I first encountered Vlanes and his poetry in Athens, at readings hosted by the Compendium Bookshop in the city centre. His poetic gifts were apparent to those who heard him read then, including Katerina Angelaki-Rooke, the doyenne of contemporary Greek poetry, who, like Vlanes, is a poet who also translates poetry. (Katerina translated Pushkin’s 'Evgenii Onegin' into Greek - no mean feat - and Vlanes has, incidentally, translated some of Katerina’s poems from Modern Greek into Russian.)
It was while he was living in Athens that Vlanes wrote his first poems in English. In true Russian fashion (dare I say?), these were not baby steps but a quantum leap: a wreath of fourteen interwoven sonnets. He is a poet who seeks challenges, raising the bar on himself repeatedly, only to surpass his own aspirations. From comments he has made, I understand that Vlanes is ambitious for poetry itself, testing and extending the limits of what poetry is and can become – in more than one language.
I find it extraordinary that someone who composes such compelling and accomplished poems in English as this award-winning collection, 'Another Babylon', did not actually set foot in an English-speaking country until he had passed his thirtieth year, and had first come into regular contact with native speakers of English only shortly prior to that.
Here I might add that Vlanes’s aptitude for language and languages includes Latin and Ancient Greek, in which he consistently scored sevens at the University of Queensland, and at least half a dozen other languages, ancient and modern, which he studies when he can make the time. As anyone who has attempted to learn another language knows, it takes a high degree of application as well as aptitude to attain the level of flexibility and creativity that Vlanes has demonstrated. Although we are here to celebrate the launch of his award-winning poetry collection, 'Another Babylon', it is perhaps worth digressing for a moment to give you some idea of the personal, poetic and cultural context that helped to engender this work.
Among the innate poetic qualities reflected in 'Another Babylon' are the power of the imagination, that personal time-traveller; an awareness and attitude that bring to linguistic consciousness what others may not readily perceive; and a sensibility that reflects on and delights in all manner of phenomena, evoking in poem after poem a nuanced world, discovered and created.
Apart from these gifts, there is a prodigious capacity for work: for taking pains and tackling projects of daunting magnitude, where no effort is too great or too prolonged, no detail too small to merit patient attention. This may be a Russian characteristic, or perhaps a cultural attitude, as well as an individual trait. In Vlanes’s case it is manifest in several impressive projects he has completed or is presently completing. These include the translation of the hundred and three sonnets that comprise Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 'House of Life' into strict Russian sonnet form; translating Konstantin Kavafy’s poems from a hybrid form of Greek into the equivalent Russian; translating all Euripides’ extant plays from Ancient Greek into Russian, as well as reconstructing, from a few surviving fragments, an entire Euripides play, the 'Phaethon', in both Russian and English blank verse; and, currently, working on a collection of sonnets in English, inspired by the work of the 16th-century Portuguese poet, Camoens. These projects have all been undertaken voluntarily, with passion and commitment.
On the one hand, there is the intense and prolonged effort, the arduous preparation for the task of translating and interpreting, which has served Vlanes so well as a poet, by building a formidable array of skills and flexibility across a number of languages – notably Russian, English, Ancient and Modern Greek, and Latin. An intimate awareness of the value and specific gravity, the subtleties and potential of every particle of language he works with has become intuitive to him; as has the ongoing acquisition and enrichment of linguistic resources.
On the other hand, there is a seemingly boundless inner freedom and fearlessness of spirit that inspire Vlanes’s work. He has said that the poems sometimes come to him, often in their entirety, in his sleep or early in the morning, when he is in a state of receptivity. It is obvious that he works on his texts, but they are never forced into being. The poems arrive fully fledged, as it were, presumably from a level of consciousness which delivers them intact. It is not that he is in the poems; rather that the poems are in him. I have seen this creative advent described as a Mozartian mode of composition, as opposed to Beethoven’s laborious processes, although I know Vlanes prefers Beethoven and Bach to Mozart, and is himself an accomplished musician on piano and harpsichord.
The sense of inner freedom the poems of 'Another Babylon' evoke is attended by a high degree of what has been termed, in a Russian context, ‘emotional logic’, and given outward form by an unerring sense of craftsmanship and sensitivity to language.
Vlanes has commented on the gravitational tensions that give a poem cohesion in an interview with Louise Waller, published in foam:e online poetry journal:
'A poem ought to be held together by something, tighter and tighter, to the brink of imploding, be it rhyme, alliteration, rhythm, meter, strict sequences of thought and imagery, etc.'
These qualities and strengths are noticeable even in a poem as brief as Mother Tiamat, which I’d now like to read.
Reading: 'Mother Tiamat'
One of my favourite poems in 'Another Babylon' is 'Horses of the Sun'. (Reading.)
Commenting on what motivates him to write poetry, Vlanes has said he sees it as a process of inner evolution, a means to awakening, a quest for self-discovery, a pathway to finding one’s true identity, and it can also be an act of redemption. For him, it is an aspiring towards continual growth, a private and contemplative activity that is nonetheless enriched when others are able to partake of the poems.
He has also made it clear that he believes the degree of talent is unimportant. To quote him: ‘If a person has sincerely chosen the path of poetry and sincerely pursues it, it is equally important, in personal terms, regardless of whether that person is a genius or of modest ability.’ To me this attitude is indicative of an integrity of intention.
The poems of 'Another Babylon' have travelled far, arriving here today after transiting languages, cultures, millennia. Even in the poet’s own life experience, there are names to conjure with – places where he lived before migrating first to Athens, then Brisbane. Born in Astrakhan, whose name means ‘Star of the Khan’, or Star City – a confluence of peoples, cultures, tongues, located near the Volga estuary and the Caspian Sea, Vlanes (whose given name, by the way, Vladislav, means ‘possessor of glory’) spent the years of his schooling in Kazakhstan, not far from where spacecraft are launched, bound for the International Space Station and, in the past, the Moon. His first university, the University of the Urals, is in Ekaterinburg, named for the Empress Catherine the Great, where the last Romanov Tsar and his family were executed, and as a postgraduate he attended the University of St Petersburg, a city with legendary status in Russian history and literature.
While I know Vlanes would not wish me to apply the principles of viticulture to the cultivation of poets and poetry, I tend to think that culture and language, the traces of history that hover in the ether of a given place, as well as the physical elements of a locality (and here I invoke Hippocrates on airs, waters, earth) must play some part in the formation of an individual sensibility.
However, I also believe that it is in language that a poet ultimately seeks and finds a home. Clearly, Vlanes the poet has more than one place of abode, and has achieved in English what many native speakers could not.
Whether Vlanes could or would have produced 'Another Babylon' if he’d been born and raised in Brisbane is debatable and probably irrelevant, but this is where these poems were written, and we are fortunate and privileged to be able to enjoy them in our own time, place and language.
I now invite you to listen to Vlanes, and then to treat yourselves to a copy of this brilliant and beautiful collection he has given us, 'Another Babylon'.
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'Another Babylon', Vlanes's first published poetry collection in English, was launched on Sunday, August 28th, at the Queensland Poetry Festival 2011, at the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane.