‘People who go into battle with a joke on their lips’: Interview with Boris Dralyuk

Boris Dralyuk is a distinguished Ukrainian-American poet, translator, and editor, currently residing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He left Soviet Ukraine when he was eight but kept his close links to his native Odesa. His commitment to maintaining those links has brought him multiple translation awards, underscoring his expertise and dedication to bridging cultural and linguistic divides.

Dralyuk’s academic credentials include a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA, where he has also taught. He started by translating from Russian, including such authors as Isaac Babel and Mikhail Zoshchenko, but has also translated from Ukrainian and dreams of bringing Mykhaylo Khvyliovyj and Ivan Kotliarevsky into English. 

His debut poetry collection, “My Hollywood and Other Poems”, published in April 2022, showcases his unique voice and deep engagement with themes of memory, identity, and the émigré experience. His own identity speaks to the richness and complexities of linguistic backgrounds and Ukrainian identity too.

Chytomo: Congratulations for the inaugural Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for your translation of Andrey Kurkov’s “Grey Bees” – this is already your third book by this author. Starting from this point, do you feel that Kurkov has become a sort of brand ambassador for contemporary Ukrainian literature in recent years?

Boris Dralyuk: Andrey Kurkov has been one of the major faces of contemporary Ukrainian literature for over 20 years, long before the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 and the war in 2014. For many readers in the English-speaking world, he may have been the only access point to Ukrainian literature as they browsed the shelves at major bookstores.

And yet, for a long time, if Kurkov’s books were shelved in sections devoted to international literature, he was lumped in with Russian authors. Although he has always insisted that he was Ukrainian, few seemed to listen. Only in the past few years have library systems in the US recategorized his books as Ukrainian literature rather than Russian.

Chytomo: This reclassification is a significant achievement, as we are still fighting this battle for proper categorization on Amazon! 

Boris Dralyuk: During the early days of the conflict, Kurkov’s novels rose in popularity–readers yearning for context for the situation in Ukraine, especially eastern Ukraine, sought them out along with nonfiction titles. I feel ”Grey Bees” did more than provide context, however. It not only deepened the anglosphere’s understanding of the war, but also its appreciation for the dignity of the common, everyday Ukrainians affected by it.

Ironically, on Amazon, “Grey Bees” was listed as a bestseller in “Eastern European Literature,” ranked right above a cheap edition of Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, the cover of which bore a portrait of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national bard.

This mix-up likely occurred because someone searching for images of “Eastern European men” for the book cover found a picture of Shevchenko, with his long whiskers and tall sheepskin hat–he fit the stereotype. I don’t think either Shevchenko or Dostoevsky would have been pleased with this combo, but it illustrates how chaotic and unfocused the categorization of Eastern European literature can be in the international market.

Chytomo: I was just about to throw a joke that this just proves how attractive Shevchenko was!

Boris Dralyuk: Shevchenko was a handsome fellow. Considering the hand he’d been dealt–serfdom, imprisonment, exile–he managed to maintain his appearance fairly well. When it comes to winning people over to a cause, looking good never hurts.

Regarding the recognition of what is Ukrainian versus Russian, there’s been a massive shift. I currently live in the heart of the United States, having spent 30 years in Los Angeles among “the coastal elite,” as certain players on the American political scene call them. One might expect people on the coasts to be more attuned to questions of decolonization and linguistic differences. Yet I haven’t perceived too much of a difference when it comes to attitudes on Ukraine. In fact, the people I’ve met here are, if anything, even more curious about Ukraine, and are just as well informed as their countrymen out west. They have a clear view of the stakes: Ukraine is a country with borders that were violated by an aggressive neighbor, and it deserves every chance to defend itself properly.

Perhaps the fact that most people have a common-sense understanding that an independent nation has the right to stay independent is one of the chief bulwarks of Ukraine’s campaign. Ukrainians have been able to appeal to people who are not especially concerned with global matters, who are often just beginning to learn about Ukraine’s culture and history. These people may have less knowledge, but they also carry fewer stereotypes, fewer preconceptions. Both in LA and in Tulsa you still find, of course, people invested in the notion of the inherent greatness or superiority of Russian culture. These notions have seeped into the educational system and taken root. 

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Chytomo: Do you feel that there is a massive switch from the recognition of what is Ukrainian and what is Russian?

Boris Dralyuk: It’s remarkable to witness the transformation that has occurred over the past three years. The difference between things Russian and Ukrainian has been significantly refined in people’s minds. This conflict has sharpened people’s understanding of Ukraine’s history and its relationship with the Russian Empire.

If there’s any positive development to come out of this situation, it’s that people have been paying attention. Even if that attention has begun to wane–which is, sadly, inevitable–they will have already absorbed some vital information. This passive knowledge will change the way they engage with Russian and Ukrainian topics in the future.

Chytomo: Let’s discuss your professional background in Slavic studies. How do you view the current state of Slavic studies in academia? Are there efforts to decolonize the field and provide fair representation for other Slavonic languages and cultures, without big scandals on “cancelling Russian culture”?

Boris Dralyuk: The process of changing Slavic studies programs is extremely slow due to institutional inertia. These institutions are driven by committees and are difficult to redirect. However, there is some hope.

Much of the problem comes down to personal, emotional investment. The scholars who built these programs came to Slavic studies almost exclusively through Russian. They were introduced to great Russian authors like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who were well-translated and who influenced a great many Anglophone writers. Furthermore, after the Second World War, the easiest way to gain funding for Slavic studies programs and to justify their expansion was political. The case to make, in the US and the UK, was that we must understand the culture of our enemy–Soviet Russia.

This bred generations of students who had little access to or understanding of other Slavic cultures. They were unaware of the great authors in other Slavic languages. To make matters worse, the Russians they met, including very well educated ones, often denigrated Ukrainian literature, dismissing the Ukrainian language itself as a dialect. And I would be surprised to learn if any of them had even mentioned Belarusian. These dismissive attitudes also pervaded the great Russian works students were asked to read. For decades, professors rarely commented on, let alone argued against, the imperialist views in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

And so, over the course of their education, students often took on negative attitudes about the so-called “minor” cultures, languages, and literatures of the Russian and Soviet empires. This bias persists in Slavic studies, but it is certainly on the wane. I greatly admire all those working to eradicate it once and for all. I should add that there may be a potential stumbling block. Now that Russia is increasingly antagonistic towards the United States and other Western democracies, we may again see greater state funding for the study of Russian. It’s up to individual departments everywhere to make the case for the study of other Slavic languages and to distribute their funding equitably.

Chytomo: But there is also massive pushback – remember the situation when Masha Gessen resigned from PEN America over the cancellation of an event featuring Russian writers at The World Voices Festival because of the refusal of Ukrainian writers Artem Chekh, Iryna Tsilyk, and Artem Chapeye to participate in the festival, which was attended by Russians. 

Boris Dralyuk: The controversy seemed like a non-issue to me. I think the general public intuitively understands that if a person doesn’t want to appear at a festival with someone else, they cannot be forced to do so and should not be ambushed. If the Ukrainian authors made it clear to the organisers that they didn’t want to take part in a festival that also featured speakers affiliated with the culture of a nation currently attacking their homeland and killing their people, then they had every right to pull out when they learned that their request had not been met. 

However, a number of cultural figures in the US view freedom of speech as an absolute value. They see the threat of censorship everywhere. I understand that they want to hear a variety of perspectives, including those of “good Russians,” but Ukrainian authors need not be forced to listen to them too. I think most of the people who complained about the decision of the Ukrainian authors didn’t really give much thought to the particulars but simply clung to their general ideals. The Ukrainians and their allies who contributed to this discussion did an immense job of educating people about the particulars. They focused people’s attention on the specific experiences and positions of the authors, which made it harder to grandstand about free speech.

Chytomo: Let’s try to discuss Ukraine through a Ukrainian lens, rather than focusing on Russia. How challenging is this for you, given your own extensive background in Russian literature? You’ve edited significant anthologies like ”1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution” and ”The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.” How do you navigate this shift in perspective, especially considering your own background of being born in Odesa, Soviet Ukraine?

Boris Dralyuk: It’s true that I was born in the Soviet Ukrainian Republic, and I consider myself Ukrainian. However, my self-identity is not uncomplicated. Many people in my situation, who left Ukraine before it became independent, question how much of a claim we have to Ukrainianness, especially if we come from Russian-speaking families or predominantly Russian-speaking cities, as Odesa was at the time.

It took time for me to understand my identity as a Ukrainian. It was a journey I undertook. At the same time, I have a deep love for many works written in Russian, which I cannot deny. A very great many of these happen to be written by Russophone authors from Ukraine, who also had complicated but powerful relationships with their Ukrainian identity.

These authors may not be perfect standard-bearers for Ukrainian culture today, but, in their time, they took significant risks to position themselves as Ukrainians, not simply as Russians. Isaac Babel is one such figure. He was by no means a Ukrainophobe and fully embraced his legacy as a Jewish author from a Ukrainian city, where the “Russian” that was spoken on the streets–which featured as much Yiddish and Ukrainian as Russian–was a unique surzhyk (mixed language) he helped legitimize.

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Chytomo: How old were you when you left Odesa?

Boris Dralyuk: I was eight, turning nine, when I left Odesa. I was a child, but my mother, although we spoke largely Russian and eventually a little English, was fluent in Ukrainian. She was extremely proud of her Ukrainian and taught me as best she could. I took Ukrainian classes as a child but retained very little.

At UCLA, I was lucky enough to end up in a Slavic department that had on its faculty a great scholar of Ukrainian literature, Roman Koropecky, although he primarily taught Polish literature. Through him, I began to connect with and fully discover the richness of Ukrainian culture. If not for him, I would have gone through my entire graduate education with a personal connection to Ukraine but no real exposure to the full breadth of Ukrainian literature.

My personal journey was shaped by coming from Odesa as part of a Jewish family. We enjoyed connections with our Ukrainian neighbours but also experienced anti-Semitism under the Soviet system and in day-to-day life. Our sense of identity was hierarchical. We were first and foremost Jewish, then Odesan–although these two were somewhat interchangeable. Our identity was largely civic–we belonged to Odesa. The Russian language and Russophone literature were dear to us, but in terms of ethnic identification, we would never think of ourselves as Russian. Nor did we think of ourselves as Russian Jews; if anything, we were Soviet Jews, but really, we were Odesan Jews.

After immigrating, we began to look back on the things we loved most about our lives, and many of those had to do with the particularities of Ukraine: living by the sea, visiting other Ukrainian cities, like Kyiv and Lviv (with its incomparable coffee!), the rural landscape, so beautifully evoked in Ukrainian poetry and song, and our sense of difference from all things cold, dreary, somber, Muscovite, and Petersburgian. When I visited Russia afterward, this sense of difference intensified. No one thought I spoke proper Russian, and my habit of smiling when meeting someone–common in Ukraine but not in Russia–made them suspect I wasn’t entirely well.

My sense of the difference between the Russian-speaking communities of Ukraine and Russia grew over time. This year, to mark Ukraine’s Independence Day, I attended an event in Tulsa, which is now home to hundreds of refugees from southern Ukraine. There’s a strong Baptist community here, and many Baptist families who fled Mariupol and other parts of southern Ukraine found sponsorship in Tulsa. A local cinema, owned by a man of Ukrainian descent, hosted a big celebration on August 24. Most attendees, though wearing beautiful traditional headdresses and vyshyvankas, spoke Russian in casual conversation. However, when the anthem was sung in Ukrainian, there wasn’t a person who didn’t join in. We all had tears in our eyes. We were all Ukrainian.

This invasion has fortified many people’s sense of their Ukrainianness. Before, they might not have thought much about their national identity, but when faced with aggression, people have had to make difficult decisions about who they are and where they stand. The vast majority of my friends, relatives, and connections in Ukraine, whether Russian-speaking or not, quickly chose to identify as Ukrainian and tie their stories to Ukraine’s story. This has been very moving to witness.

Of course, during wartime, emotions run high and questions of identity become more fraught than in peacetime. My hope is that after Ukraine solidifies its independence, which I believe it will, these questions can be addressed with cooler heads. The culture can develop freely, embracing its history and reckoning with it fully.

What matters now is winning the war and making sure that people recognize, at long last, that Ukrainians have their own culture and deserve to preserve and foster it.

Chytomo: Let’s return to your other hat–as a professional translator, what are your observations on recent trends or the biggest challenges in the field of translation, especially concerning Ukrainian literature?

Boris Dralyuk: There’s a quantity versus quality issue in the translation process when a small, devoted community continually pushes to make an impact on a broader culture, an issue that also arises when there’s a sudden burst of interest in a long-neglected culture. In both cases, you have a small number of people with a lot of work on their plates.

The idea that any translation into English is better than no translation worked for a time, but it has its limitations. A shelf full of Ukrainian writing in translation makes an impression on readers, but the next step is to convince one of those readers to take a book off the shelf and crack it open. The challenge is not just to prove that Ukrainian literature exists, but to show that it’s worth reading.

That calls for a systematic approach. Talented translators need to be drawn to the cause and trained up. Luckily, many gifted translators who have been working for years are finally getting attention from publishing houses. Work that has been sitting in manuscript, repeatedly rejected, is now seeing the light of day. Just as importantly, many accomplished translators and scholars, especially in the UK, are investing their time and talent to train a new generation of non-native Ukrainian speakers, who can use their stylistic skills to make Ukrainian literature resonate in English. Over the next three to four years, we’re sure to see an even greater number of quality translations appear. The hope is that these won’t be drowned out by the sea of merely adequate translations. We rely on editors, agents, promoters, and advocates like Zenia Tompkins to direct people’s attention to the best work.

Chytomo: What was the last book by a contemporary Ukrainian author that you read that really grabbed your attention and made you think, “This is it; this is a great one”?

Boris Dralyuk: Actually, the last thing I read that really got me wasn’t contemporary, but I’ll give you the contemporary one first. I think Zenia’s translation of Tanja Maljartschuk’s ”Forgottenness” is lovely. That was the last one I read. If people read it, they will see what the fuss is about. It really demonstrates the quality of contemporary Ukrainian literature and translation. Artem Chekh’s ”Rock, Paper, Grenade” is also excellent–a beautiful novel. I provided a blurb for Olena Jennings’ and Oksana Rosenblum’s translation, which will soon be released.

I have also been rereading Mykola Khvyliovyi, and I think his work deserves a new translation. It would serve as a showcase for the achievements of Ukrainian literature in the 20th century. I’m considering translating him myself. His prose demonstrates that the great modernist movements didn’t stop at Ukraine’s borders. Indeed, Ukraine made vital contributions to the avant-garde, and its writers were often in touch with or even ahead of Western European trends. Unfortunately, many promising Ukrainian writers were cut down before they could mature in full. Khvylovy reached great heights before his untimely death.

I also believe it’s time for an anthology of Ukrainian poetry from the 19th to the 21st centuries. It should be pocket-sized, enjoyable on every page. I’ve been informally translating poems by Ukrainian poets who are unknown in English and posting them on Twitter–a small attempt to broaden people’s perceptions of Ukrainian culture.

My wife (Jennifer Croft, American author, critic, and translator who translates from Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish – OM) and I translated a short children’s book by Taras and Marjana Prokhasko, ”Who Will Make the Snow?” This was, personally, an almost therapeutic act during the early months of the war. It was also important for us to translate a children’s book because I felt that piece of Ukrainian culture was largely missing from the anglosphere. Ukrainians aren’t just people hardened by war. They’re also people who love and raise children–people with rich, colorful imaginations no less vibrant than those of Lewis Carroll or Maurice Sendak.

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Chytomo: You’ve been translating a lot of Ukrainian poetry recently too, right? Do you have the feeling that Ukrainian poetry is blooming during the war? It seems to have found its niche, helping people live through this experience when they can’t find their own words.

Boris Dralyuk: Yes, I’m trying. I think poetry is extremely important for Slavic cultures in general, especially East Slavic cultures, which tend towards logocentrism. Words may be as important as deeds. And in the case of Ukraine, which was for so long under the thumb of other nations, language is the surest carrier of identity, and poetry is the highest form of linguistic expression. Today, for Ukrainians under constant bombardment, putting one’s experience into verse is an act of cultural resistance, as well as the first step towards recovery from the psychic chaos of trauma.

Most impressively, people are producing greatly varied work. They’re ceaselessly discovering new forms of expression for this shared experience, creating a mosaic, a tapestry. It’s a war as well-documented in poetry as the First World War was in English. Many of these poems will be anthology pieces read by Ukrainian children, students, and scholars for generations to come. The memory and the lessons of this moment will live on in verse.

Chytomo: I’ve attended a couple of events featuring poets like Halyna Kruk and Ostap Slyvynsky, whose “Winter King” was recently longlisted for the 2024 National Translation Awards for poetry, and this is amazing poetry for any audience.

Boris Dralyuk: Indeed, and Ukrainian poetry from the 1920s to the 1990s would amaze audiences as well. I know you’re a fan of the band “Pyrig i Batig”, and I too love their songs based on Pavlo Tychyna’s and Ivan Franko’s poetry. I also love the poems of Lina Kostenko. My goal is to collect enough translations to create a proper anthology and present it to the world. 

Chytomo: I’m going to quote this statement in capital letters for those who are willing to join your plan! I know plans can change quickly, especially for creative people, and life often brings unexpected elements. But if you had a dream project related to Ukrainian literature, what would it be? Is there something specific you’d like to do or achieve in this field? Perhaps write something yourself?

Boris Dralyuk: I don’t think I’m in a position to contribute to Ukrainian literature directly. My voice is better used as a vehicle for Ukrainian authors. My dream is to translate Kotlyarevsky’s ”Eneida”. I believe it could really change people’s perceptions about how rich Ukrainian literature was from the very start. I love comic verse, and I think the readiness of Ukrainians not only to laugh, but also to laugh at ourselves, is one of our best qualities. 

The comic, sometimes tragicomic work of Ukrainian postmodernists, like the Bu-Ba-Bu collective, should also be translated or retranslated with appropriate vigor.

Chytomo: The emphasis on humor really is a distinctive Ukrainian characteristic, isn’t it? 

Boris Dralyuk: It’s in the Ukrainian DNA. Among the clips circulating on the internet this year that touched me most was from Kyiv, where a coffee shop had been severely damaged by a drone attack. The barista, a young woman who spoke as if she’d already had 15 lattes, was making drinks for people and laughing the whole thing off. What else was she supposed to do? “You come and make coffee,” she said. “Why spoil other people’s day?”

This spirit was precisely what people underestimated when Russia began its invasion. Russians thought Ukrainians would sink to their knees. No, they won’t. Their sense of humor is the strongest vertebra in their spine; it keeps them upright.

It’s also very attractive; it acts like a magnet. I think one of the reasons that Ukrainian authors attract so many new readers when they appear abroad is that they sometimes show up in camouflage, with dirt still under their fingernails, but they’re laughing. This image of the cheerful warrior–people who are happy to defend their homeland, even if it means certain death–is powerful. It’s hard not to root for people who go into battle with a joke on their lips.

Copy editing: Joy Tataryn

The publication is a part of the “Chytomo Picks: New Books from Ukraine” project. The materials have been prepared with the assistance of the Ukrainian Book Institute at the expense of the state budget. The author’s opinion may not coincide with the official position of the Ukrainian Book Institute.

Team of authors: Olha Mukha, Oleh Kotsarev

Translation: Nataliia Firsova