Essays, Translations, and Other Writings
Since 2022 or thereabouts, I have found it especially difficult to keep up with the crises breaking out across the world. In part, I imagine, that has to do with the birth of my children, who are remarkably adept at generating small crises themselves. It also has to do, I’m sure, with the means by Continue reading “Los Angeles Has Not Yet Lost Its Way”: Viktor Rayzman on the Number 4 Bus
The May issue of Poetry magazine featured my little essay on the poetry of nostalgia, in which I characterized myself as being “[m]ore susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me.” I had in mind both the stream of my own experiences and the larger current of history. One tends to flow into Continue reading Home Goes the Pilot up the Wind: On Oscar Mandel (1926-2026)
The new issue of The Common, a literary journal always worth reading from cover to cover, carries my poem “Legion.” I never thought I’d write a poem about the First World War, a conflict that gave rise to more great verse in English than any other. What could I add to the lines of Wilfred Continue reading “Legion”: Harry Krumm in the Great War
The Ukrainian émigré Alexander Voloshin arrived in Los Angeles a year before Henri Coulette was born in the city on November 17, 1927. For much of the next three decades, until Voloshin’s death in 1960, the two men shared the same terrain, and it’s very likely that the young Coulette saw a good deal of Continue reading Simply Human: Henri Coulette and Alexander Voloshin
A little less than a month ago, I posted Dana Gioia’s film about Weldon Kees. The morning I drove to sunny South Pasadena to shoot my cameo, Dana and I conducted a brief conversation about Kees, which he has now posted to his channel: I spoke about Kees, whom I’ve been reading since the age of Continue reading Weldon Kees and Zbigniew Herbert: A Conversation with Dana Gioia
I discovered the mid-century American poet Weldon Kees (1914-1955) quite by chance, which is the best way to discover a poet. As I wrote in a 2015 essay on Henri Coulette (1927-1988), about whom I’ll have some news to share soon, “[a] photograph of Kees—neatly trimmed moustache, neatly tailored gray flannel suit, right arm bent Continue reading Dana Gioia resurrects Weldon Kees (but not, alas,…
The New Year has always been a merry holiday in my family, even in the worst of times. A decade ago, when I was still editing the Los Angeles Review of Books (which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this year!), I invited my Belarusian friend Sasha Razor and the brilliant scholar of Soviet media David MacFadyen Continue reading “Board the Troika of the Past”: Alexander Voloshin Rings in the New…
A woman recently reached out to me after finding the snippets of my translation of Alexander Voloshin’s Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood. Attached to her email was the photo above. Her parents, who had gone through German DP camps and settled in Los Angeles in 1949, befriended Voloshin and his wife, Helen, in the ’50s, frequently Continue reading Face to Face with Alexander Voloshin
This week Paul Dry Books made me a very happy man. My translation of Alexander Voloshin’s mock epic Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood, which will officially appear in April of next year, now has a cover, blurbs from four of my idols in disparate fields, and a foothold on Amazon. The people I approached, with faint Continue reading From Mandelstam to Mr. Peanut: Another Hollywood Émigré Journey
I find it hard to remain cheerful this summer, though I have one or two good reasons to celebrate—not counting the three named Jenny, Nina, and Charlie. One development worth toasting is the appearance of Vernon Duke’s Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems, a book packed with such gaiety that I can hardly keep Continue reading “No Victors Here”: Alexander Voloshin in the Hollywood Bowl