Product Description

This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.

Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories--Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European--and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.

Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #451881 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 465 pages

About the Author
Constantine Cavafi was a major Greek poet who worked as a journalist and civil servant during his lifetime.

Stratis Haviaris is Curator of the Poetry and Farnsworth Rooms, Harvard College Library.

Customer Reviews

Interesting plates of original manuscripts in the back
Though this is not my favorite translation, there are several plates in the back of the book of works in the poet's original hand.