Trifecta: Kurkov, Voloshin, and Coulette

I haven’t posted a thing here in what feels like ages. It’s only been a month and a half, in fact, but what a month and a half it’s been! In February, Jenny and I learned that we were both finalists for the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, which made us the first married couple to be shortlisted for any NBCC award — and this fact drew some attention from the Literary Hub and the Los Angeles Times. Last Thursday, I was stunned to learn that my translation of Andrey Kurkov’s Grey Bees won. I mean it: stunned. The news reached me over Twitter in Los Angeles, in the office of my old colleague Peter Winsky, who’s now teaching at the Slavic department at USC. I was about to give a reading from My Hollywood and Other Poems and couldn’t believe what I saw on my phone. Jenny and I were visiting LA with our twins and my wonderful sister in law, and we had all just been to Disneyland, the setting of Jenny’s brilliant story “Anaheim,” which begins with an unexpected win. Well, this whole prize thing felt about as real as the puppets of It’s a Small World to me… But as with the finest of Walt’s fantasias, it made me want to believe.

To make matters even more fantastic, just days earlier The New Criterion ran my essay on Alexander Voloshin, whose mock epic of “Russian” Hollywood, On the Tracks and at Crossroads, I’ve been translating and posting here for about a year now. And a few days before that, The Orange County Register published a beautiful biographical article on one of my favorite LA poets, the unjustly neglected Henri Coulette, by Erik Pedersen, with whom I’d shared my reflections on Coulette’s Angeleno style and his legacy. Do give it a read.

What does all this prove? Perhaps this: For all their differences, Kurkov, Voloshin, and Coulette each managed to capture, uniquely and convincingly, a time and a place in their work. There’s no expiration date on writing as perceptive and evocative as theirs.

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