Poetry review – RENAISSANCE: Ian Pople joins in some ‘dialogues with the dead’ embodied in poems by Haris Vlavianos
Renaissance
Haris Vlavianos
Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
World Poetry
ISBN 9781954218420
£19.99
Haris Vlavianos’ Renaissance describes itself as ’36 Portrait-Poems of artists, poets, scholars, politicians, philosophers, witch hunters, clerics, inquisitors, actors and musicians.’ And, as Margaret Atwood points out in her ‘Preface: Dialogues with the Dead,’ these ‘portrait-poems’ are not only concerned with the famous: Michelangelo; Leonardo; Durer and Machiavelli, but also the less famous: the artist Sofonisba Anguissola who, banned from painting religious subjects, nevertheless made her fortune as a portrait painter; or Louise Labé, who disguised herself as a male knight and ‘vanquished all opponents.’ It has to be said, however, that the vast majority of the ‘portrait-poems’ are about relatively well-known figures from the Renaissance. And the nature of the poems is mostly that of narratives in which we learn various facets of famous lives.
Vlavianos was born in Rome in 1957 and extensively educated in the UK at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford from where he obtained a D Phil. He is also known in Greece as a translator of a range of modern, mostly North American, poets ranging from T.S. Eliot to Louise Gluck and Ann Carson. However, most of his own published work has been written in Greek and Renaissance is published in a handsome and useful bilingual, Greek and English edition. The translations are by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and are in a warm, springy English that responds to Vlavianos’ precise and atmospheric Greek. Barbeito does take liberties with some of Vlavianos’ syntax and can elaborate on Vlavianos’ sometimes quite stark Greek, but mostly to give the translation slightly more fluency in English where a more literal translation might have felt a little more raw, perhaps. These poems are breezy narratives and Barbeito’s translations respond to the narrative drive that Vlavianos imparts to the poems and the characters they depict. Since so many of Vlavianos’s subjects are Italian, he also takes to sprinkling his poems with words and phrases from the language which remain in the Italian in the English translations. Barbeito also contributes a substantial afterword about the book and what she sees Vlavianos’ objectives are and the ways in which he conveys those objectives. This afterword feels a little unnecessary. Her translations are clearly very considered and the poems read so well that an elaborate defense of the poems and implicitly the translations feels just that, a defense.
Margaret Atwood in her preface, asks the question that many might ask, ‘Why should we enter into dialogues with the dead? Perhaps because human nature, like nature, takes on an infinite variety of forms while remaining always itself. … They are like us, and, it follows, we are like them. If you want to know yourself, you must also know others.’ That latter remark slightly gives the game away. We might ask ‘which others?’ The others that Vlavianos depicts are those who have come down to us through a great deal of recorded history. Even where such figures are not well-known, such as Sofonisba Anguissola or Louise Labé, they are well-known enough to have been recorded in history with tales to tell. These are the kinds of lives with which the imagination can engage and with whom a dialogue is possible. In a sense then, such lives are ‘easy targets.’
And with these lives, the poet qua poet has the advantage of being able to bring in a range of disparate elements over a short course of time. This is what Vlavianos does. In, for example, ‘Benvenuto Cellini’ Vlavianos depicts a ‘sodomite, murderer, /loanshark, extortionist / and so much more, / he was without a doubt, a madman’. Vlavianos writes about Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus with the Head of the Medusa which he saw as a six-year-old with his step-father, Ugo, who ‘turned to me with a chuckle: ‘”It’s his head / Perseus ought to be holding, / not the Medusa’.”/ “Whose?” I asked, / He didn’t respond. // Years later, / I realized he meant / the “perverso sodomita,” / whose Autobiography I had just read.’ This gives, I hope, some sense of the language of the translation; there is a certain prosiness to it, but it has a vivacity and evocativeness. We might ask how Vlavianos remembers this with such detail from such a point in his childhood. But we can suspend our disbelief because the whole setting draws us in.
Towards the end of the poem, Vlavianos writes about the robbery in 2003 of Cellini’s famous gold salt and pepper cellar, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The salt cellar is unique among Cellini’s works and depicts the Cosmos in the gods Neptune and Tellus. The thief eventually turned himself in, claiming ‘that Cellini had haunted his dreams / and threatened to cut off his tongue / if he failed to return it.’ To which the translation adds, ‘Undeniably true. / Without the sense of taste / what’s the point of a salt cellar.’ Literally, Vlavianos’ Greek reads, ‘True. / Without taste / what can you do with a salt cellar?’ What Barbieto does is to make the emphasis of this ending, slightly more nuanced in English. That nuance not only arises with the ‘undeniably,’ but also with the opening out into the ‘sense of taste,’ and also the ‘what is the point of…’ Vlavianos’ conversation is not only with the artist, and Vlavianos’ step-father, Ugo, and even with Robert Mang who stole the salt-cellar, but there is a reaching out to the reader, to which Barbieto’s translation adds a nice dramatic feel.
Drama is, perhaps, the key to such a book. The dialogue that Vlavianos has with these figures can be, and here is, inherently dramatic. ‘Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457)’ begins, ‘Invective is an art form unto itself. / Demanding, difficult. / Asperity and irony are not enough. / Your arguments must convince.’ It is tempting to suggest that these lines are Vlavianos’ manifesto for the book and even the art of poetry, as if he were casting side eyes at the reader to break the fourth wall. Yet, Vlavianos then moves into an identification with Valla which renders the drama more intimate. ‘And you, Lorenzo, / among all the polemicists in Italy / were, as Eramus himself admitted, / il piu brillante!’ [translator’s italics]. ‘Il piu brilliante’ meaning ‘the most brilliant.’ And the poem then goes on, ‘Bravo for defying the inane scholars – / I too find Aquinas a deadly bore. / I haven’t opened his Summa since my student days.’ And Vlavianos goes on to argue with a range of European figures from Epicurus to Constantine to Pope Sylvester. We might find all this a bit precious. One intellectual at the top of his game, i.e. Vlavianos, identifying with another, Lorenzo Valla, who has been canonized by history. The relationship between the poet and the subject, here, is essentially a literary one: praise for the subject’s style and their relationship with their subject matter. And certainly, other lives are out there; Papadiamantis’ stories of life on the island of Skiathos would be one comparison. However, as Atwood’s introduction tells us, there are a range of lives, in Vlavianos, Renaissance, in this beautifully produced bilingual edition. And these translations of a complete collection give us a powerful example of what this important poet is doing.
Nov 14 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Haris Vlavianos
Poetry review – RENAISSANCE: Ian Pople joins in some ‘dialogues with the dead’ embodied in poems by Haris Vlavianos
Renaissance
Haris Vlavianos
Translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
World Poetry
ISBN 9781954218420
£19.99
Haris Vlavianos’ Renaissance describes itself as ’36 Portrait-Poems of artists, poets, scholars, politicians, philosophers, witch hunters, clerics, inquisitors, actors and musicians.’ And, as Margaret Atwood points out in her ‘Preface: Dialogues with the Dead,’ these ‘portrait-poems’ are not only concerned with the famous: Michelangelo; Leonardo; Durer and Machiavelli, but also the less famous: the artist Sofonisba Anguissola who, banned from painting religious subjects, nevertheless made her fortune as a portrait painter; or Louise Labé, who disguised herself as a male knight and ‘vanquished all opponents.’ It has to be said, however, that the vast majority of the ‘portrait-poems’ are about relatively well-known figures from the Renaissance. And the nature of the poems is mostly that of narratives in which we learn various facets of famous lives.
Vlavianos was born in Rome in 1957 and extensively educated in the UK at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford from where he obtained a D Phil. He is also known in Greece as a translator of a range of modern, mostly North American, poets ranging from T.S. Eliot to Louise Gluck and Ann Carson. However, most of his own published work has been written in Greek and Renaissance is published in a handsome and useful bilingual, Greek and English edition. The translations are by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and are in a warm, springy English that responds to Vlavianos’ precise and atmospheric Greek. Barbeito does take liberties with some of Vlavianos’ syntax and can elaborate on Vlavianos’ sometimes quite stark Greek, but mostly to give the translation slightly more fluency in English where a more literal translation might have felt a little more raw, perhaps. These poems are breezy narratives and Barbeito’s translations respond to the narrative drive that Vlavianos imparts to the poems and the characters they depict. Since so many of Vlavianos’s subjects are Italian, he also takes to sprinkling his poems with words and phrases from the language which remain in the Italian in the English translations. Barbeito also contributes a substantial afterword about the book and what she sees Vlavianos’ objectives are and the ways in which he conveys those objectives. This afterword feels a little unnecessary. Her translations are clearly very considered and the poems read so well that an elaborate defense of the poems and implicitly the translations feels just that, a defense.
Margaret Atwood in her preface, asks the question that many might ask, ‘Why should we enter into dialogues with the dead? Perhaps because human nature, like nature, takes on an infinite variety of forms while remaining always itself. … They are like us, and, it follows, we are like them. If you want to know yourself, you must also know others.’ That latter remark slightly gives the game away. We might ask ‘which others?’ The others that Vlavianos depicts are those who have come down to us through a great deal of recorded history. Even where such figures are not well-known, such as Sofonisba Anguissola or Louise Labé, they are well-known enough to have been recorded in history with tales to tell. These are the kinds of lives with which the imagination can engage and with whom a dialogue is possible. In a sense then, such lives are ‘easy targets.’
And with these lives, the poet qua poet has the advantage of being able to bring in a range of disparate elements over a short course of time. This is what Vlavianos does. In, for example, ‘Benvenuto Cellini’ Vlavianos depicts a ‘sodomite, murderer, /loanshark, extortionist / and so much more, / he was without a doubt, a madman’. Vlavianos writes about Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus with the Head of the Medusa which he saw as a six-year-old with his step-father, Ugo, who ‘turned to me with a chuckle: ‘”It’s his head / Perseus ought to be holding, / not the Medusa’.”/ “Whose?” I asked, / He didn’t respond. // Years later, / I realized he meant / the “perverso sodomita,” / whose Autobiography I had just read.’ This gives, I hope, some sense of the language of the translation; there is a certain prosiness to it, but it has a vivacity and evocativeness. We might ask how Vlavianos remembers this with such detail from such a point in his childhood. But we can suspend our disbelief because the whole setting draws us in.
Towards the end of the poem, Vlavianos writes about the robbery in 2003 of Cellini’s famous gold salt and pepper cellar, from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The salt cellar is unique among Cellini’s works and depicts the Cosmos in the gods Neptune and Tellus. The thief eventually turned himself in, claiming ‘that Cellini had haunted his dreams / and threatened to cut off his tongue / if he failed to return it.’ To which the translation adds, ‘Undeniably true. / Without the sense of taste / what’s the point of a salt cellar.’ Literally, Vlavianos’ Greek reads, ‘True. / Without taste / what can you do with a salt cellar?’ What Barbieto does is to make the emphasis of this ending, slightly more nuanced in English. That nuance not only arises with the ‘undeniably,’ but also with the opening out into the ‘sense of taste,’ and also the ‘what is the point of…’ Vlavianos’ conversation is not only with the artist, and Vlavianos’ step-father, Ugo, and even with Robert Mang who stole the salt-cellar, but there is a reaching out to the reader, to which Barbieto’s translation adds a nice dramatic feel.
Drama is, perhaps, the key to such a book. The dialogue that Vlavianos has with these figures can be, and here is, inherently dramatic. ‘Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457)’ begins, ‘Invective is an art form unto itself. / Demanding, difficult. / Asperity and irony are not enough. / Your arguments must convince.’ It is tempting to suggest that these lines are Vlavianos’ manifesto for the book and even the art of poetry, as if he were casting side eyes at the reader to break the fourth wall. Yet, Vlavianos then moves into an identification with Valla which renders the drama more intimate. ‘And you, Lorenzo, / among all the polemicists in Italy / were, as Eramus himself admitted, / il piu brillante!’ [translator’s italics]. ‘Il piu brilliante’ meaning ‘the most brilliant.’ And the poem then goes on, ‘Bravo for defying the inane scholars – / I too find Aquinas a deadly bore. / I haven’t opened his Summa since my student days.’ And Vlavianos goes on to argue with a range of European figures from Epicurus to Constantine to Pope Sylvester. We might find all this a bit precious. One intellectual at the top of his game, i.e. Vlavianos, identifying with another, Lorenzo Valla, who has been canonized by history. The relationship between the poet and the subject, here, is essentially a literary one: praise for the subject’s style and their relationship with their subject matter. And certainly, other lives are out there; Papadiamantis’ stories of life on the island of Skiathos would be one comparison. However, as Atwood’s introduction tells us, there are a range of lives, in Vlavianos, Renaissance, in this beautifully produced bilingual edition. And these translations of a complete collection give us a powerful example of what this important poet is doing.