Voloshin Speaks!

Over a month has passed since my last post here, and you can blame that on the pleasures of my “day job” at the University of Tulsa. I’ve greatly enjoyed being back in the classroom, and even had the opportunity to do a little academic traveling, giving a couple of lectures in Paris on translation and poetry. I could go on recounting the perks of my trade, but I’d rather share a discovery that brought tears of joy to my eyes.

Those of you who have read a passage or two of my translation of Alexander Voloshin’s mock-epic of the Hollywood émigré scene, Sidetracked, on this blog, know that his long, uphill struggle to make a living at the studios was rewarded with many barely-there, uncredited, silent appearances. However, as I found last week, at least one role allowed him to speak. That’s right — after several years of getting to know and inhabit Voloshin’s voice on the page, I finally got to hear the man’s own gentle baritone.

Appropriately enough, the film in which Voloshin talks centers on an experience very close to his own. Directed by French emigré Robert Florey (1900-1979), the 1937 B-film Daughter of Shanghai stars Anna May Wong, whose character pursues a gang of violent, exploitative people smugglers who have killed her father. In a scene in which Wong first spies on the smugglers going about its heartless business, we see — and hear — Voloshin, one of the exploited refugees, take a stand against the gang boss, only to get knocked out. The language he speaks? Not English, not Russian, but Ukrainian—the language his father, a Ukrainian ethnographer, worked so hard to preserve. It is a rare thing to hear Ukrainian spoken in Hollywood cinema, and hearing the words come from Voloshin moved me deeply. You can watch the scene here, thanks to Turner Classic Movies.

It’s no accident that Florey gave Voloshin his big break in the talkies. An émigré himself, he was keenly sensitive to the plight of Hollywood’s lower social strata, especially of the extras. In 1928, a decade before Nathanael West and Horace McCoy turned their attention to the town’s bottom-feeders, Florey and the Serbian-American pioneer of montage, Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976), shot, on a budget of $97, an extraordinary expressionistic short film titled The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra, which you can watch in its entirety here.

I suspect Florey and Voloshin recognized each other as kindred spirits from the very start. Indeed, Florey first gave Voloshin a role in 1927, in an another expressionistic short, Johann the Coffin Maker. That film is now lost, but Voloshin’s voice survives, both in Daughters of Shanghai and, more fully, in his marvelous poem.

“On the Planet’s Edge”: Abram Katsnelson Sees Kyiv in Los Angeles

Most of the émigré Angeleno poets whose work I’ve shared here over the years wrote in Russian, though some of them had roots in Ukraine and even identified as Ukrainian. Today I bring you a poem originally written in Ukrainian by Abram Katsnelson (1914-2003), who, like Peter Vegin (1939-2007), came to California in the 1990s, on the same wave that carried my family to these shores. By that time Katsnelson had, like Vegin, firmly established himself as poet in the Soviet Union, but he did so decades earlier than his younger colleague.

Born into a Jewish family in Horodnya, a small town in the Chernihiv Region of northern Ukraine, Katsnelson published his first collection in 1935, a few years before earning his degree in literature from Kyiv University. He fought in the Second World War and weathered the Stalinist antisemitic campaign of the postwar years, during which his brother, who wrote under the pseudonym Ilya Stebun, came under vicious attack. Throughout, Katsnelson remained proudly Jewish and proudly Ukrainian — serving as a bridge, as he writes in one of his poems, between the two identities. His poems, all written in Ukrainian, are full of vivid evocations of his childhood in Chernihiv and of his youth in Kyiv, yet they do not shy away from the catastrophes that marred those lands in those years.

As you might guess, however, it is the lyrics written in the last few years of his life, after his move to Los Angeles, that speak to me most directly. One of them, like the Vegin poem I translated years ago, is set on a balcony I myself might have seen from the street. Like Vegin, Katsnelson looks out from his balcony and sees not just his adoptive city, but also the home he left behind.

We’re sitting on the balcony together
at end of day, our lives nearing their end.
As in most songs, the sun is sinking lower.
As in most songs, the evening has commenced
with farewell rays of light streaking the sky.
I squint my eyes and see the Dnipro glimmer…
A breeze — as if the river were nearby,
only we’re in America, not Kyiv…
Yet what I see is Kyiv, that gazebo
where we sat side by side, ignoring time.
O night, don’t rush, don’t simply come and go…
But now I hear the rumbling of the tram
that dropped you off and then continued on,
taking me home at the approach of dawn.
Ages ago that tram went on its way,
while our love stayed. It’s with us to this day.
Embrace me now and reaffirm our pledge
here at night’s threshold, on the planet’s edge.

---

Сидимо з тобою вдвох ми на балконі.
День уже на сконі. І життя на сконі…
Сонце — як у пісні — усе нижче, нижче.
Вечір — як у пісні — усе ближче, ближче.
Шле з крайнеба сонце нам прощальні промені.
Очі я примружив — і сяйнув Дніпро мені.
Вітерець повіяв, наче близько дме ріка.
Тільки ж це не Київ, тільки ж це Америка.
А я Київ бачу і стару альтанку,
де вночі сиділи вдвох ми до світанку.
Грянуть нині, ноче, ти не поспішай!
Чую я: гуркоче київський трамвай —
той, який від тебе десь уже останній
віз мене додому майже на світанні.
Він давно проїхав, він давно пройшов.
А любов лишилась, не мина любов!
Обніму тебе я, обніми й мене ти
на порозі ночі, на краю планети.

“Here the Autumn Is Just Like in Kyiv”: Sergei Bongart Pays His Respects at Forest Lawn

A few years ago I shared my translations of poems by the Odesa-born Victor Mall (1901-1989), a former student of Kazimir Malevich who, after settling in Los Angeles, built a career as a graphic designer. Mall, it turns out, wasn’t the only visual artist among the Russophone Angelenos with a sideline in verse. In fact, an even more accomplished painter, the Kyiv-born Sergei Bongart (1918-1985), wrote poems that are, in my view, as touching and clever as those of Vernon Duke, another disciple of twin muses.

Bongart fled his native Kyiv in 1943, during the Second World War. His mother had died a decade earlier, in 1933, during the Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine. That same year Bongart’s father, a lawyer, poet, and athlete, had been arrested and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia; in 1938, shortly after his return, he died, never having recovered his strength. After the war, Bongart spent three years in DP camps before receiving permission to immigrate to the US in 1948. After a brief stay in Memphis, he came to California, where he eventually took over the studio of an earlier émigré artist, Nicolai Fechin (1881-1955). Like Fechin, he was drawn to the natural landscapes of the American West. He founded an art school in Idaho, where he taught for half the year, and spent the rest of his time painting and teaching in Santa Monica. His bold, expressive style attracted many notable students, including James Cagney, with whom Bongart toured Europe in 1963.

The poems Bongart wrote under the tutelage of his friend Ivan Elagin (1918-1987, more here and here), who had also escaped from Kyiv during the war, have more in common with his quieter, more impressionistic canvases. In them, as in many of his paintings, the artist demonstrates that double vision so characteristic of exiles, overlaying what he sees before him with memories of what he left behind.

Verse also allowed Bongart to show off what he excluded from his paintings: a healthy sense of humor. His finest poem, it seems to me, depicts Forest Lawn, the impeccably manicured cemetery in Glendale that was mercilessly satirized by Evelyn Waugh in The Loved One (1948).

Forest Lawn

Forest Lawn — to put it more plainly,
a landscape of tears and farewells,
where people can buy themselves housing
with a dim view of heaven or hell.

There are choices: a two-bedroom plot,
if the client is happily married,
looking out at the street, with its palms,
or the sunset (who cares if you’re buried?).

An agent delineates haughtily,
over and over again,
how the client may sleep with eternity
at a discount — a layaway plan.

Hucksters all offer you novelties,
but here is the greatest one yet:
that while you still live, you can visit
your grave, and pay your respects…

I feel strange on these slopes and these glades —
no crosses, wherever one searches
on this land so unfriendly to weeds,
uncaressed by the flutter of birches.

Here the autumn is just like in Kyiv,
if only it weren’t for the surf.
What to do? It is simply our nature
to be drawn, near the end, to home turf.

Beings perish in various fashions,
moved by instinct, not knowing why:
dogs sneak away from their houses,
while humans return there to die.

Any wonder that, more and more often,
I imagine that cross where they lie
in the depths of the overgrown graveyard?
My parents, facing the sky.

---

Forest Lawn
(Самое известное кладбище в Лос-Анджелесе)

Forest Lawn – говоря попроще —
Место проводов, слёз и бед.
Место, где покупают жилплощадь
С перспективой на тот свет.

Выбор есть: вот участки двухспальные,
Это, если клиент женат —
Даже с видом на улицу с пальмами.
Подороже – на нежный закат.

Наглый агент – с беспечной небрежностью
Объясняет опять и опять.
Как по низкой расценке с вечностью
Вы смогли бы легко переспать.

Не пугает он вас преисподней,
Рай сулит и воркует о том,
Что в могилу – хотя бы сегодня,
А платить – даже можно потом.

Торгаши промышляют идеями.
Но доходнейшая из идей:
Чтоб при жизни ещё сумели вы
Погрустить над могилкой своей…

Чужды мне эти склоны с полянами
Без крестов, без оград и без роз
На земле не дружившей с бурьянами,
Не обласканной шумом берёз.

В Калифорнии – осень как в Киеве,
Если б только не этот прибой.
Что ж поделаешь, – видно такие мы
Напоследок нас тянет домой.

Всё живущее – по-иному
Смерть встречает, не зная о том —
Пес идёт умирать из дома —
Человек возвращается в дом.

Не с того ли я вижу всё чаще
Крест с рябиной, где к небу лицом,
В самой гуще кладбищенской чащи
Похоронены мать с отцом?

“You Too Should Be Home”: Taisia Bazhenova’s Old Émigré at Work

After writing last month’s post about Tamara Andreeva, I’ve discovered a few new details about her life both in China and in the US, which I’ll share soon. But today I’d like to post a poem by Taisia Bazhenova (1900-1978), who, like Andreeva and Mary Custis Vezey, came to California after getting a literary start in Harbin in the 1920s. Like Andreeva, Bazhenova largely abandoned poetry a few years after immigrating in 1928, turning towards journalism. Unlike Andreeva, she continued to write in Russian, contributing regularly to just about every émigré publication on the West Coast, including Land of Columbus, where she appeared alongside Andreeva. Although she spent most of her American life in Northern California, she was, for some time in the 1930s, based in Los Angeles. The poem below, which was published in 1935, likely describes a scene in San Francisco, yet the portrait it paints of an elderly émigré forced to support herself and her daughter-in-law as a seamstress could just as well have been set in Hollywood—or, with a few adjustments, anywhere, then or now.

Old Russian Lady

Only old ladies from Russia
wear such coats, cut off at the waist,
and hats so long out of fashion,
not a hint of rouge on their face.

Finding a seat on the tram,
she stares out the window shyly.
I ask her about her health —
she glows with gratitude, smiling.

She’s riding to work and worries:
“I pray that I won’t be late…”
But she gets there before it opens,
looks at her watch and waits.

Inside, the workshop is stuffy.
Silently, women sew.
“Back in Russia and China it’s winter,
here one would never know…”

She sews lace onto children’s dresses,
hunched over, and slowly intones:
“The daughter-in-law is ailing,
laid out at home, alone…”

“You too should be home,” I say.
“Grandkids romping nearby.”
“No grandkids — my son died young,
with the Whites in Siberia.”

---

Русская старушка

Только у русской старушки такое
В талию старенькое пальтецо.
Шляпа немодного давно покроя,
Ненарумянено совсем лицо.

Сядет в трамвай, посмотрит на лица,
Отведёт смущенно взгляд на окно.
Я спрошу о здоровье — вся оживится,
Как будто ждала вопроса давно.

Подъедем к фабрике — бежит в волненьи:
— Знаете, всё-таки б не опоздать!
Приходит и ждёт, опять с нетерпеньем
Смотрит на часики: скоро ли пять?

Солнце и душно. Гудят трамваи,
А женщины тихо и молча шьют.
— У нас ведь в России, и там, в Китае,
Сейчас морозы, не то что тут!..

Пришивает кружево к платьям детским,
В фуфайке, согнувшись, в очках, у окна…
— А дома, — шепчет, — больна невестка,
Опять без меня в постели одна…

— Бабушка, вам бы в тёплую горенку
С тихой лампадкой да нянчить внучат!..
— Знаю, что были бы… Да умер сын Боренька,
В Сибири убит он как белый солдат.

“To Cry a While in the Wind”: Tamara Andreeva Comes to Los Angeles

Tamara Andreeva in 1930

Nearly a decade ago, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, of which I was not yet the editor, I reported on some of the earliest discoveries I made on my long search for the voices of LA’s Russophone past. Among them was the journal The Land of Columbus (Zemlya Columba), which folded after two issues in 1936 and 1937. As I wrote in 2015, the first of these issues

features two poems by a young woman named Tamara Andreeva, who was born in Russia in 1908 and made her way to the West Coast by way of Shanghai and Harbin, settling in Santa Monica. Her Russian verse is nothing much, but I was intrigued. It turned out she’d also published a few lyrics in English, including this piece from the August 1932 issue of Poetry.

You can read that anglophone lyric in my essay. But it’s the Russian poems that called to me again after I posted my translation of Andreeva’s fellow Harbin-reared Californian transplant Mary Custis Vezey. The two Andreeva poems in The Land of Columbus are very much in the vein of the early Anna Akhmatova, and little research turned up confirmation that she was indeed under the sway of the St. Petersburg Acmeists, having been a member of the “Acme” poetry circle in Harbin and even conjured up, in one of her lyrics, the founder of the original Acmeist Guild of Poets, Akhmatova’s husband Nikolay Gumilyov.

Those juvenile poems penned in Harbin are indeed rather slight and imitative, but the more I read them, the more I sense the young woman’s strong, sensitive, tempestuous spirit. I began to wonder how she came to California in the first place, and what happened to her after the The Land of Columbus foundered. The first question was answered by a brief article in the Los Angeles Times, dated August 18, 1930, and headlined “Girl Flees Reds to Come Here”:

Five years of wandering, part of the time in flight from Russian Bolsheviks, and part on journeys through Mongolia and Tibet as a correspondent for American newspapers, have ended, at least temporarily for Miss Tamara Andreeva, a Russian girl originally from Leningrad, who has come to Los Angeles to enter Occidental College.

A brief notice from 1934 told of Andreeva’s successful petition to retain legal residence and seek citizenship in the US.  Her next appearance in the Los Angeles Times is as a contributor. Between 1947 and 1951, the paper published over a dozen of her lively, perfectly idiomatic articles on fashion trends and profiles of Southern Californian artisans. She was by then, according to records, on her second of three marriages, and had worked as a publicist and fashion editor for CBS and other companies. She continued to write articles for a variety of venues over the following decade, but the trail of publications ends some years before her death in Riverside, California, in 1987. As far as I can tell, she had left her life as a poet far behind her. But I imagine the memories lingered.

Lingering memories are the subject of a lyric she wrote in Russian in Los Angeles, in 1931, shortly after enrolling in college. She sent it back to Harbin, where it appeared in an émigré journal. A new American life lay ahead of her, but she could not have been sure of that then.

You know, there are certain evenings
when light can only do harm,
when you sit — in America, Russia —
your head on your folded arms.

The rain weeps and drums on the rooftop,
the print in my book grows small,
the shadows of recollection
lengthen against the wall.

Stern as the Pyrenees,
reaching so very high,
they crowd, tower over me,
telling of days flown by.

The night slips on its black gloves,
its feathery boa of clouds…
How weary I am of my body,
of sitting inside, head bowed…

The raindrops fall from the eaves,
the lamp casts a yellow ring —
I leave without closing the door
to cry a while in the wind…

---

Знаете, есть вечера такие,
Что не следовало-бы зажигать огни,
А сидеть, в Америке, в России-ль,
Голову на руки уронив.

Плачет дождь по крышам барабаня,
В книге шрифт всё мельче и бледней;
Тени от моих воспоминаний
Выросли грознее Пиреней

И беззвучные у стенки встали.
Все имеют запах, вкус и цвет;
Затолпили, заняли сознанье
Датами давно прошедших лет…

Ночь перчатки черные надела,
Облаков пушистое перо…
Скучно как с тобою, тело,
Коротать остатки вечеров!

По одной стекают капли с крыши;
На стене от лампы жёлтый круг.
Выбежала, двери не закрывши,
Плакала и звала на ветру.

“They Pursue Their Fabulous Dream”: A Late Californian Poem by Mary Custis Vezey

Mary Custis Vezey in Harbin, 1920s

A couple of days ago, on Twitter, I broke some splendid news about Vernon Duke. His memoir, Passport to Paris, which has been out of print since 1955, will be republished in 2025 by Paul Dry Books. The new edition will include my brief introduction and my translations of eighteen of Duke’s poems, a number of which I’ve shared here over the years. Encouraged by my success in resurrecting Duke, I immediately shifted my attention to another long-neglected onetime Angeleno deserving of a minor revival.

Like Duke, Vladimir Nabokov, and a very few other Russophone authors of their era, Mary Custis Vezey (1904-1994) was perfectly comfortable in both Russian and English. Indeed, as her name suggests, her English was truly native. She was born in New York to a Russian mother and a father, Henry Custis Vezey, whose family was deeply rooted in American soil. Shortly after Mary’s birth, the Vezey family returned to St. Petersburg, where Henry was attached to the American Embassy. He would eventually become Vice-Consul. After the Revolution, he was transferred to the American Consulate in Harbin, which was as much a Russian as a Chinese town at that point.

There, Mary soaked up the local culture while receiving an education both in Russian (at the Girls’ School of the Harbin Commercial Schools) and in English (at the North China American School established by the American Presbyterian Mission). A precocious and spirited young woman, she wrote remarkably competent and sometimes quite striking poems in both languages, most of which have recently been collected by the scholar Olga Bakich in A Moongate in My Wall: Collected Poetry of Mary Custis Vezey (Peter Lang, 2005).

Vezey’s second American period began in 1925, when she sailed to California to attend Pomona College. As Bakich reports,

Her poetry in English gained recognition, and she was invited to join the Scribblers Society, founded in 1913 by Professor William Sheffield Ament. Membership, limited to twelve, was by invitation only and based on writing ability. The Society’s journal, Scribblers Magazine, renamed Manuscript in 1925, published her article “Chinese Poetry during the T’ang Dynasty” and two poems, one of which, “Chinese Serenade,” was awarded an honourable mention by the journal Inter-Collegiate World and reprinted.

That little poem gives a fair sense of the style of Vezey’s anglophone verse at the time—a style indebted to Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale, both of whom she translated into Russian.

Chinese Serenade

The silver pilgrims of the sky—
the clouds of sunset go,
and sweetly starts her lullaby,
my Goddess Moon, Chang-O.

Dispel thy drowsy dreams, my friend,
as rays of twilight fade,
and with my song thy magic blend
upon thy lute of jade!

Then let me love thee, as a cloud
may love a flashing star,
as ripples on the lake, that crowd
to touch a nenuphar.

She returned to Harbin 1929 and released her first collection, simply titled Poems, which included her original verse in Russian and English as well as her translations into and out of both languages. A second collection, also titled Poems, appeared in 1936. Her place in the vibrant Harbin émigré cultural scene was secure, but that scene was on the verge of disappearing. War was spreading through China and the Far East. Along with many Harbin Russians, the Vezey family sought to escape the conflagration before it engulfed them. In 1939, they made their way to San Francisco, where Mary continued to write and publish her verse, as well as to use her superior English to advocate for lesser-known émigré poets. Her third and final collection, Blue Grass, appeared in 1973.

She spent the last decades of her life working on an anthology of Russophone poets from China. In a letter to Bakich from 1991, she wrote:

I have little time left, and I won’t be able to accomplish much. I am not as strong as I used to be. But I would still like to publish three little books of mine: one of poetry (the last one), one of translations into English, and one more (a special one). But before that—not my poetry, but that of colleagues and friends w’ho can no longer do it. […] I can’t allow myself to publish something of mine; my goal is to preserve the unpublished works of my compatriots and colleagues.

It is Bakich who fulfilled Vezey’s final aspirations, collecting and publishing the work the poet was unable to see into print before her death in 1994. One of those late Russophone poems jumped out at me as I leafed through A Moongate in My Wall. Titled “Smugglers,” this little portrait of comrades from Mexico who perish in their attempt to realize their dreams by crossing the US border was written in 1985. Vezey, who had had to cross so many borders in her life, staying one step ahead of disaster, clearly understood the desperation of the men she was describing. She sees human hope and tragedy where too many—even today—see only a cartoonish threat or a political opportunity.

Smugglers

With a bag slung over each shoulder,
they pursue their fabulous dream,
crossing a foreign border,
fording a raging stream.

They crawl, they sneak, they prowl,
quiet as quiet can be,
to strike not a vein of gold,
but the rock of reality.

Back home, at this very hour,
where the dream first cast its spell,
the bells in the ancient tower
toll a funeral knell.

---

Контрабандисты

У них мешки за плечами.
Их манят чудные сны.
Они проходят ночами
границу чужой страны.

Они крадутся, как воры.
Река—через реку вплавь.
Им снятся золота горы—
их ждет свирепая явь.

А там, в далекой деревне,
где дерзкий рождался сон,
уже с колокольни древней
плывет погребальный звон.

“For Helping a Passerby”: Vladislav Ellis’s Hungry Years

I’ve let two months go by without sharing a single thing here, which is very much unlike me. And there have been things to share, like fresh translations of Vernon Duke in Arc and of Julia Nemirovskaya in The Queens Review, as well as news about other projects, like my completion of Alexander Voloshin’s mock epic, which I’ve decided to title Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood. What’s my excuse?Well, I’ve been busy teaching, very happily, at the University of Tulsa, and caring for the twins — but I’ve also felt somewhat stifled by the weight of current events. The grinding war in Ukraine and the unfolding catastrophe in Gaza make whatever I have to say seem so inadequate, so thoroughly beside the point.

Although I’ve had trouble finding anything worth sharing publicly, I have been drawing hope from a unique book — one that took an arduous journey to reach me. Live, and You Won’t Have to Die! was printed in Ukraine, gorgeously, in 2016. It contextualizes and reproduces pages from the DeePeeniad, a hand-drawn “journal” that the poet Vladislav Ellis and the artist Vladimir Odinokov “published” for their fellow displaced persons at the Munich camp where they were held from 1945 to 1947. Ellis eventually settled in Los Angeles, as readers of this blog and My Hollywood will know, while Odinokov went on to have a distinguished career as a set designer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, where he collaborated with Chagall.

During their lean, uncertain years in the camps, Ellis and Odinokov took it upon themselves to find and spread joy through humor. The delightful doggerel and cheerful illustrations below gain enormous poignancy in light of the circumstances under which they were made.

They may take on even greater poignancy when I tell you that the book was sent to me by Vladislav Ellis’s son, who had returned to his father’s native Ukraine decades ago but has now been forced to flee his home in Kharkiv. Life his father, he too is a refugee, now living in Bulgaria.

It was only years after the war, when Ellis was safely in Los Angeles, that he was able to write more directly of his wartime experience. The poem below relates an episode from his time as a hungry prisoner of war in occupied territory, being led, slowly, towards Germany, reduced to begging for scraps. Alas, with just a few words changed, the poem could read as if it were ripped from today’s news stories.

Incomparable

The old woman gave me some bread —
no more than a bit of crust —
then got on her knees and begged
that I leave her hut at once.

“I’m afraid for my son,” she whispered.
“At this age I wouldn’t lie —
the Germans just hanged my neighbor
for helping a passerby.”

Outside all was wet and freezing.
The road was torn up. A wasteland.
I strode through the puddles and drizzle,
took shelter beside a haystack.

---

Неповторимое

В страхе дадена хлеба краюха,
И не хочет от пленного платы.
На коленях рыдая старуха
Умоляла уйти из хаты.

«Сына жалко, помилуй, не можем,
Неспособна на старости врать я,
Немцы нынче за помощь прохожим
У соседки повесили зятя…»

За околицей мокрая стужа,
От обозов в рытвинах дорога.
Зашагал по осенним лужам,
Под покров позабытого стога.

“That Old Life of Ease”: Light Reading with Alexander Voloshin

Cover of “Captain” Mayne Reid’s The Headless Horseman

Reading aimlessly had me feeling like a kid again, and it reminded me of this enchanting passage from Alexander Voloshin’s On the Tracks, in which he compares his fantasies of the American Wild West, derived from adventure stories, with the reality of an immigrant’s life in  California. Swift, Verne, and improbable tales of adventure set in the New World made up the bulk of my childhood reading, too, and I suspect Samson Kolechko, the hero of The Silver Bone, was weaned on them as well. It’s a good thing they’ll always be there for us, and for generations of children to come.

With the arrival of spring break, I’ve managed to find time for a little light reading—purely for the sake of entertainment, no edifying strings attached. This is also my way to celebrate a week of good news, which included the longlisting of my latest translation, Andrey Kurkov’s The Silver Bone, for the International Booker Prize and my receiving a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

You gaze into the past and see
vain seeking, sheer adversity…
And only rarely, in your sleep,
do little fragments of it seep
into your mind — sweet memories
of childhood, that old life of ease…
Distant Crimea… Warm July
in a lush garden… Floating by,
a row of half-remembered faces,
their chatting mingled with the traces
of piano music from the house…
Whispered confessions, solemn vows…

If I had heard of “grief,” “despair,”
they were mere words, as light as air
and utterly devoid of meaning…
Children are selfish, overweening…
Spoiled by my comforts, by routine,
constantly summoned to be seen
by this or that doting relation,
I was the Center of Creation…
I felt I’d never be held back,
proceeding boldly down life’s track!

It often happened, at midday,
when it was just too hot to play,
that I would slip into the study,
where it was quiet, cool. Nobody
ever came in to read with me —
for grown-ups, summers are book-free.

Climbing onto the couch, I’d be
transported by the fantasy
of Swift or Verne to some strange land
with Gulliver or Captain Grant.
Texas, the broad plains, a fierce squall —
I dreamt of weathering it all,
and vowed that someday I’d wage war
against the natives… Hear me roar!
My eyes would blaze, my gaze would stun,
I’d settle matters with my gun…
I would win fame and untold riches!

Well, now I’m here… Alas, the hitch is
the truth behind our childhood dreams
is hardly ever what it seems.
Life bears no hint of heroism;
we fear another cataclysm,
remaining shaken and appalled
after the Bolsheviks’ “fierce squall”…

I’d found true poetry in novels —
but here it’s prose, hard work, drab hovels…
Now I approach the final track,
leaving all joy far back, far back…

---

Посмотришь в прошлое — там годы
Исканий тщетных… Там невзгоды,
Что Жизнь дарила щедро мне,
И только изредка, во сне, —
Отрывками увидишь снова
Моменты детства золотого,
Далёкий Крым… Уютный дом…
Июльский день в саду густом…
Ряд лиц — теперь полузабытых…
Из окон, широко-раскрытых, —
Услышишь музыку… Рояль
В тоске звенит — «кого-то жаль…
К кому-то сердце жадно рвётся…».
И гулким эхом отдаётся
Романс старинный — там, вдали, —
Где проплывают корабли,
Где солнца золото, где море…

В те дни я слышал: «Мука»… «Горе»…
«Тоска»… Но был я очень мал
И смысла слов — не понимал…
Слова легко скользили эти, —
Всегда эгоистичны дети.
Рабы обычаев, уюта, —
То люди к нам, то мы к кому-то…
Ряды визитов отдаём —
И мне казалось — создан мир
Лишь для меня!… И я — кумир!
Я — Центр Вселенной!… Бог Великий
Свет создал пёстрый, многоликий, —
На радость мне!… И жизни путь
Я свой — пройду не «как-нибудь»,
А «гордо», «смело», «в славе яркой»!…

Бывало часто — в полдень жаркий
Я шёл в прохладный кабинет, —
Там — книг ряды, там — взрослых нет, —
Большие летом не читают, —
Никто мне там не помешает…

Взобравшись на большой диван,
Читал я сказку, иль роман, —
О «Гулливере», «великанах»,
О солнечных далёких странах,
О «Детях Гранта»… И мечтал,
Что сам увижу «грозный шквал»,
«Техас», «льяносы», «Аризону»,
И — верный «прерии закону» —
Я буду цель иметь одну, —
«Вести с индейцами войну»!…
Мои «так грозны» будут «взоры»,
«Мой карабин решит все споры»!…
И буду славен я, богат, —
«Великий Бледнолицый Брат!»…

На деле ж — вышло всё иначе…
Из этого совсем не значит,
Что не сбылись мои мечты, —
Они — сбылись… Но красоты
И героизма — нет в помине…
Ну вот — в Америке я ныне,
В стране далёких, детских дум,
Но… стал холодным взрослый ум…
Прошли «расплавленные годы»
И гул Российской Непогоды,
Разбив мечты, как «грозный шквал», —
Изнанку Жизни показал!…

Нет радости и в этих странах…
Поэзия — была в романах,
На деле ж я увидел тут
Лишь прозу и тяжёлый труд…

«Лишь там прекрасно — где нас нету»!…
Невольно поговорку эту —
Частенько повторяю я, —
Мои читатели-друзья…

Короче, — грустные итоги:
Уже кончаются — дороги…
И перепутья… И пути…
А счастья — нет… и — не найти!…

Joys Direct and Vicarious

Photograph by Magdalena Edwards.

This past week has brought me great joy, to put it mildly. The joy has been both direct — Nina, Charlie, and I have spent half the week with my mother, who’s visiting Tulsa for the first time — and vicarious. That vicarious part comes courtesy of my sensationally gifted wife, Jenny, who’s new novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, has racked up a staggering number of rave reviews. Just today, in The New York Times, Fiona Maazel writes:

The Extinction of Irena Rey is mad with plot and language and gorgeous prose, and the result is a bacchanal, really, which is the opposite of extinction. Such is the irony of art. To quote the novel’s epigraph, which could not be more apt: “And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, thereby making a forest.” This novel’s a forest. Go explore.

Jenny’s triumph comes on the heels of a more humble triumph of my own, a return to LA to read at the Hammer Museum, as part of a UCLA-sponsored poetry series I attended religiously as an undergrad and grad student years ago. As I told the audience, I learned a great deal from the poets who visited us then, but nearly as much as I learned from the man who introduced them, Stephen Yenser, my first teacher in the art of poetry. I would say that having Stephen introduce me was a dream come true, only I hadn’t ever dreamed such a thing would happen. The recording is up on the Hammer site, if you care to suffer through it.

As gratifying as it was to share the stage with Stephen, what made the evening especially sweet was the presence in the audience of a very special guest, Gedda Ilves, who, at the age of 100 (and of course you wouldn’t know it to look at her), is a living link to the Russophone Angeleno poets whose work I’ve been translating for some time now.

Gedda, who was born in 1923 among the Russian émigrés in Harbin, China, and came to Los Angeles, via Brazil, in the 1950s, is herself a poet, whose latest collection, As Butterfly to a River: New & Selected Poems, appeared in 2019. She has also just written a memoir, which she was gracious enough to share with me. It is a riveting tale, reflecting in every sentence the vivacious spirit that has sustained Gedda through all the turmoil she has witnessed. I spent a memorable afternoon at her home before the reading, pursuing her papers and admiring her collection of intricate snuff boxes and other artifacts associated with her international past. I will no doubt have more to say about Gedda and her work in the coming months, but I will end this entry with her own words:

I stand at the place
where my childhood
days passed.

Our garden then
full of flowers.
I chase a butterfly,
watch a caterpillar
my mother tells me
not to touch.

The house is gone.
I stand here for a while,
blinking at the high-rises.

“That Age-Old Spirit Filled the Air”: Alexander Voloshin Conjures Up a Ukrainian Christmas

“Koliada,” tapestry, by Olha Pilyuhina

Just a few weeks ago I began a new semester at the University of Tulsa and also, with much excitement, kicked off my stint as a Tulsa Artist Fellow.  I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to be part of this year’s multi-talented cohort, and I look forward to collaborating with each and every one of my colleagues in the program.

My first year with the Fellowship will be devoted to research into émigré and refugee writing from Oklahoma, the exploration of literary links between my adoptive state and my near-native California, and the completion of my translation of Alexander Voloshin’s On the Tracks and at Crossroads.  I wasted no time in getting back to the last of these projects, and, as usual, the Voloshin passages I happened to be translating resonated poignantly with the dreadful realities of our own time.  For too many people trapped in war zones or struggling to survive in foreign lands, there was no holiday season.  This was the case for Voloshin in 1939.  You can’t blame the man for dwelling on memories of happy holidays past, especially when he’s able to conjure up the sights, sounds, and smells of them with such elan.  In this particular passage, Voloshin writes the diverting Christmas tale he claims he isn’t able to write by drawing on his recollections of Ukrainian koliada celebrations — of the hopak dance, of the sound of a bandura, of Lenten feasts featuring kutia, uzvar, varenets, and palianystia, that Russian-tongue-twisting shibboleth of the current war.  Although Voloshin identifies himself throughout the poem as Russian, his heart was in Ukraine, where he was born and spent most of his life before emigrating.  He knew how to pronounce “palianystia” properly, and I expect he would have said the word proudly now.

Today — no sleep, no pleasant dream…
How can I celebrate the theme
of Christmas when my home is gone?
However much the heart may want
to sing about bouquets of roses,
it simply can’t if it feels frozen…
Where do we get that Christmas spirit?
A carol? We’re too glum to hear it.
Our well of fantasy runs dry.
We’re getting old: joy seems to fly
farther away from us each year,
leaving us steeped in doubt and fear…
A bloody world… Tyrants enthroned…
What lies ahead? Unknown… Unknown…
How could I now wax lyrical
about a “Christmas miracle”
when evil forces roam and pillage?
What Christmas Eve? What “sleepy village”?
The Star of Bethlehem? And snow?
“He made a friend and lost a foe”?

All that is done… Gone in a flash —
the “sleepy village” turned to ash,
both “friend” and “foe” deep underground,
the Star extinguished… What surrounds
us is brute force… Hardly a word
of love or joy is ever heard,
and a small pile of firewood
lies where the Christmas tree had stood…
We’re God-forsaken, left behind…
A happy ending’s hard to find…

Yet life had once been otherwise,
richer by far. We used to prize
loyalty, honor, and compassion;
brotherhood, freedom were in fashion…
On Christmas Eve, that Holy Night,
we helped our neighbors, set things right.
Of malice there was not a trace —
just one big brotherly embrace[…]

Once, in Ukraine, what carols sounded!
In every home, comfort abounded —
each was a warm and tidy realm…
The children sang of Bethlehem,
of Christ, the Magi, and the manger…
Lights burned till morning: welcome, stranger!
Two dozen pages wouldn’t do
if I wished to describe to you
those charming evenings: the bandura,
the tambourine, the wild bravura
of young lads at their hopak dance,
the lasses smiling as they prance,
braids swinging to the tap of heels —
and then, of course, the wondrous meals!
The uzvar punch, big bowls of kutia,
the fish in aspic, strong and fruity
brandies, and horilka too —
and for the youngest, milk, fresh stewed!
Embroidered cloths, pies without meats, and
warm, round loaves of palianytsia…
Roach with translucent caviar…
Voices of praise… The shining Star…
That age-old spirit filled the air,
so that you sensed it everywhere…

---

Сегодня — сон бежит от глаз,
Ну, как «Рождественский Рассказ»
Я напишу — живя в изгнаньи?!…
Нет — не могу!… При всём желаньи
Нельзя воспеть букеты роз,
Когда в душе — царит мороз!…
Где взять «рождественские темы»?!…
Ведь тут — истосковались все мы,
Иссяк фантазии полёт,
Стареем мы, и каждый год
Нам всё трудней развеселиться…
Не знаем — завтра что случится,
Повсюду в мире — «кровь», «вожди»
И — неизвестность впереди!…
Где-ж взять «лирические фразы»,
Как добрые писать рассказы,
Коль всюду торжествует зло?!
«Сочельник»… «Спящее село»…
«Звезда Рождественская»… «Вьюга»…
«Он ждал врага, а встретил — друга»…

Всё это — в прошлом!… Всё — ушло!…
Сгорело «спящее село»,
«Друзья», «враги»… — в одной могиле.
Угасли «звёзды»… Грубой силе
Всё покорилось… На дрова
Срубили «ёлку»… И слова
Любви и радости — не слышны…
Совсем забыл о нас Всевышний, —
Лишь «вьюги воют у крыльца», —
Увы — без «доброго конца»!…

А было некогда — иначе!…
И жили все мы побогаче,
И знали много чудных слов:
«Честь», «верность», «преданность», «любовь»,
«Свобода», «братство», «состраданье»…
Мы шли с любимой на свиданье…
В «Сочельника Святую Ночь» —
Стремились ближнему помочь…
И чужды были нам проклятья,
И были братскими объятья […]

А в Малороссии!… Колядки!…
И в каждом доме, в каждой хатке, —
Уют, теплынь и чистота…
Поют детишки про Христа,
Про Вифлеем, волхвов и ясли…
И — до утра огни не гасли…
Не хватит двадцати страниц,
Чтобы веселье «вечерниц»
Вам описать… Звучит бандура,
На бубне — лопается шкура,
Пошли в присядку «парубки»,
Стучат «дівчаток» каблуки,
Звенят «подковки», косы вьются,
«Дядькі шуткують і сміються»,
«Різдвяна Ніч» — глядит в окно…
А на столах — полным-полно:
«Кутья» в «макітре», «взвар», «горілка»,
«Сливьянкі староі бутилка»,
Из рыбы — постный холодец,
В баклагах толстых «варенец»,
Вишнёвка, запеканка, пиво…
Всё аппетитно… Всё — красиво…
Лежат повсюду «рушники»,
На них — «вишивані квіткі»…
На блюдах — пироги горою,
Тарань с прозрачною икрою,
Пшеничных груда «паляниц»…
У окон — ряд весёлых лиц:
Пришли пославить — со Звездою,
И дышит стариной сeдою
Напев народной «Коляды»…