Q&A …

… TRANSLATIONS OF TIME An Interview with Boris Drayluk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

How can we connect with bygone poets and make their words resonate today? In his debut collection My Hollywood as well as in his Russian translations, Boris Drayluk explores this question and succeeds. Through an interplay of ever-present loss, happenstance, and humor, the work is a meeting place between artists past and present; between a real person and other real people he admires. “I’ve always known that one can’t dwell in the past,” Drayluk writes. “But that doesn’t stop me from dwelling on it. It does hold lessons for us, cautionary tales. And it holds its treasures – among them verbal objects that seem as alive to me as anything uttered this very minute, perhaps more so.” Another key to his practice is form: not only does it add integrity to the work, he tells us, but through structure we can find surprise.