Helga Olshvang Landauer
BY Zachary Deretsky

In both creative work and life, what kind of energies and imagery attract you most?

The Orpheus myth and everything that has to do with remembrance and reemergence — from Proust to pollen.

You are very much an interdisciplinary artist. How does your own poetry writing dialogue with your filmmaking enterprises?

I believe there are two major and only occasionally overlapping types of dramaturgy: constructing or growing (traveling). An example of the first type would be any existing genre, requiring a set of characters and rules of coexistence.

The second is the force of motion that connects places and events, as in Homer’s Odyssey. Cinema that follows this second road is closest to poetry, using motion rather than the architecture of a known genre as a force to connect characters and events, is most interesting to me. This involves transformations of thoughts rather than characters; a change of emotion rather than a change of circumstance.

When I make a film, I am trying to apply the same elements which concern me as a poet: rhythm, silence as a key structural element, and motion as the connective tissue. The ideal film, like a poem, is a vehicle of sorts, which takes you to an unexpected place different from where you started the journey. At the end of the road, I see these art forms as different vehicles for what is ultimately a metaphysical journey toward Spinoza’s accidental truth, never quite reaching it but moving the artist and the viewer a bit further.

When I make a film, I am trying to apply the same elements which concern me as a poet: rhythm, silence as a key structural element, and motion as the connective tissue. The ideal film, like a poem, is a vehicle of sorts, which takes you to an unexpected place different from where you started the journey.

What are some agendas that you often revisit throughout these years of writing poems?

The same agenda that dominates the history of philosophy: death and dying.

Does writing in English compromise sensibilities or sensualities that you may have when writing in Russian?

Most definitely, yes. I envy Nabokov who contributed immensely in both languages. When writing in English, I feel like I am making sculpture without seeing it, and I harbor grave doubts as to whether it reflects me to the same degree that the Russian language does.

Given that you write in both languages, how do you confront their simillar/differing (and at times irreconciliable) temperaments?

I have this image of a Russian phrase approaching from faraway and circling in complicated loops before holding you in a tight embrace. English walks alongside you the whole time, establishing a cozy and deceitful familiarity, and then turns the corner at the last moment.