Book Reviews by Boris Dralyuk
Papers by Boris Dralyuk
Translation Review, 2017
Russian poetry is often said to have had two periods of efflorescence: the Golden Age of the earl... more Russian poetry is often said to have had two periods of efflorescence: the Golden Age of the early nineteenth century and the Silver Age of the early twentieth. As I sit down to write this introduction, it occurs to me that translations of Russian literature into English have also had their Golden Age, and that we are now witnessing their second bloom. The analogy is revealing on several counts. Like the Golden Age of Russian poetry—which produced a handful, but really only a handful, of geniuses—the Golden Age of Russian-toEnglish translation is associated with a relatively small number of brilliant women and men; chief among these is the unjustly maligned Constance Garnett, but one should also mention Louise and Aylmer Maude, John Cournos, as well as S. S. Koteliansky, whose cotranslations with various members of the Bloomsbury set helped lay the groundwork for English modernist prose. Today’s Russian-to-English translation community is far broader and more diverse; the body of wo...
Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 2014
The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, whose solitary 18‐year stay on an island off the coast of s... more The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, whose solitary 18‐year stay on an island off the coast of southern California was commemorated in Scott O’Dell’s novel, Island of the Blue Dolphins, has been of considerable interest since she was abandoned on the island in 1835 and brought to Santa Barbara in 1853. We examine one of the factors that may have contributed to the Lone Woman’s abandonment and discuss several newly‐translated Russian American Company (RAC) documents, one of which gives details of a long‐rumored deadly con ict between a Russian‐led crew of Alaskan native otter hunters and the San Nicolas Island natives (Nicoleno). All three documents contain important new information about the nature of the sometimes violent interactions between the Spanish, Russians, Americans, California Indians, and Alaskan natives in the early nineteenth century.
The general proficiency level ofEnglish ofthe Japanese is often criticised. even today, despite t... more The general proficiency level ofEnglish ofthe Japanese is often criticised. even today, despite the fact that many practitioners ofELT have certainly "improved" their practices. In this connection, Tanaka (1999) indicates that virtually all the innovations in ELT that have been made are ftagmentary, and concludes that the problem is really lack of correlation. He argues that what should be done now is to develop a firm system to support a fundamenta1 concept, which encourages collal)oration across the entire spectrum of ELT practices. Adopting such a point ofview, in this paper we investigate the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF), which contains comprehensive descriptions of various concepts and eleinents relevant to language education. This framework encourages practitioners ofELT in Europe to situate, co-oTdinate and differentiate their practices, and also to explain their practices to other practitioners. The aim of this paper is to clanfy the significance of this common ftamework. with particular ficK us on its functions, and to suggest some implications fbr the reform ofELT in Japan. Although CEF itself is in the process of implementatien in Europe, these functions, namelyi (l) to help the users make choices, (2) to help the users infbrm other users of their practices, have been widely accepted fbr the purpose ofco-operatlon among practltloners. JapanSociety ofEnglishLanguage Education Japanese people should have better command of English in order to have close contact with foreign countries. This can be seen in the policy document presented in 2000, 7)be liZsion of .1:epan in 21st C17ntin y(21 Sbiki Aijhon no KOusou in Japanese). The document states like the foIlowing. Confronting this rapid globalization and progress in technology, we must equip ourselves to use English and utilize the new infbrmation technology in order to communicate and compete with the rest of the world. English here is not a mere fbreign language, but an international language, which enables peeple te get wide range of infbrmation, express their ideas, make a trade, and coliaborate with etheT workers in the world. Of course, we should keep our culture, traditions, and mother tongue, Japanese language, and also should be encouraged to study other foreign languages. However, there is no doubt that the ability to use English is one ofthe most important abilities in order to access the world.
The Journal of Popular Culture, 2014
V azquez Montalb an's "subnormal cycle," Nichols ends with glimpses of how mass media, in the int... more V azquez Montalb an's "subnormal cycle," Nichols ends with glimpses of how mass media, in the interest of late capitalism, co-opts and erases identity. Nichols's study, relying on historical accounts to trace responses to neoliberalism in Taibo's and V azquez Montalb an's noir detective stories, offers vital ways of critically responding to late capitalism's influence.
Translation and Literature, 2021
This is an enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translat... more This is an enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern transl...
The poem above, composed on February 15, 1928 by a talented but until recently completely forgott... more The poem above, composed on February 15, 1928 by a talented but until recently completely forgotten translator named Dmitry Sergeyevich Usov (1896–1943), wears its cleverness on its sleeve. At first blush, it appears to be little more than a perfectly executed piece of legerdemain— an intralinguistic translation, a paraphrase. And yet the poem has exerted a faint but unrelenting pull on me since the day I first encountered it, an effect akin to that of lunar gravity on oceanic waters. Strictly speaking, of course, the poem above is not Usov’s; it’s my translation of his Russian original. The existence of this translation is, in itself, evidence of the original’s hold on me. Pondering this poem and the hold it has taken has afforded me a deeper understanding of the process of poetic translation, an art I have practiced for a number of years; in the following pages, I hope to retrace my arrival at this understanding. Dmitry Usov, a Russian translator of German, was a victim of Stalin’...
Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) was born in Kiev. He studied in Moscow, then worked as a frontline journal... more Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) was born in Kiev. He studied in Moscow, then worked as a frontline journalist after the German invasion. After the liberation of Kiev in 1943, Ilya Ehrenburg commissioned him to write an article for The Black Book (a planned documentary account of the Shoah on Soviet soil) about the massacre at Babi Yar, a ravine just outside the city. In the course of six months, the Nazis shot a hundred thousand people, nearly all of them Jews. Ozerov also wrote a long poem about Babi Yar, published in early 1946. Beginning in 1943, Ozerov taught in the Translation Faculty at the Gorky Literary Institute, himself translating poetry from Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ukrainian (languages he knew well), Lithuanian (which he could read), and from other languages of the Soviet Union with the help of a crib. He also wrote many books of literary criticism and did much to enable the publication of writers who had suffered or perished under Stalin. He was the first editor to publish Zabolots...
Slavic Review, 2016
This essay examines a variety of popular engagements with history made possible by new technologi... more This essay examines a variety of popular engagements with history made possible by new technologies, namely the Internet and video games. We term these nondisciplinary appropriations of history parahistorical. Parahistory is an international phenomenon, but it is articulated differently in various national contexts. Russian parahistorical pursuits provide insight into both the phenomenon at large and the peculiarities of the Russian state's and population's attitudes toward history and historical memory. On the basis of a contextualized survey of Russian parahistory, we argue that historians cannot afford to ignore these uses of history beyond the academy which can teach us a great deal about the nature and broader implications of our discipline.
World Literature Today, 2011
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Book Reviews by Boris Dralyuk
Papers by Boris Dralyuk