RENAISSANCE

Known in Europe for his spare, precise, and emotionally charged poetry, acclaimed Greek poet Haris Vlavianos paints 36 quixotic poem-portraits of Renaissance figures to remind us that the past is always present. In the first of his books to be published in the US, Vlavianos focuses on a central period of turbulence and renewal in European history through the ventriloquized voices of both well-known and marginal characters of the time. Renaissance traces their hopes, dreams, and disappointments, their acquiescence and resistance to various orthodoxies, holding up a mirror to our own moment of parallel tensions. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “sin” of renunciation, to Louise Labé’s defiant “cackle” and Giotto’s arrogant “perfect circle,” these limpid poems explore the multitude of ways that the arts, in the broadest sense of the word, can help us re-imagine ourselves and the world we live in. Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and with a preface by Margaret Atwood.

Renaissance is an extraordinary excursion into intellectual and artistic history by means of a limpid, highly approachable poetic form. Haris Vlavianos presents a rare combination of sensual vitality and intellectual power. —Ian McEwan

In these spare—and unsparing—portraits, Haris Vlavianos captures the restless vitality and infinite variety of the European Renaissance in vividly intimate tones that range from wry to tragic, angelic to monstrous, engaging in conversations, as his subjects so often did, that erase every barrier of time, space, manners, and language, bringing in Fellini, Manet, and Julio Iglesias, as well as the ancients whose legacy he shares with them. Renaissance affords us an irresistible immersion in a past that remains insistently present. —Ingrid Rowland

Every bit as witty and charming as their subjects, these poems map a lineage that undergirds so much contemporary thinking about existence, aesthetics, and overarching social and political themes that animate global literature. Renaissance takes seriously our intellectual inheritance but avoids somberness. It is a spirited and luminous collection full of humor and measured erudition. —Major Jackson

The urbane humanity of Robert Browning and the defiant erudition of Ezra Pound (both name-checked in these pages) come together in this lively collection of vignettes drawn from a turning-point in human history. Haris Vlavianos has an eye for the quirky detail, the flaw in the mirror, the conceits (in a double sense) that the great artists of the Renaissance thrived on. So directly does Vlavianos’s spare, stiletto-sharp verse come across in these translations by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, you have to shake yourself to remember that the originals were written in another language. —Roderick Beaton

Hagiography gives way to biography, warts and all. It’s the warts that interest Haris Vlavianos. These imperfections—human flaws and excesses—were what also fascinated Robert Browning, a predecessor of Vlavianos in the art of painting portraits through words. But whereas Browning has his characters speaking for themselves, Vlavianos often enters into dialogue with them. […] What would we think of them, these inventors of themselves—he asks the reader—and what would they think of us? How far apart are we, really? Why should we converse with the dead, and what have they to tell us? —Margaret Atwood