Product Description

Cavafy, the foremost modern Greek poet, is a master at presenting a scene, an intense feeling, or an idea in direct, unornamented verse. Many of the poems are openly homosexual. Sixty-three newly translated poems have been added to the widely praised edition which includes the classic poem “Ithaca.” Introduction by W. H. Auden. Translated by Rae Dalven.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #153604 in Books
• Published on: 1976-10-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Greek

About the Author
Constantine Cavafy was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth child of Constantinopolitan parents. His father died in 1870, leaving the family poor. Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers. Although living in great poverty and discomfort, Cavafy wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years. Much of his ambition during these years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.

Influential literary relationships included a twenty-year acquaintance with E. M. Forster. The poet himself identified only two love affairs, both apparently brief. His one intimate, long-standing friendship was with Alexander Singopoulos, whom Cavafy designated as his heir and literary executor when he was sixty years old, ten years before his death.

Cavafy remained virtually unrecognized in Greece until late in his career. He never offered a volume of his poems for sale during his lifetime, instead distributing privately printed pamphlets to friends and relatives. Fourteen of Cavafy's poems appeared in a pamphlet in 1904; the edition was enlarged in 1910. Several dozens appeared in subsequent years in a number of privately printed booklets and broadsheets. These editions contained mostly the same poems, first arranged thematically, and then chronologically. Close to one-third of his poems were never printed in any form while he lived.

In book form, Cavafy's poems were first published without dates before World War II and reprinted in 1949. PÍÍMATA (The Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy) appeared posthumously in 1935 in Alexandria. The only evidence of public recognition in Greece during his later years was his receipt, in 1926, of the Order of the Phoenix from the Greek dictator Pangalos.

Perhaps the most original and influential Greek poet of this century, his uncompromising distaste for the kind of rhetoric common among his contemporaries and his refusal to enter into the marketplace may have prevented him from realizing all but a few rewards for his genius. He continued to live in Alexandria until his death in 1933, from cancer of the larynx. It is recorded that his last motion before dying was to draw a circle on a sheet of blank paper, and then to place a period in the middle

Customer Reviews

A note on the translation
This review is not about the work of Cavafy itself, which I love, but a comment on the translation. Many critics have complained that a great deal is lost in a translation of Cavafy, particularly some of the linguistic and stylistic craftsmanship, and that is true of any translation of a poet. However, I believe the tone or the mood of poems, so important in a poet like Cavafy, are underemphasized, and if a translation is capable of conveying them with profundity, it is commendable; and in this respect the Rae Dalven translation is far superior to the Keeley/Sherrard and the Theoharis translations I have read, and the only one worth returning to - it remains evocative where the others seem to miss the pitch, sounding flat or overdone.

Rediscovering Timeless Qualities
There are those days when nothing new appeals to you, and it's good then to turn to your something that is not new. I did recently -- Cavafy.

To read the verse of C.P. Cavafy is to rediscover the timeless quality of passion, desire, pain, and life itself. He offers another view of everything you have ever felt, giving it new perspective. There is little imagery in the work -- it would be unnecessary adornment. They eye and voice of Cavafy are all that is necessary. He saw and said, and did so simply. You need not ponder for hours the nuances of the work. That time can instead be well spent contemplating how and why things feel the way they do.

Cavafy questions civilization. In "Expecting the Barbarians," he describes with characteristic simplicity the essential sense of human relief that is found in giving up specifically in giving up the trappings and restrictions placed on the inhabitants of any society. Cavafy yearns for freedom, and when at last that freedom is denied, he ponders going on without that 'kind of solution. "

Cavafy never questions love or lust. "He Asked About the Quality" explores chance encounter and desire that must be hidden even when that desire is mutual:

". . . their only aim, the touching of their hands over the handkerchiefs; the coming close of their faces, by chance their lips; a momentary contact of the limbs."

The collection. the entirety of Cavafy's work, is a celebration of both antiquity and the present. Greece, Rome, Alexandria of the early nineteen hundreds, early Christianity itself -- these are Cavafy's settings. In spanning two thousand years of Western culture he discovers and reveals an immediacy, an appreciation of beauty -- the beauty of man himself, both physical and contemplative. Cavafy finds the joie de vivre even when it hurts. Then, in "The Horses of Achilles," he goes further and laments. Patroclus is slain and lifeless on the battleground. The immortal horses, gifts of the gods, begin to cry. Zeus tries to console them:

" --- Yet the two noble animals went on shedding their tears for the never ending calamity of death."

Cavafy: a look into something old, very old at times, yet always very new.

essential
It comes down to a matter of preference, but Cavafy's spare, elemental poetry is best translated for me by Rae Dalven, despite the greater number of titles available in an Edmund Keeley translation. This book is a worthy travel companion, with just about every extant Cavafy poem. Savour something special.