Product Description

Since his death almost seventy years ago, C. P. Cavafy has come to be recognized as one of the greatest poets of modern times. Elegiac, deeply sensual, and able to plumb the heart with language of immense richness, Cavafy evokes the great lost classical world of the Mediterranean with unparalleled beauty. Much of his poetry deals with love, specifically homosexual love. It speaks of human passions, the experience common to all mankind of love offered, sought, and lost. His verse is beautiful and embracing, and remains as alive and sensuous as it was when he wrote it.

Theoharis Constantine Theoharis offers a new translation, one that presents Cavafy's work in the thematic order Cavafy wanted it published and emphasizes the tenderness and intensity of the love poems. Gore Vidal's foreword offers an explication of Cavafy's world, a valuable map for readers of what will be embraced as a signal volume of world poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1005291 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Though Cavafy never published a book during his lifetime, preferring to circulate his poems privately in broadsides and pamphlets, acclaim for his work has grown steadily, both in the U.S. and abroad, since his death in 1933. A Greek citizen who lived and worked in Alexandria, Cavafy is esteemed both for his elegant redactions of classical and ancient history and myth, and for his gorgeously muted and candidly homosexual poems of erotic longing and loss. As is clear in these conversational and freewheeling versions, those two contexts don't mark a major division in his oeuvre, as desire frequently enters the former, while the latter are typically informed by a classical sense of decorum: "Yesterday, walking in a remote quarter,/ I passed outside the house/ I used to enter when I was very young./ Eros, with his magnificent force,/ had seized my body there." Recurrent themes of the joys of youth and art, along with an emphasis on Hellenism in all eras, also lend the poems a remarkable consistency. Like the expanded edition of Rae Dalven's landmark translations, this book presents a number of earlier efforts that the mature Cavafy repudiated. Unlike Dalven's collection, however, this volume presents Cavafy's authorized work in the order the poet gave it before his death. Though translator Theoharis Theoharis's versions are commendably relaxed, the windily inconsequential preface by Gore Vidal is no substitute for Auden's insightful introduction in the Dalven volume or for the helpful biographical sketch that appears in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's collection. Containing nine poems never before published in English, this volume will no doubt be a necessity for completists readers, though those new to Cavafy's work will do well with any of the collections currently available.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Whether Shakespeare was gay and how gay Whitman was will probably be debated forever. Meanwhile, there is no question that the great Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933) was homosexual. He wrote of furtive homosexual trysts, loves and powers lost, and gracefully meeting defeat by affirming passion and joy. The personae of his poems are fellow homosexuals, contemporary and historical, and defeated figures out of the eastern Mediterranean's long history. His verses are modernly irregular; the later a poem is in his career, the fewer and looser are its rhymes, and his diction is conversational rather than, as in other, including even modern, Greek verse, rhetorical. Theoharis' translation adds a dozen poems to the Cavafy-in-English canon. Otherwise, his versions differ little from Rae Dalven's 1960 and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrerd's 1975 renderings, both still in print. No one objects to new Englishings of the yet more frequently translated Rilke, say, or Akhmatova, and Cavafy is of their stature, a figure whose worth almost mandates multiple editions. Ray Olson
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Review
"A welcome collection by a modern master who deserves far greater renown." -- Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2001

Customer Reviews

Expatriot longings in Alexandria, the poetry of love
Constantine P. Cavafy is one of the most intelligent and elloquent poets of this century, but remains barely known in American. Why is this? Probably because Cavafy is a man and his poems of lust and longing are addressed at other young men. I would never have discovered this amazing man if it were not for an essay about him published in Gore Vidal's "The Last Empire." Cavafy spent his life as a Greek citizen living in Alexandria egypt, and writing about the young men he found there. But beautiful males are far from his only subject. Some of his best poems are written with a technique where he becomes someone else, often a someone historical that has been dead hundreds of years. He writes as if he really were that person, describing what they are feeling, as well as what they see and hear. He can summon with words all the glory and magic of empires long extict, often to a degree of erie detail. These poems made me yearn to experience what he was describing, to be able to see what he can see in his mind. He wrote in Greek, and this book has been translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis. As I don't read Greek, I have no way of knowing how close he came to the original, but I know that what he did translate blew me away. I was transported from my life to the baths and cafes of Alexandria, the palaces of the Ceasars, from Greece in 1900 to the Greece of legend. Cavafy was able to take me places I'd never knew existed. Maybe the best compliment I can give this work is that it didn't just make me think, it made me imagine and dream. Anyone who loves the Greek world should own this book. Five stars just aren't enough.