Simply Human: Henri Coulette and Alexander Voloshin

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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 his older neighbor on the silver screen, if only for seconds at a time. He would not have known the name of the extra with the swarthy mustachioed face, and he certainly wouldn’t have known that the extra was a fellow poet—a poet as keenly observant and witty as himself, as bittersweetly in love as he was with the landscape and culture they shared.

What we do know, judging by the manuscript of Coulette’s final collection, And Come to Closure—which was found in his closet after his lonely death in 1988—is that the poet understood the life Voloshin lived. He treated it with utmost sympathy in one of his finest poems, “The Extras”:

Today, they are the subjects of a king,
And they must cheer his passage through the town
This coronation morning, cheer his taking
Purple and ermine, the sceptre and the crown.

They have, they will again, take after take,
But now the star, his agent at his sleeve,
Has disappeared. Their thoughts come back to them,
Like shadows, and they rest from make-believe.

Duchess and chimney sweep are Blossom and Hank.
A light is asked for, and a light is given.
Gossip is music played upon the breath
By wicked tongues, and anecdote is heaven.

Simply human is what their costumes smell of;
Simply human is what their faces say.
They make the lobby and the street look real.
Practicing every day for Judgment Day,

They draw the circle that becomes a crown;
They draw bathwater on a bended knee,
And curtains on the night, and they draw blood.
They are the after that comes After Me.

The very elegance of Coulette’s iambic pentameter lends more dignity to Blossom, Hank, and their confrères than was ever granted to them on Hollywood sets, while dignity is precisely what these people gave to the scenes in which they appeared. Consider how Coulette rings the changes on the word “draw” in the final stanza—how many varied actions these people perform, all reduced to a single monosyllabic verb. They draw a circle that, through the magic of montage, becomes a king’s crown (I imagine a Busby Berkeley sequence); they draw their master’s bathwater; they draw the curtains before a fade-out; and they draw blood in a swashbuckling fracas. Yes, on paper, just one little word—but in effect, the whole picture.

Reading the poem today, I wonder about Blossom. There’s no mystery about Hank. Coulette, whose first name was pronounced “Henry,” went by Hank in his daily life. “Hank, c’est moi,” says Henri. But Blossom—well, she is a tarnished urban flower, like Virginia Cherrill in Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). She may also be a nod to the flower girl in the film at the center of Prater Violet (1945), the first novel Coulette’s colleague Christopher Isherwood finished in his adoptive home, Los Angeles. And I hear her voice as that of Blossom Dearie, child-like yet streetwise.

As Michael Caines and I write in our introduction to the new Carcanet Classics edition of Coulette’s poems—the first collection of his work to appear since 1990—the poet had every reason to identify with extras, those anonymous but essential human beings on the periphery. He himself had been marginalized, partly by choice, partly by chance. You can read our essay in the latest issue of The New Criterion.

He would, I venture, have seen an echo of his own experience with his second book, The Family Goldschmitt (1971)—most copies of which were accidentally pulped at his publisher’s warehouse before they could be distributed—in this passage about an extra’s working day from Voloshin’s mock epic of exile in Hollywood, Sidetracked:

It’s twelve o’clock… And so at last he
decides to dial up Central Casting…
“GA” for “Garfield” (of all things),
Three… seven… one… one… And it rings.
“Hello” — then, with a stifled groan,
“You call back later.” Click. Dial tone.

Evening is here… No calls at all —
now it’s too late for them to call.
“How sad… Maybe tomorrow, then.”
At least he can go out again…

Frustrated, feeling quite defeated,
he dines, drinks wine, heads to the theater…
At the Apollo they’re now screening
the film on which, for four demeaning
days, he worked (at seven fifty
per) — oh, that was heavy lifting…
The set was hot, stuffy, and stale.
Swallowing lukewarm ginger ale,
he sat behind the bar each day,
landed one closeup… flew away.
Others had paychecks for three weeks!
Just think—some folks get all the breaks…

Alas, there is more pain to follow…
Watching the screen at the Apollo,
he finds he’s nowhere to be found!
They’ve cut him out of it, the clowns…
He didn’t count on such a blow—
they didn’t even let him know…
It’s all right there—just not the bar:
the “fist fight” and the “tearful star,”
the “scandal” and the “intrigue” too,
but for a hundred smackeroos
you wouldn’t spot a sign of him!
Another victim of fate’s whim…
How rude! You suffer for your art
and in the end they scrap your part…

Of course, Coulette could not have read Voloshin’s poem. It appears in my English translation next month, from Paul Dry Books, a few days before Coulette’s poems reemerge in print. This double publication is, to me, of great significance. I have somehow managed to help bring two of my Angeleno heroes out of the background at the same time. The world is a cruel place at the moment, but that supposedly cruelest of months, April, will be kind to two poets long denied kindness. I don’t often plead like this, but I will do so now, on their behalf. Please order their books today—you won’t regret it.

Weldon Kees and Zbigniew Herbert: A Conversation with Dana Gioia

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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 17, hurriedly, as is my wont, but still managed, I hope, to make one or two points that are not entirely lacking in merit. One such point—on which Dana and I agree—is this: Although Kees was second to none in his mastery of the American idiom and understanding of the American scene, his sensibility might have had more in common with Eastern and Central European poets who’d witnessed the catastrophes of the 20th century firsthand—who had, as it were, felt them on their skin. What was born of that encounter in the work, for instance, of Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky (who valued Kees highly) was a sense of the human condition as essentially tragic, together with a resolve to face that tragedy honestly, but not morosely or histrionically, not without humor, not without style. Think of Weltschmerz, but with a bit more zest, even a little selzter.

I wouldn’t be much of an Angeleno if I didn’t cite a pop lyric to illustrate what I have in mind. The one that suggests itself immediately was written by my fellow Fairfax High alum Jerry Leiber: “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing / Let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” (Take it away, Peggy Lee…) Here’s something you may not know: Those lyrics were inspired by the work of another Angeleno, Thomas Mann, whose early story “Disillusionment” (1896) was a favorite of Gaby Rodgers, Jerry Leiber’s German-born wife. Which brings us back to Central Europe.

As I mention in my chat with Dana, the Polish poet to whom I believe Kees’s vision of the world and tone of voice, if not formal technique, bear a particularly striking resemblance is not Miłosz by Zbigniew Herbert, whose Selected Poems I reviewed for the TLS in April last year. I will reproduce my review below, but not before I share a poem by Kees that concisely expresses the bleak wisdom I find in Herbert’s verse.

The Speakers

“A equals X,” says Mister One.
“A equals B,” says Mister Two.
“A equals nothing under the sun
But A,” says Mister Three. A few
Applaud; some wipe their eyes;
Some linger in the shade to see
One and Two in neat disguise
Decapitating Mister Three.

“This age is not entirely bad.”
It’s bad enough, God knows, but you
Should know Elizabethans had
Sweeneys and Mrs. Porters too.
The past goes down and disappears,
The present stumbles home to bed,
The future stretches out in years
That no one knows, and you’ll be dead.

Zbigniew Herbert, Selected Poems, edited and introduced by J. M. Coetzee and Alissa Valles (London: Penguin, 2024)

Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98) has the distinction—the irony of which he likely both rued and appreciated—of being the only member of a trinity of internationally influential post-Second World War Polish poets not to have been awarded the Nobel prize. Having lost out on the award, he could at least boast of a bevy of laureates who felt he should have won. Responding to his laconic congratulatory telegram in 1996, Wisława Szymborska wired back: “Zbyszek, Great Poet! If it were up to me, you would be the one struggling to compose a speech right now.” And it was Czesław Miłosz, the recipient in 1980, who had first introduced anglophone readers to Herbert in 1965, through his anthology Post-War Polish Poetry, then more thoroughly in 1968, with a volume of Selected Poems co-translated with Peter Dale Scott. In his anthology, Miłosz accords Herbert the highest praise: “If the key to contemporary Polish poetry is the collective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skillful in expressing it.”

The esteem in which Herbert was held by fellow Poles is impressive, but equally impressive was the degree to which his poems spoke to readers from other parts of the world. Joseph Brodsky, despite his distaste for free verse, argued fervently for Herbert as “a poet for this place; above all, for this time”. Seamus Heaney looked to him as a model, calling his work an “ideal poetry of reality”. Another longtime admirer among the laureates, J. M. Coetzee, is now the co-editor, with Alissa Valles, of a judicious and timely Selected Poems, which he has furnished with an excellent introduction.

This selection is judicious in that it collects Herbert’s best-known and most accomplished poems from every stage of his career. It begins with the opening lyric of his first volume, published in 1956, and ends with one in memory of the essayist Jean Améry, which only appeared in print a decade after the poet’s death. Valles, who previously edited the door-stopping Collected Poems (2007), in which most of the translations were her own, here includes a greater number of renditions by Miłosz and Scott, and by John and Bogdana Carpenter, whose earlier volumes did much to cement Herbert’s reputation in English. This too is judicious, if for no other reason than that it allows readers innocent of Polish to appreciate Herbert’s variety of tones, ranging from the crisply classical, which Miłosz and Scott handle superbly, to the looser, more conversational, which Valles’s approach suits well.

Amazingly, this most subtle of craftsmen was able to wrest those tones from what seem to be the plainest materials: strings of direct statement, mostly in lower case, entirely devoid of punctu­ation. Coetzee described the “vivifying shock” that the “deliberately plain” early translations of Herbert’s poems gave to the “rather torpid and insular British poetry scene” of the 1960s, at the same time signalling that, plain though they were, the poems were in no wise simple: “What impressed readers in the West was the directness with which [postwar Polish poets] dared to address life-and-death issues, a directness achieved more often than not by strategies of ironic indirection”. Irony and indirection are indeed Herbert’s favourite tools, and he uses them not merely to evade the censor, but also to render the human condition as he understood it: complex and unchanging.

In one of his greatest poems, “Elegy of Fortinbras”, here translated by Miłosz and Scott, Herbert gives voice not to Hamlet, the vanquished poet-prince, but to his practical successor:

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison

Does the poet’s sympathy lie with the designer of prisons? Hardly. There is simply no better way to demonstrate his understanding of the makers of systems that break people like himself, and understanding, though it may not save him, is a form of triumph.

Herbert takes the same tack in “Damastes Nicknamed Procrustes Speaks,” here translated by Valles:

I designed a bed to the size of the perfect man
I measured captured travelers against that bed
it was hard to avoid – I admit – stretching limbs
trimming extremities
the patients died but the more of them perished
the surer I became that my research was correct
the end was sublime progress requires sacrifice

When writing this monologue Herbert may, as he admitted to the Carpenters, have been thinking of Lenin, but his Damastes is also the Damastes of myth. By displacing his disgust with Communist rule onto the classical world, he demonstrates, time and again, how little man changes over time. Our capacity for cruelty and self-delusion is as persistent as our capacity for dignity. History may do us in, but, like Mr Cogito, Herbert’s alter ego in two dozen poems in this book, dignity demands that we pursue our “last reward”—“the golden fleece of nothingness”, admission to “the company of [our] fore­fathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland / the defenders of the kingdom without bounds and the city of ashes”.

As war again touches Zbigniew Herbert’s birthplace—Lviv, in present-day Ukraine—and the tide of cruelty rises around the globe, poets who feel compelled to respond directly may learn from his example. The final irony of his indirect approach is that by looking backwards he extended his poems’ reach. Tyrants expire; parables rise from their ruins.

Dana Gioia resurrects Weldon Kees (but not, alas, Boris the parrot)

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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 cleanly at the waist with a cigarette between the index and middle fingers—appeared above the masthead of a journal that accepted two bits of my two-bit juvenilia many, many years ago.” The years have grown in number since I set those words down on paper, while my admiration for and debt to Kees’s work have steadily deepened. In that same essay I describe Kees as “my Virgil,” but I am far from the only poet whom he has guided. In fact, he plays the Virgilian part more literally in a magnificent long poem—a work-in-progress titled The Underworld, by Dana Gioia, who has done more to preserve Kees’s memory than anyone since Donald Justice. Today Dana has shared his latest and most engaging critical work on Kees, an hour-long film that tells the story of the poet’s life and, more importantly, evokes his peculiar spirit. I was lucky enough to add my own two cents at roughly the 35-minute mark. Do give the film a watch. Kees will hook you for life.

“Board the Troika of the Past”: Alexander Voloshin Rings in the New Year

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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 onto the journal’s Radio Hour to speak about the special significance of the New Year for those who lived under Soviet rule. Do listen to the episode, if the season’s spirit moves you—but to make a long story short, what Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanza, and other religious and cultural days of wintertime revelry are for those who celebrate them around the world, New Year’s was for the denizens of the staunchly secular USSR. All the markers of Christmas especially (from the tree to the jolly bearded bestower of gifts in the night) were displaced onto New Year’s and became a beloved part of the lives even of those who otherwise, sometimes at great risk, retained their Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or other officially repressed faith.

Of course, the significance of New Year for the East Slavic lands predates 1917, as Alexander Voloshin makes clear in a sparkling, bittersweet chapter of Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood. I revisited the chapter this morning, and noted that it was written as 1939 turned into 1940—that is, as the world was rapidly descending into chaos. Today, as 2025 turns into 2026, it is hard for many of us to celebrate without a sense of trepidation, even of dread. Millions of people around the world will spend the evening of December 31 out in the bitter cold, or in bomb shelters. What comfort can we find in Voloshin’s words below? Only the knowledge that we aren’t the first generation to spend what should be a joyous night under dark clouds, and, with that knowledge, the suggestion that the clouds will eventually part.

Among the people to whom I’ll be raising a flute of “foamy Mumm” (or, more likely, Veuve…) tomorrow evening is Voloshin himself, whose poem, so long neglected, will once again appear in print in 2026!


Before we tasted of this woe,
we didn’t greet the New Year so . . .
We weren’t afraid and heavy-hearted . . .
Of course, the life with which we’ve parted
always seems sweet in retrospect.
Be honest, would you not elect
to board the Troika of the Past
and ditch these cars, however fast?

We’ve access now to aeroplanes,
but they are no cure for the pains
of hearts removed from native places . . .
I’d stake my life on this: The case is
that those of us older than forty
are sick at soul. However sturdy
we may appear, it’s just for show—
we’re always worried, always low.
We miss familiar hills and rivers,
and often we are seized with shivers
as we recall those distant bells,
those shepherd’s pipes . . . No, nothing quells
our longing or holds back our tears
when we dredge up those sunken years . . .
Frost-covered spruce and pine trees—all
that we had deemed “worn out,” “banal,”
“provincial” now seems rare and precious,
the only thing that might refresh us . . .

Indeed, it’s painful to admit
that disillusionment has hit
us Russians hard . . . For there were times
when we’d head south, to warmer climes—
Sorrento, Monte Carlo, Nice,
Capri . . . We’d follow our caprice . . .
And there we’d ring in the New Year,
lifting a loud and joyous cheer!
How sweet it was to float at night
in gondolas—a pure delight
to say, “Isn’t it nice and warm?
Back home it’s freezing—a big storm . . .”
While roses bloomed, we thought of snow
and of our luck; how could we know
that we would someday feel so haunted,
that snow would be all that we wanted . . .

We only love, only hold dear
the scenes that vanish, disappear . . .
Now at our temples we may find
frost of a rather different kind . . .

But let’s not dwell on that—instead
we should recall, lest we forget,
a proper Russian New Year’s Eve!
One had to live it to believe . . .

Moscow! Such merry revelries!
The snow is piled up to our knees!
How will we reach the village now?
In our swift troika—speed the plow!
Bring on the friendly toasts and drinks,
the season’s heartwarming high jinks!
Khodynka Field now lies outspread
like an enormous snow-white bed
by which we race along, pell-mell,
to the Kremlin’s chiming bells . . .

Where to now? Off to the Yar,
to hear Sokolov’s guitar,
Shishkin’s famous Roma choir . . .
What a crowd—and all afire!
Ah, no guest will ever want
for vodka at this restaurant . . .
Silver clanging, crystal ringing,
piano playing, people singing . . .
Men in tailcoats . . . Cavaliers,
grenadiers, and cuirassiers . . .
Strapping Cossacks from the Don,
merchants with their caftans on . . .
Rubies, diamonds, emeralds glitter
as the ladies smile and titter . . .
Noise and laughter everywhere—
happiness beyond compare!
Corks are popping! Here they come:
countless flutes of foamy Mumm,
Aÿ-Champagne, Abrau-Durso,
and, bien sûr, la Veuve Clicquot . . .

Twelve has struck! The maestro stands,
as the trumpets in the band
greet the New Year—all is right
with the world! The future’s bright!
So it was throughout the land,
from St. Pete to Samarkand—
but Old Russia is wiped out . . .
There, they live under the knout,
while we roam and curse our fate—
now for twenty-three years straight . . .

1939 is gone—
and good riddance . . . Moving on . . .
Oh, it left a bitter sting.
What will 1940 bring?

War, a raging hurricane . . .
The whole world has gone insane . . .
Yet faith smolders in our souls
like a mound of stubborn coals.
After all, the Russians broke
from the Tatar-Mongol yoke,
made it through the Time of Troubles
with their empire redoubled,
and watched Peter’s city rise
from the swamp before their eyes.
It was there that they first saw
culture, science, and the law—
but then darkness came again . . .
Sacrificing many men,
even Moscow, they still won,
chasing out Napoleon!

My fellow émigrés, today
there’s just one thing I wish to say:
We’re waiting . . . We have waited long . . .
But we will get there—do stay strong!
Don’t give in to your despair.
We’ve suffered much that was unfair,
barely escaped our foe’s Red wrath,
and traveled exile’s flinty path,
but I believe our time will come—
we’ll rest, revive ourselves at home,
with all our children, all our kin,
and then our New Year will begin!

Face to Face with Alexander Voloshin

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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 hosting the couple at their home. I had, until that day, never encountered anyone who had seen Voloshin in the flesh—not for lack of trying. Voloshin died in 1960, his wife in 1962. I’d asked every Angeleno émigré I could find whether they had known the man, even in passing. None had: it was too long ago.

After years of posting pieces of his poem, I finally drew out a witness, made a living connection—just in time. The photo was taken in the last year of Voloshin’s life. I had found other photos of him—a headshot from the ’30s, a professional portrait from the ’50s—and I include them in the book, together with frames from his films. But I had never seen a photograph so intimate, so poignant.

He’s the dark, diminutive figure on the right. He looks ill, unhappy. I wish I could tell him that, 75 years after his poem appeared in a small émigré edition, Paul Dry Books would bring it back to life in English. Do the old man a solid, pre-order now, and have yourself a ball in April!

From Mandelstam to Mr. Peanut: Another Hollywood Émigré Journey

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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 hope, to endorse the book were the soulful and exquisitely subtle American poet Henri Cole, the eminent Hollywood historian Anthony Slide, the pioneer of Russophone pop culture studies Jeffrey Brooks, and screenwriter, novelist, and bad boy-turned-mensch Jerry Stahl.  All four agreed, and all four delivered far more than I could ever have dreamed of.

Now that My Hollywood and Other Poems, Vernon Duke’s Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems, and Voloshin’s Sidetracked are a wrap, as it were, I feel like a major part of my life’s work is behind me.  Long ago I set out to resurrect the major poetic voices of Hollywood’s Russophone past—and this loose trilogy is tangible evidence, if not of my success, then of my passionate commitment to that goal.  Of course, as any fan of Hollywood cinema knows, trilogies beget trilogies, spawning sequels and prequels never-ending…

So, am I done resurrecting Russophone Hollywood?  How could I be?  I mean, Alex Woloshin (Voloshin’s stage name) isn’t even the only fascinating émigré bit player named Alex to pass through the studio gates.  We’ll start this story, appropriately enough, on the set of Edwin Carewe’s 1931 adaptation of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, starring the tragic Mexican spitfire Lupe Vélez as Katyusha Maslova.  Reporting on the slew of “White Russian” extras brought in to lend the film an authentic atmosphere, Dan Thomas notes that one “Alex Novinsky once had his slightest command obeyed almost before it had passed his lips. Now he sits quietly in the jury box awaiting commands from Carewe and his assistants.”

As we know from Voloshin’s poem, there was no shortage of impostors and self-aggrandizers among the émigrés, but, at least in this case, the reporter had not been hoodwinked.  Alexander Alexandrovich Novinsky (1878-1960) had indeed been a staff officer (captain 2nd rank) in the Russian Imperial Navy, and, after joining the White forces in the Civil War, continued to serve as the harbor master of the Crimean port of Feodosia—about as responsible a position as one could occupy in the years before total Bolshevik victory. I would describe Novinsky for you, but I would rather offer this paragraph of prose from Osip Mandelstam, whom Novinsky treated most kindly during the great, highly erratic poet’s troubled stay on the peninsula in the summer of 1920:

The starched white tunic inherited from the old regime made him look miraculously younger and reconciled him with himself: the freshness of a gymnasium student and the brisk cheerfulness of an executive—a combination of qualities which he prized in himself and feared to lose. He conceived of the entire Crimea as one blinding, stiffly starched geographical tunic. On the other side of Perekop was night. There beyond the salt marshes there was no longer any starch, there were no washerwomen, no glad subordination, and it would be impossible there to have that springy step, as after a swim, that permanent excitement: the blended sense of well-bought currency, of clear government service, and, at the age of forty, the feeling of having passed one’s exams.

So opens, in Clarence Brown’s translation, “The Harbor Master,” a sketch dedicated to Novinsky in Mandelstam’s The Egyptian Stamp (1924).  It makes for a most charming portrait of the slight, energetic, dignified officer.  And it isn’t the only piece of literature Novinsky inspired.  Maximilian Voloshin (1877-1932, no relation to the author of Sidetracked)—whom Mandelstam had been visiting in Koktebel in 1920, and with whom he had a tremendously silly falling out—was a close friend of Novinsky’s and dedicated a very fine and fiery poem to him in 1917.

Imagine, for a moment, how odd a time the first half of the 20th century was, how dizzying its noise, to borrow an image from Mandelstam.  A distinguished officer who, in the 1910s, made a lasting impression on two literary giants was, by 1938, appearing as “Professor Von Stupor” in the Three Stooges short “Violent Is the World of Curly.”  Better that than the alternative, of course.  By the end of 1938, Mandelstam lay dead under the ice in a transit camp near Vladivostok.

Novinsky followed the same path to Hollywood that his namesake Alex Voloshin chronicles in Sidetracked: first Constantinople, then New York, then California.  He arrived stateside in 1923 and became a citizen in 1930.  His son Roman, who had been born in 1902, Americanized the family’s name further, becoming Roman Novins.  He, too, appeared in a few films, but also briefly owned a bookshop, and, for most of his career, taught Russian at Caltech.  Roman Novins died in 1981 and is buried, like his father, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

A true Hollywood ending—but wait, remember what I said about sequels.  Roman’s daughter, the artist Phyllis Novins Cairns (1938-2021), went on to build a career in what is, after film, the most American of industries: advertising.  According to her obituary, “[I]n the 1960s, she redesigned Mr. Peanut into the iconic form that we recognize today.”  The original design for the dapper corporate legume was made by Antonio Gentile (1903-1939), the son of immigrants from Italy.  What would US culture—high, low, and middle—be without its émigrés?

“No Victors Here”: Alexander Voloshin in the Hollywood Bowl

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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 from smiling at the sight of it. On July 15, its official publication date, the great jazz historian and cultural critic Ted Gioia shared my intro to the volume with his many loyal readers at The Honest Broker. Go over and read it—I tried to keep it light and breezy, à la Duke himself.

The other cause for celebration is intimately related to the first. If My Hollywood and Other Poems was, in part, a love letter to LA’s émigré past and present, then Duke’s Passport is an expression of continued love. Both were stamped and delivered by the wonderful people at Paul Dry Books, who—and here’s the news—will also bring out the third missive, my translation of Alexander Voloshin’s Sidetracked: Exile in Hollywood, in April 2026.

With so much to revel in, why am I so down? It’s the state of the world, I’m afraid… Over three years after the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, my native country is still under attack—soldiers dying at the front, civilians hunted by drones and targeted by missiles. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s most powerful ally, the United States, wavers in its support. Meanwhile, here in the US, my adoptive home, migrants are hunted in the streets and thrown into camps. And this barely scratches the surface of the world’s woes. Innocent men, women, and children suffer and die in Palestine. War and famine rage in Sudan. Ours is an era of genocidal violence.

I reflect with some bitterness and no small amount of irony on the fact that this makes the reappearance of Voloshin’s poem all the more timely. Over the past few years I have shared excerpts of the poem touching on war in Ukraine, on the struggle of refugees to obtain entry to the US, on their hard but hopeful lives in their adoptive country, and on their fear—rooted in painful memories—of another war, another wave of expulsions. Voloshin began his poem in the late 1930s and finished it shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Not long ago I learned that, around the time he was penning lines about Europe’s descent into fascism, he appeared on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, wearing his military uniform and decorations from the Russian Imperial Army, along with representatives of other Allied nations. The photo below was published by the Los Angeles Times on September 19, 1938, alongside headlines and subheads like the following: “Promotion of World Peace Stressed at Breakfast Meeting.”

No one knew better than Voloshin how elusive peace was, or how fickle allies could be. You can see it in the expression on his face; he is the fourth man from the left, slightly stooped, with the moustache. On the very day the photo was published, representatives of the French and British in Prague presented a proposal to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland. Voloshin stood in the Bowl with veterans from Italy and Japan, which would soon be Axis powers. And he still remembered how the victorious Allies of the Great War had treated the soldiers and officers of the White Army, who had fought on their side until 1918, after peace had been declared in the West.

Then disaster struck in spring —
1920 was to bring
great misfortune to the Whites,
send us tumbling from the heights…

[…]

In Crimea, we held fast
for another half a year,
yet we lived in constant fear:
Communists, auxiliaries —
Latvian, even Chinese, —
all came bearing down in force,
primed to kill without remorse…
This would be our final trial…

Where was Europe all the while?
There were promises, but no
so-called “allies” ever showed. 
Our defeat now seemed assured and
we were nothing but a burden…
They had won! No victors here…
Without us to interfere,
and ignoring all our pain,
they were splitting our domain!

They were feasting in Versailles,
settling the old disputes,
but, mid fearsome gun salutes,
one could hear a mournful sigh…

Us? We simply weren’t invited…
No one even tried to hide it.
Why pay heed to the complaint
of some disempowered state?
What did they, in Europe, care
about bloodshed over there,
in Crimea, Perekop —
about us, who still had hope,
who remained naively loyal?
Once, when fighting on their soil,
we were heroes to them… Now,
we were useless, disavowed…

The Paul Dry edition of Voloshin’s will include several photos of Voloshin, but not the one from the Times. It is a bit too sad, I think.

“I Stroll Quietly Among the Graves”: Viktoria Yankovskaya’s “Will and Testament”

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Viktoria Yankovskaya (1909-1996) was born in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East, to the family of famed Machurian tiger hunter and, later, Korean resort owner, Yuri Yankovsky (1879-1956). Like his father, the Polish naturalist Michał Jankowski (1841-1912), Yuri had an ambivalent attitude towards Russia, speaking the language but never fully identifying with the culture. The family first settled in the Far East involuntarily. Michał had been imprisoned in Siberia for taking part in the January Uprising of 1863, which sought to free part of Poland from Russian rule, but his love of the flora and fauna of the region inspired him to put down roots first in Irkutsk, then farther east in Primorye. After the death of his first wife, he married a Buryat woman, with whom he had five children, including Yuri.

The younger Yankovsky was practically born on horseback with a rifle in his hands. After returning from his studies of agricultural practices in Texas and Illinois, he took over the management of the family estate, marrying the daughter of an important shipbuilder and fathering five children, including Viktoria. During the Civil War, the family fled to northern Korea. They established a resort for émigrés, where Yul Brynner—then a little boy—spent his summers. When Soviet troops entered Korea in 1945, Yuri was arrested for having supplied meat to the Japanese army. He died in the camps.

Yuri’s son Valery (1911-2010) was also arrested and sentenced to a twenty-year term in the camps, but he survived and was released in 1957. Viktoria too was detained by the NKVD, but since she had only recently given birth to her son, she was spared. Instead of being sent to the camps, she was ordered to organize a collective farm. She did as she was commanded and continued to work on the farm until 1953, when she was able to escape to Hong Kong and, from there, to Chile. In 1961, she immigrated to California, settling near the Russian River, where she lived out the rest of her days.

Viktoria’s collection of stories of life in the wild, titled It Happened in Korea, appeared to critical acclaim in 1935. Although she had written poems from early childhood, she only gathered a handful for publication in 1978, titling the collection Across the Lands of Dispersion. This volume was reprinted, with additional poems and a selection of stories, in Vladivostok in 1993. “Will and Testament” is the last of the poems in that later book—a final statement by an irrepressible spirit descended from a long line of adventurers.

Will and Testament

I remember our farewells in China,
feeling we would never meet again.
We were flying from Hong Kong to Chile,
you were sailing off to other lands.

Decades passed, and now, in San Francisco,
I stroll quietly among the graves,
gazing at the markers—how I wish to
lay my eyes upon familiar names…

There they are: to my left and right,
all those crosses, all those dates and dashes.
The earth’s womb embraces, holds them tight.
Hopes and dreams, long journeys… Dust and ashes…

No, I will not join them. I’ve decided
that my son will scatter my remains
in the ocean. I cannot abide it—
resting here, eternally mislain.

I dream my ashes, blending with the fog,
will be lifted to the clouds, will soar…
Let a wave on the Pacific catch them,
carry them to my beloved shore…

Завещание

Я помню, как прощались все в Китае,
И встретиться не собирались никогда:
Мы из Гонконга в Чили улетали,—
А вы в другие страны плыли навсегда.

Десятки лет прошли. Я—в Сан-Франциско
На Сербском кладбище тихонечко бреду:
Смотрю на памятники, обелиски—
Грущу, тоскую и какой-то встречи жду…

И вот, нашла: направо и налево
Знакомый ряд имён на мраморных крестах:
Всех приняло в себя земное чрево:
Мечты, надежды, дальний путь… и тут ваш прах…

Нет! Я не лягу тут. Уже решила,
Что кинет сын мой прах в Великий Океан.
Я не хочу заброшенной могилы—
Мне тесен ряд давно забытых ��огикан.

Хочу мечтать, что прах взлетит в тумане
И распылится, поднимаясь к облакам…
Пускай волна на Тихом океане
Подхватит и умчит к любимым берегам.

“The Dybbuk” and “The Whole Shebang”

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It’s not every month that a poet—let alone a simple versifier like yours truly—gets to see his work in print in not one, but two major journals of thought. Yet this is the precisely the catbird seat on which I have alighted.

The May 29 issue of The New York Review of Books carries “The Dybbuk,” a poem dedicated to Delmore Schwartz, whose pained work I carried with me in my late teenage years like a vade mecum. I’m glad I didn’t follow his example through to the end, but he clearly continues to haunt me.

A poem somewhat different in tone, the first I’ve written on the subject of fatherhood, appears in the June issue of The New Republic. The title and one of the rhyme phrases, “The Whole Shebang,” belongs—now, at least—to the dedicatee, Nina.

Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna and the Light of Childhood

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I’ve let many weeks slip by without posting here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve been idle. What I wouldn’t give for a stretch of idleness just about now… Teaching at the University of Tulsa has been wonderfully rewarding and inspiring, but between preparations for class, childcare, and an occasional conference—even an energizing one, like the Hayes Translation Festival at the College of William & Mary—I’ve had little time for anything else. Still, I’ve managed to translate a few poems from Ukrainian and Russian, write a couple of poems of my own (more on that next month), and review a few books for the TLS, including Julian Evans’s Undefeatable: Odesa in Love and War and a timely new selection of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems.

In my piece on the great Polish poet, I describe the tones of his verse as “ranging from the crisply classical [to] looser, more conversational,” and add that “this most subtle of craftsmen was able to wrest those tones from what seem to be the plainest materials: strings of direct statement, mostly in lower case, entirely devoid of punctu­ation.” His is a kind of poetry I admire immensely, a kind from which I derive a great deal of pleasure and wisdom, but it is not the kind I myself write or am compelled to render. Among the Poles, I am more frequently drawn to gentler, tastefully rueful voices like those of Leopold Staff (1878-1957) and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska (1891-1945). I had the chance to discuss these two poets and read my versions of their work a few months ago with two great critics, Jaroslaw Anders and Małgorzata Pośpiech:

This past week I found myself immersed in the delicate lyrics of Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (1892-1983), who was part of the same literary scene. Born in Vilnius, Iłłakowiczówna was educated at the University of Oxford and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, served as a nurse assistant in the Imperial Russian Army during the First World War, and, in the 1920s and ’30s, became both the secretary to Marshal Józef Piłsudski and an important literary figure in Warsaw. The poems she published at that time are varied in terms both of subject matter and style, but the ones I love most echo the mood of Staff’s early verse, looking back, with warm nostalgia, on the rich imaginative and emotional landscapes of childhood. Here is a shining example, in my translation:

A Lamp from Childhood

A white lamp with a landscape on its base—
it rang, and warmed, and had the power to soothe…
A moon glowed bright above a country house,
a wisp of smoke curled upward from the roof.

Smugglers sought shelter among fir trees in the hills,
a long procession, snaking up the ridge.
A stream flowed from the pass like spilled white milk,
joining a rushing river neath a bridge.

O lampshade, lampshade, ringing soft and deep,
two little fists in chocolate from a tart,
a mother’s hands, her breath upon the cheek,
and nightlong joy upon the beating heart…

1926

And another, translated with far greater sensitivity and skill by Anita Jones Dębska, can be found here.

Lampa z dziecinnych lat

Była biała lampa z wytłoczonym krajobrazem,
grzała, usypiała i dzwoniła zarazem;
świecił na niej księżyc, domek z jasnym okienkiem,
dym ulatywał u góry pasmem takim cienkim.

Przemytnicy szli, jodły gór im sprzyjały,
padał z przełęczy w przepaść potok jak mleko biały;
przemytnicy szli długim, długim jak wąż korowodem,
most przez rzekę leżał, woda świeciła pod spodem.

O, dzwonie, dzwonie lampy, o, głębokie przeciągłe dudnienie,
o, matczyne na włosach ręce, na szyi, na policzkach tchnienie,
sucharek z lukrem przy twarzy, w czekoladzie dwie małe pięście
i przez całą noc na sercu bijącym szczęście, skrzydlate szczęście.

1926