Haris Vlavianos - Renaissance
Haris Vlavianos
Renaissance
Translated from Greek by
PATRICIA BARBEITO
Preface by
MARGARET ATWOOD
$20.00
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
February 25, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-42-0
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
BIOS
HARIS VLAVIANOS is a Greek poet whose work consistently probes the intersections of history and poetry and points to the foundational intertextuality of what we call “poetic voice.” He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, a range of prose works (including an autobiographical novel, collections of essays on poetry and culture, and a semi-fictitious historical work, Hitler’s Secret Diary), all of which have been translated into numerous languages. His Self-Portrait of White was awarded the National Poetry Prize, the Academy of Athens Poetry Prize, and the Critics’ Poetry Prize. His acclaimed translations include four volumes of Louise Glück’s poetry, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and a recent study and translation of Emily Dickinson. He served as editor of the influential literary journal Poetics and as Poetry Editor at Patakis Publications for 17 years. He teaches Contemporary History and Modern Greek Poetry at the American College of Greece and Creative Writing at the Hellenic Open University.
PATRICIA FELISA BARBEITO is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Menis Koumandareas’s Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry; Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation, shortlisted for the Greek National Translation Award and winner of the Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize; M. Karagatsis’s The Great Chimera; Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife, shortlisted for the National Translation Award, and Christos Chomenidis's Niki, shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for M. Karagatsis’s Junkermann.
MARGARET ATWOOD is an internationally acclaimed novelist, poet, and literary critic, who has won multiple awards and honors, including two Booker Prizes and a PEN USA lifetime achievement award. She is also the founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writer’s Trust of Canada.
PRESS
Haris Vlavianos
Renaissance
Translated from Greek by
PATRICIA BARBEITO
Preface by
MARGARET ATWOOD
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 focusses 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.
“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
“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. In these elegant, witty, often acerbic character-sketches, greater and lesser figures from the past look at us and we look at them—and as readers we’re reminded that one of the great discoveries of the Renaissance was perspective. So directly does Vlavianos’s spare, stiletto-sharp verse (every bit ‘as good as good prose,’ as Pound thought verse should be) 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
“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. Gently, he reminds the pious ‘diva’ Vittoria Colonna that she also wrote dozens of erotic sonnets, cheers on Lorenzo Valla for ‘taking on the inane scholars’ and confides his own family secrets to the shrewd Florentine matron Alessandra Strozzi. Renaissance affords us an irresistible immersion in a past that remains insistently present.” —Ingrid Rowland
“In this poetic compendium, Haris Vlavianos profoundly and provocatively reasserts the centrality of Italian humanism. 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. Vlavianos’s philosophic and historical imagination brings into the room light that suffuses the air of the twenty-first century mind. In large quantities, he deftly enacts and signifies within the force of a single poem all the controversies, debates, and contributions of European thought, which feels more than a haunting or an act of recovery, but a redemptive motion toward vivifying conversations equally important today. Renaissance takes seriously our intellectual inheritance but avoids somberness. It is a spirited and luminous collection full of humor and measured erudition.” —Major Jackson
BIOS
HARIS VLAVIANOS is a Greek poet whose work consistently probes the intersections of history and poetry and points to the foundational intertextuality of what we call “poetic voice.” He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, a range of prose works (including an autobiographical novel, collections of essays on poetry and culture, and a semi-fictitious historical work, Hitler’s Secret Diary), all of which have been translated into numerous languages. His Self-Portrait of White was awarded the National Poetry Prize, the Academy of Athens Poetry Prize, and the Critics’ Poetry Prize. His acclaimed translations include four volumes of Louise Glück’s poetry, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and a recent study and translation of Emily Dickinson. He served as editor of the influential literary journal Poetics and as Poetry Editor at Patakis Publications for 17 years. He teaches Contemporary History and Modern Greek Poetry at the American College of Greece and Creative Writing at the Hellenic Open University.
PATRICIA FELISA BARBEITO is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Menis Koumandareas’s Their Smell Makes Me Want to Cry; Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation, shortlisted for the Greek National Translation Award and winner of the Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize; M. Karagatsis’s The Great Chimera; Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife, shortlisted for the National Translation Award, and Christos Chomenidis's Niki, shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for M. Karagatsis’s Junkermann.
MARGARET ATWOOD is an internationally acclaimed novelist, poet, and literary critic, who has won multiple awards and honors, including two Booker Prizes and a PEN USA lifetime achievement award. She is also the founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writer’s Trust of Canada.
PRESS
Bilingual Edition
192 pages
February 25, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-42-0
Distributed by Asterism (US) and
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
