In a 2009 interview, literary and cultural critic Michael Wood speaks about his America in the Movies (1975), a book that, among other things, offers an account of the particular aura surrounding Hollywood’s depiction of America in films from the 1940s and 1950s. Wood credits French structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss with framing his take on that iconic scene: “I’d read pretty much everything by [Lévi-Strauss] at that point, particularly his work on the structural study of myth. That really seemed to me like a great model for talking about the movies. He talks about myth being a collective neurosis, and a neurosis being an individual myth. And he also says that a myth offers a solution to a problem that has no solution. If you had a solution, you wouldn’t need the myth.” If you substitute “love” (love for place, for a person or persons, for language) for “neurosis,” these notions about individual and collective myths offer a red carpet runway into the gorgeous, temptingly nostalgic, sonically sensuous, and emotionally provocative worlds of two new debut collections, Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Aimee Seu’s Velvet Hounds.
Just as Isaac Babel’s collection Odessa Stories (which Boris Dralyuk, an acclaimed translator and Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, has translated into English) is, in a sense, a My Odessa, a mythologizing of the criminal-ridden port town and Jewish terrain of Babel’s childhood, Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood is a palimpsestic mapping of an émigré’s memories and imaginings onto what might be thought of as a “target language” — Hollywood — a place already heavily mythologized. Exiles are always aware of at least two cultures, of two or more languages, and this stereoscopy makes for a rich poetic frisson in Dralyuk’s work. In an interview with Arkansas International, what Dralyuk, who emigrated to the United States from Odessa as a child, says about his praxis as a translator may account for his uncanny ability to “translate” his particular experience of Hollywood and environs for a reader:
“I have always, from the very start, approached poetic translation as the writing of poetry, full stop. It calls for the same degree of care – care for each word, each sound – as the writing of one’s own poetry, and I feel the only way to muster and sustain that care is through inspiration, through transport. For as long as I’m translating a poem, I take on a consciousness that could have given rise to the original. I don’t become the human being who wrote the original, of course, but I step into some version of that person’s mind – the version contained in, or hinted at, or perhaps constructed by the poem in front of me. Minds emanate from poems, try to envelop and infect us as we read; they want to take us over, and, if their intricate plans come together, they do. Poetic translators go one step further than readers – our bodies possessed, we set to work on new poems in the target language.
And so, for me translating poetry has, fundamentally, served the same function as writing my own poetry: it has given me the opportunity to refine my craft. It has also allowed me to walk in other poets’ footsteps, to see and feel the world as they did, and to learn their methods of making poems that preserve those visions and sensations, preserve whole sensibilities.”
Whereas the poems of some ex-patriots pine for lost homelands (Seamus Heaney likened the distance to the work of a lever — the longer the lever and the farther away one is from one’s homeland, the easier it is to move the heavy rock of one’s material), Dralyuk instead dives deeply into his inherited city — its current and former denizens, its architecture, its fallen movie stars, its has-beens, its history, its poets, often with a particular focus on the period of Russian emigration to Los Angeles in the wake of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the first-wave émigré movement from Russia into other parts of the world.
In the title poem, a triptych of poems cast in Dralyuk’s signature spin on the Onegin sonnet, the speaker leans right into his flood subject: love for what’s lost and the myth that loss engenders. Here is the first of these three poems. Its title alludes, ironically, to the name of a posthumously erected statue of silent film star Rudolph Valentino, now fallen into a shabby state despite the hope- and ambition-charged “aspirational” milieu of Tinseltown:
Aspiration
That night I discovered the park at De Longpre and Cherokee … Looking at all the small houses, telling myself that these were where Swanson and Pickford and Chaplin and Arbuckle and the others used to live in the good old days …
— Horace McCoy, 1938
This elegant poem, with its dry wit, smart rhymes, subtle allusions (Eliot is here, Shelley, Keats), and knock-out imagery (that clacking film projector, “slowly going dead”), is characteristic of the work in My Hollywood. Dralyuk’s lyrics evince a mix of high style and vernacular torque that not only reflects the lost worlds under consideration, but embodies them as well. To return to the “translation” analogy, Dralyuk has an uncanny ability to move into the ruins and realms of demolished bungalows and “dingbats,” forgotten careers, neighborhood cafes, tchotchke shops, dive bars, and abandoned celebrity manses as one might enter a text in a foreign language; he engages with his subjects sonically and formally until a (re)new(ed) sense of those places and persons bodies forth for the reader.
Not all of the poems revolve around Hollywood; there are love poems, portraits, tributes, odes, poems about language itself (dictionaries, style, translation, poetry), as well as a suite of translations of poems about Hollywood by other Russian poets. Whatever a given poem’s subject may be, there is always an active engagement with sound (and silence), as in the lovely “Notation”:
In certain rooms I lived
like momentary noise.
In others, I took pains
to make myself perceived.
In some I was the creak
to be more felt than heard —
linoleum’s absurd
and personal mystique.
In many I was shrill —
the pealing song of birds
accustomed to the scraps
left on the windowsill.
In yours I wasn’t sound,
I was the tangled sheet
still clinging to your feet,
holding your ankles bound.
The reader emerges from the irresistible world Dralyuk has conjured in My Hollywood as one might exit from the darkened cathedral of a movie theater, blinking into the alien light of day or lit streetlamps feeling enlarged by the film one has just experienced: a sensation of having been inhabited and translated by the spell the story just told has cast, a little homesick, perhaps a bit nostalgic (nostos, “return home”; algia, “pain”). Altered. “I draw you out,” Dralyuk writes in “The Catch: On Translation,”
… faint voice, from rippled pages:
a famished angler reeling in a fish,
the kind that, in the folktale, grants a wish —
a golden thing, imbued with living magic.
Between us is the taunt line of attention,
imperiled by the current and the wind.
Slowly but willfully, I reel you in.
We hold each other, for a moment, in suspension.
* * *
Aimee Seu’s Velvet Hounds likewise summons up and unleashes her own mythical terroir: the realm of girlhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Seu’s sonic and imagistic lexicon is part Philly, part mosh pit, part bulimic bathroom stall, part trippy sleepover party, part Gothic horror story, part bloody fairy tale, part parked car, part karaoke bar, part hot mess family drama, and at every turn a full-throttle engagement with the body as it tightrope-walks above the romance of oblivion.
As with Dralyuk, sound accounts, in large part, for the somatic arrest of these poems. In Dralyuk, it’s often in the surprising styling and epiphanies of rhyme that we participate in a poem’s emotional and spatial atmosphere. Seu’s poems are full of alliterative collisions for the mouth, but it’s often in the swift swerves and accruals of rhythm that the reader is drawn in. Here is the end of “Telling Your Best Friend”:
… She marvels
at how long it took you to tell her.
But you still haven’t really
now that you have. Because your best friend,
your raucous largest heart, star-crossed twin
of second grade, savior at sixteen from the other girls,
your sleeved ace, the lovely runaway
horse who entered a barren kingdom,
mane and tail on fire, brawling and snapping
her gum, cutting class, dropping
acid on the beach, no matter
how much you love each other,
you can never see what the other saw.
This passage, book-ended by specular, chiasmus-like phrases, offers its intervening quicksilver, shapeshifting catalog with a velocity that suspends the reader’s breath and then releases it. Lévi-Strauss’ notion that we create myth because there is no solution to our existential problem pertains to Seu’s work. Often full of anguish, bent by complicated desire, the poems and their speakers are able to sit with paradox, to hold at once disbelief and a generous love of life. “When I die,” Seu writes in “Heaven,” “the little lavender wind-chime-legged deer / will have to drag me out by their hundred silver teeth. / Their dream-catcher antlers snagged on the fumy robes / of my naked soul tugging, because I will want to kiss every wall / as I leave. Each pock on the carpet. The lace of rust / around the sink. Walk backward down the steps / kissing, and kiss your picture three times. / I will wake again on the other side of the world / saying your name and they’ll call it gibberish.”
As compelling as the poems are the poems’ titles — “Poison Ivy Handjob,” for instance (“I want to write out my most horrible secrets / and they not sound so bad / sung back to me in the mouths of the crowd”), “Family Portrait with Cadillac Engulfed in Flames,” “Portrait of Boy Preserved in Chlorine,” and “You Say I Look Happy in a Photograph from When We Were Apart and I Think.” There are sexy odes (“Clitoral” and “G-Spot”) as well as epistles to exes, family members, friends, and to the speaker’s younger self. At the beating heart of the book is a lyric essay, “Long Lonely,” a coming-of-age narrative that alchemizes unreliable parental figures, bi-racial and fluid sexual identities, and extremes of religion and love, and in which the reader is as likely to encounter The Righteous Brothers as Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Heir to poets like Sylvia Plath, Cate Marvin, and Lucie Brock-Broido, Seu does not shy away from being “extra” — with her diction, her subject matter, her cadence. But how not believe the truth of Seu’s outsize hunger for the full menu of the world, reading these last lines from “Ode to Pomegranates”?:
Oh, to have the scent of a lover
on your hands all day, to be tarnished
by a scarlet oblivion. I want to lie in bed
with you with the window open
cradling you, consuming you
ravenously, picking you apart
as the morning rain begins
to scatter itself. As long as I live I want
to taste every last capsuled drop.
* * *
In a 2017 interview with Katya Michaels, the editor of The Odessa Review, Boris Dralyuk offered a prescient response to Michaels’ question about whether or not distinctions should be made among Russophone, Ukrainian, and Russian writers. “As Ukraine rediscovers its identity,” Michaels asks, “there’s been some debate whether a Ukrainian author is someone who has to create his work in the Ukrainian language.” Dralyuk responds:
“Well, I think it’s not just about the rediscovery of identity — some parts of Ukraine have had a consistent identity through history — but about combining a lot of Ukraines into one Ukraine. It’s a very interesting and very fruitful process. I regard Babel as a Jewish-Ukrainian-Russian-Soviet writer, not necessarily in that order, but all of those things. The kind of Russian language that is spoken in Odessa is distinctive, inflected by Ukrainian as much as it is inflected by Yiddish and numerous other languages. So Babel is a Russo-Ukrainian writer, if you want to call it that, and very much a Jewish writer. No one can claim ownership of a language.”
I had been savoring Dralyuk’s and Seu’s debut collections for well over a month to prepare for this review, but when I sat down to write it in mid-March, Russia and Ukraine were already weeks-deep into a deadly conflict. Dralyuk’s words are a reminder that at the root level of language (language which is our unique human gift), Russia and Ukraine, especially their poets, are more akin than they are divided. When I think of the poetry of resistance to totalitarianism and injustice, Marina Tsvetaeva, Ivan Franko, Anna Akhmatova, Vasyl Stus, and Osip Mandelstam are among the first authors to come to mind. In the collective and personal myths created by My Hollywood and Velvet Hounds — and in all good poetry, really — human beings are invited to be seen and felt as real to one another, writer and reader, across space, place, and time. It’s an old chestnut, when defending the value of poetry, to call up William Carlos Williams’ charge that while poetry may make nothing happen, people die miserably every day for lack of its nuanced expressions of human complexity. Poetry is, to quote the very human and problematic Ezra Pound, “news that stays news.” In private mythologies with communal resonances, My Hollywood and Velvet Hounds make this timeless news new.
My Hollywood and Other Poems, published by Paul Dry Books on April 5, 2022, 69 pages, $16.95 paperback
Velvet Hounds, published by University of Akron Press on March 2, 2022, 73 pages, $15.95 paperback