spirits among émigrés of the past. In truth, I seek connections in all my reading; the poets to whom I’m most powerfully drawn, in any language, are those with whom I feel I share strands of spiritual DNA. Of course, when these poets happen to be fellow Russophone immigrants to LA, writing about a city I’ve come to know like the back of my hand, the connections run deeper.
When I first laid eyes on a cycle of lightheartedly poignant, acutely observed Angeleno poems by Vladimir Dukelsky (1903-1969), I sensed right away that he and I were meant for one another. Dukelsky is better known in the English-speaking world as Vernon Duke, the songwriter behind a number of immortal jazz standards, as well as an accomplished classical composer. His family fled Odesa by sea at the end of the Russian Civil War, and although he took a more circuitous route to LA, his vision of the town’s bright charms and little tragedies chimes perfectly with my own. I included two of Duke’s lyrics – a pean to the many-splendored Farmers Market, where I’ve whiled away countless days, and a tribute to a washed-up actress à la Norma Desmond – in My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry, 2022). Since then I’ve continued to render his colorful snapshots of our adoptive home turf, one by one.
It was a great joy to see two of the poems in the pages of the latest Ocean State Review. The one above, “Beverly Hills,” shows that, in many respects, little has changed since Duke set his impressions in rhyme in the early 1960s. Fashions may fluctuate, but Rodeo Drive is still clogged with gawkers rich and poor. What I love about Duke’s portraits is that, even when he seems to pass judgement on his subjects, his sentence isn’t heavy; few of us would want to spend much time with the frugal dowager in her icy mansion, but she holds our attention for this little while. She’s part of the social ecosystem of Southern California, a system that isn’t always in balance, but is always interesting to observe.
Duke infuses his portraits with ironic humor and measured sympathy, qualities that seem to have come naturally to him, but must also have been fine-tuned by the hard experiences of his youth; however sad a state the world appears to be in now, the poet’s tone suggests, he’s seen worse. That tone is set by means of playful diction, jaunty rhythm, and clever rhyme – the specialties of songwriters. It is a tone I myself adopt when writing poems in English, and I hope I’ve brought it off here. I imagine Duke reading these translations and saying, with a shrug, “I’ve seen worse.”
Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, and has taught there and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tulsa. 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 My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and translator of Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Maxim Osipov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and other authors. 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. In 2022 he received the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for his translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees. for On Twitter @Boris Dralyuk.