Product Description
An extraordinary literary event: the simultaneous publication of a brilliant and vivid new rendering of C. P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems and the first-ever English translation of the poet’s thirty Unfinished Poems, both featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English—by the acclaimed critic, scholar, and award-winning author of The Lost.

No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Now, after more than a decade of work and study, and with the cooperation of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, Daniel Mendelsohn—a classics scholar who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy’s genius. And we hear for the first time the remarkable music of his poetry: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators.

The more than 250 works collected in this volume, comprising all of the Published, Repudiated, and Unpublished poems, cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy’s own lifetime. Powerfully moving, searching and wise, whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry brilliantly makes the historical personal—and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian’s assessing eye as well as the poet’s compassionate heart.

With its in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation, together with The Unfinished Poems, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

pretentious
Cavafis is a wonderful poet and even a bad translation of his work reads well. This one is a fussy, pretentious, mind-numbingly pedantic effort, not to mention expensive. The volumes published by Princeton and by Harvest may not be as complete but they are more accessible than this. There is no need to join the ego trip that this translator is obviously on.

Cavafy for a new century
Wonderful new translation and so subtly nuanced I had a greater appreciation for some of my favorite poetry.

Powerful Poems
I think this must be a really good translation. I read a review to that effect. But the few poems I have read are SO powerful. He is a great writer. I am not really a poetry person, but find Cavafy so emotionally evocative.

Hellenic peotry.
If you enjoy themes of ancient and Byzantine Greece you will revel in this. Can't comment on translation but must assume it is well done to get publshed in such a handsome edition. One note of caution, many of the images allude to encounters with other men of all ranks and classes. Nevertheless,I got a very vivid picture of Alexandria both current (early 1900's) and ancient.It has a place of honor next to my edition of Robert Graves.
Gregory K. Tobkes
East Meadow, NY
[...]

A feast of poetry
This is a feast of a book.

Thirty years ago I acquired the translation by Keeley & Sherrard, who were friends of the great Cavafy scholar George Seferis . . . at that time, Cavafy was one of those forbidden pleasures like the PARIS AND NEW YORK DIARIES OF NED ROREM, and OUR LADY OF FLOWERS by Jean Genet that were available in serious LA and New York bookshops of the period.

I was bored by Rorem and Gide, but there were a few great Cavafy poems, it seemed to me at the time, for example "Waiting for the Barbarians", that set apart this late 19th century-early 20th century Greek speaking poet who lived in Alexandria, Egypt from the other merely transgressive, but certainly not transcendent, purveyors of illicit literary pleasures.

I almost didn't bother to pick up the Mendelsohn translation when I saw it in a Sydney bookstore this week, because in my mind I had long ago pigeon-holed Cavafy as a second tier poet of historically subtle poems and of ardent, but somewhat tiresome, gay eroticism.

I am so glad that I bought this book. Reading Cavafy in Mendelsohn's translation is a revelation, a rebirth of a splendid poetic sensibility, and also one of the sure signs of the maturity and stature of American culture in the 21st century, for Mendelsohn is an American. This edition is not simply an accidental conjunction between the poet and a scholar who happened to have a relationship with figures close to Cavafy, it is the union of two complementary and deeply sympathetic spirits, that of Cavafy himself and Mendelsohn. We seem to be emerging from a generation-long desert of American cultural mediocrity imposed upon us by the spiritual tyranny of Theory.

Everything about this edition is first class and saturated in learning and great artistic insight. The scholarly apparatus is extensive but non-intrusive and always edifying. Mendelsohn seems to be that rare scholar who is generous in spirit, repeatedly referring in the text by name to colleagues who have made contributions he considers significant to understanding Cavafy--rather than relegating them to footnotes. The way he has chosen to organise the poems, with characteristic thoughtfulness and sympathy, is far superior to the order in Keeley & Sherrard.

I have found it a deeply moving experience to read Cavafy's poetry in this edition. Please note this review doesn't contain even a hint of the wonders of the poetry itself: I want to preserve that as a pristine pleasure for anyone who choses to read Cavafy in this edition ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

A beautiful and authentic translation
I am a big fan of Edmund Keeley's translations of Demotic Greek and Katherevousa.Having an armchair scholar's knowledge of the language I can appreciate the labor that has gone in to the refinement of the translations in the decades since the first edition.This volume reads very well in English, and I have given many of these as gifts over the years to poetry fans who do not know a word of Greek, always resulting in a comment about how such a poet could be so little known.Cavafy probably would have preferred it that way!

A must if you like modernist poetry
There is nothing that can adequately describe the first time you read Cavafy.It is like a breath of fresh air or a cold shower on a hot day... completely envigorating and different to anything you've ever read before.

I've shared his poetry with friends and they are all blown away.

Cavafy's erotic poems show a sensitivity and directness that is quite unique.

His personal reflective pieces are extremely insightful.I would say that you will get a better understanding of Existential philosophy through this small book of poems than any tomes from the likes of Satre, Camus, Beckett.

His historical poems are best appreciated if you know Byzantine history and the notes in the book are a fantastic to set the context.

This book deserves to be in any personal or public library

Cavafy is an excellent poet
Cavafy is a poet with a view that is both ancient and modern. It's a poet that has a language that is both exuberant and emotional without being too excessive.

Haunting, profound poems of antiquity, love and loss.
As with any poems translated from a language I have never learned, I am left wondering just how close Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard have come to the original style and substance of C.P. Cavafy, the great Alexandrian Greek poet of the early 20th century. (Keeley and Sherrard are scrupulous in their end notes, noting untranslatable words and the original rhyme schemes of poems translated into free verse.) Even in translation, these poems are exquisite, haunting both my dreams and my waking thoughts. Cavafy essentially had only a few subjects, but they were great ones--the lost glory of antiquity, the inevitable decline of the mighty, the death of love and beauty, the folly of human striving, the crucial importance of memory and history. In language of deceptive simplicity, he limned the ephemeral nature of beautiful things and the empty spaces their loss leaves in the soul. (Cavafy, openly gay at a time when homosexuality was truly the love that dare not speak its name, wrote only of lost, passing or unrequited love.) Most of these poems are very short, but they insinuate themselves inextricably into memory, such as "The Mirror in the Front Hall," depicting a handsome young man who stops to straighten his tie: "the old mirror was all joy now,/proud to have embraced/total beauty for a few moments." My own favorite in the book is one of the longer poems, "Orophernis," about a wastrel king of the 2nd Century B.C. who came to grief trying to be a real king for once. The final five lines of this poems are Cavafy in a nutshell; The figure on this four drachma coin, a trace of whose young charm can still be seen, a ray of his poetic beauty-- this sensuous commemoration of an Ionian boy, this is Orophernis, son of Ariarathis.

Cavafy in Greek...
I own a copy of the original collection of Cavafy's poems (in Greek) and I find that this translation has measured up to the task of translating the forceful and sensual poetry as closely as possible. And for anyone who cannot read Greek, this book will bring you as close as possible to the intense emotional response of reading the original. A must have for any poetry lover. ... Read more

Product Description
A new translation of a poet widely considered one of the most important of the twentieth century.C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote some of the mostpowerful poems in world literature. His workuncannily translates history, the record of themany, into an individual personal document. Hedraws on the spectrum of Greek poetic traditionto write wickedly satirical yet internal poetry, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boyplanning to enter politics or a poor,ostracized, pure young man destroyed by povertyand priggish social mores. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"wish that the way be long"
The second line from Constantine Cavafy's "Ithaka," as translated by Aliki Barnstone, perfectly expresses the feeling one has when reading her fine new translation of Cavafy's collected poems; one wants the journey to last, to be slow, thoughtful, recursive, if possible, neverending. In Cavafy's poetic imagination, the history of thousands of years emerges in perfectly realized vignettes, with ironies teased out of time into timeless applicability. Reading Cavafy is the pleasure of a lifetime.

I first encountered Cavafy among Robert Lowell's Imitations, published in 1961, and quickly sought out Keeley and Sherrard's Six Poets of Modern Greece--coincidentally, published the same year--and subsequently, when it became available, their joint translation of Cavafy's selected poems) to read more of Cavafy.Later, I found Rae Dalven's translation, as well.As Aliki Barnstone generously affirms in her acknowledgments, all these poets have done fine work in making available to the English-only reader as much of Cavafy's poetry as can be carried over into English.None has done this better than Ms. Barnstone.

The clarity and grace of Aliki Barnstone's translations, and her sensitivity to degrees of emphasis and (I choose to believe) subtleties of tone seem to me to contribute to the great success of these translations.Her versions of the more familiar poems ("When the Watchman Saw the Light," "Waiting for the Barbarians," "The Gods Abandon Antony" and others) are distinctive and yet comforting in their reassurance that we have experienced well before, may experience more deeply now.Ms. Barnstone, a fine poet in her own right, brings poetic authority (and a family of supportive poets, as well)to this work, and all readers must be grateful.

This volume, arranged chronologically, offers very useful historical and contextual notes for many of the poems, as well as a thoughtful but not overbearing introduction.I would recommend this volume to anyone who cares for modern poetry, but especially for the indispensable poems of Cavafy. ... Read more

Product Description
A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated Unfinished Poems of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the Collected Poems—translated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost.

When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his papers—some of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all accompanied by notes and variants that offer tantalizing glimpses of the poet’s sometimes years-long method of rewriting and revision. These remarkable poems, each meticulously filed in its own dossier by the poet, remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades before being published in a definitive scholarly edition in Greek in 1994. Now, with the cooperation and support of the Archive, Daniel Mendelsohn brings this hitherto unknown creative outpouring to English readers for the first time.

Beautiful works in their own right—from a six-line verse on the “birth of a poem” to a longer work that brilliantly paints the autumn of Byzantium in unexpectedly erotic colors—these unfinished poems provide a thrilling window into Cavafy’s writing process during the last decade of his life, the years of his greatest production. They brilliantly explore, often in new ways, the poet’s well-established themes: identity and time, the agonies of desire and the ironies of history, cultural decline and reappropriation of the past. And, like the Collected Poems, the Unfinished Poems offers a substantial introduction and notes that provide helpful historical, textual, and literary background for each poem.

This splendid translation, together with the Collected Poems, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

New Cavafy for a new century
Always my favorite poet, and this translation is wonderfully nuanced and probably part of the most comprehensive collection I am awhere of.

poetry of c p cavafy
These new additions to my collection of Cavafy's oeuvre open another windowto the soul of a poet who truly expressed rich dimensions of time, sense, and place.Anyone who loves Greece or Mediterranean sensitivies will be seduced by these translations.

A great accomplishment for Daniel Mendelsohn
Congratulations to Daniel Mendelsohn for a magnificent and masterful job in presenting us with an English version of some thirty unfinished poems of one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, C.P.Cavafy. Not only has the translator captured the essence of the poetry of Cavafy but he has also provited for us invaluable annotations that has made the poems meaningful and thus more enjoyable. ... Read more

Product Description
"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." E. M. Forster's famous description of C. P. Cavafy--the most widely known and best loved modern Greek poet--perfectly captures the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language.Cavafy wrote about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. The only bilingual edition of Cavafy's collected poems currently available, this volume presents the most authentic Greek text of every poem he ever published, together with a new English translation that beautifully conveys the accent and rhythm of Cavafy's individual tone of voice. In addition, the volume includes an extensive introduction by Peter Mackridge, explanatory notes that gloss Greek historical names and events alluded to in the poems, a chronological list of the poems, and indexes of Greek and English titles. ... Read more

Product Description
"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." E. M. Forster's famous description of C. P. Cavafy--the most widely known and best loved modern Greek poet--perfectly captures the unique perspective Cavafy brought to bear on history and geography, sexuality and language.Cavafy wrote about people on the periphery, whose religious, ethnic and cultural identities are blurred, and he was one of the pioneers in expressing a specifically homosexual sensibility. His poems present brief and vivid evocations of historical scenes and sensual moments, often infused with his distinctive sense of irony. They have established him as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century. The only bilingual edition of Cavafy's collected poems currently available, this volume presents the most authentic Greek text of every poem he ever published, together with a new English translation that beautifully conveys the accent and rhythm of Cavafy's individual tone of voice. In addition, the volume includes an extensive introduction by Peter Mackridge, explanatory notes that gloss Greek historical names and events alluded to in the poems, a chronological list of the poems, and indexes of Greek and English titles. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Something Like a Beating Heart
I don't know anything about Greek, but I have been a poet all my life and, ever since my late teens I have been told I needed to read Cavafy. He's the real thing. When I read him 35 years ago I, of course, wrestled with all the historical stuff. And the homoerotic poetry was cryptic to say the least. Mostly, I remember coming away from the book with a feeling that this was a very sober, very unhappy poet. A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. He's still dark. I'd still like to take him out for a drink on a regular basis just to cheer him up. The historical stuff is less difficult and I have nothing but the most profound respect and appreciation for the beauty of his erotic poems. The sadness at the passing of youth and beauty is immediately comprehensible, no matter what floats your boat erotically. I've read it in Whitman, of course, A. E. Housman, Gide, and both Garcia Lorca and Cernuda. I'm happy with crediting half of my new attitude toward Cavafy to my own experience and the other half to the excellence of this new translation. It seems infinitely more direct, more personal than that old translation. A lot less scholarly starch and something more like a beating heart.

A fine collection.
There is not much to say about this collection, really. Cavafy's poems, collected in both Greek and English are in this book. The edition is a standard trade paperback, and for the casual reader, it would be an affordable, good-quality edition of Cavafy's work. Anyone interested in owning the poems in both English and Greek should check this edition out.

The Collected Poems: with parallel Greek text (Oxford World's Classics)
At last! I can't read Greek 100% although i am Greek born, I just love seeing the Greek text alongside the English for this revered poet! Translations of C.P. Cavafy's poems do vary so this is an interesting way to tract the English and Greek, it engages the reader even more deeply into the emotional colour of this poet's works.

Scholarly, enjoyable, authentic translations of Cavafy's work.
The translation is authentic and scholarly, maintaining the ironic and laconic aspects of the original Greek.For those with any knowledge of modern or ancient Greek, having the original Greek text on the facing page allows for the reader to enjoy Cavafy's brilliant use of the Greek language.For non-Greek readers, there is another volume by Edmund Keeley of Princeton University which is also very thoughtfully and respectfully translated.Both are a pleasure to read in English.I highly recommend this Oxfor World's Classic edition. ... Read more

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.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Complete poetry of Cavafy
The complete poems of Constantin Cavafy (1873-1933), a Greek language poet who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt as a government clerk and who was unpublished during his lifetime but is now considered one of the major poets of the past century. The poetry of Cavafy (there are other alternative transliterations of his name) is simple (you always get what he is talking about, which is not often the case with 20th Century poetry) yet haunting. There are two main undercurrents in his poems: the classical world (where you get his wit and erudition) and stories of homosexual love (not explicit by modern standards, but certainly daring for its time and probably one of the reasons he decided not to publish his work). Sometimes these two themes overlap in his poems (as in the superb Myres, Alexandria, 340 AD), but often not. Julian the Apostate appears in many of his poems, since one of the undercurrent in his poems is a nostalgia for classical paganism and a criticism of Christianity for destroying that world. My own favorite poems are Waiting for the Barbarians (maybe his best known work), Myres but most of his poems are exceptional.

The world of Cavafy
Cavafy writes what is in his heart.This complete collection is excellent and worth owning.

perspective from a non-scholar
I have only recently come to read the other translations of Cavafy's work and I still like this one best. Dalven's translation flows, the words - both in choice and placement - just seem more evocative and well-suited to the poems. Other translations seem... awkward somehow, with extra words at the end of lines that spoil the tone, or with terms that don't carry the same weight or charm.

I do recognize the frustration that Greek readers must feel at the lack of rhyme or rhythm. (I certainly feel that way when I see my beloved Cyrano butchered whenever it's translated from its gorgeous, flowing, rhyming French.) But from the perspective of one who could never, unfortunately, appreciate the original as it was meant to be appreciated, Dalven gives me a Cavafy who makes me dream, who makes me sad, and who seamlessly sparks emotion. These are poems that I can read to others in English, and which seem almost like they were written as unrhyming poems IN English. Doubtlessly some of the brilliance involved in their creation is lost on me, and it could not be otherwise considering the language barrier. But honestly, having seen some of the other translations out there, I am not sure I would have even become a Cavafy fan if not for Rae Dalven.

To the Most Audacious Amorous Desires
Among the poets of the twentieth century, there is maybe one who can confidently say, "I am better than Cavafy."Yet, on a top five list of the twentieth century's greatest poets, Cavafy is far less likely to appear than, say, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, or W. H. Auden, yet Cavafy's work can stand against any of these.

Poets tend to squabble with tired questions, faith vs. reason, contemplation vs. experience, knowledge vs. serenity, life vs. language, etc.Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek, does not squabble. Whether Cavafy's poems are about politics, art, or love (and those on the latter are the finest), it is as if his principal questions are answered before he writes the poem.Cavafy would never write a poem depicting the conflict between seamy, audacious amours and upright society.Instead, he goes ahead and writes about seamy, audacious amours, and at the end reminds us that upright society doesn't understand, that it makes "stupid comparisons."

And all of this Cavafy does with a fleeting tone (a la John Keats) that appears to be chiseled into marble (a la Ovid), at once the slightest and weightiest thing you've ever read.

Positively a must read and must own for any self-respecting poetry enthusiast.

life reality
candles ithaca speaks and compering for life it is amazing. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
What is the relationship between E. M. Forster's quintessentially British novels, stories and essays and the abstrusely historical and erotic musings of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy? The answer is both complex and illuminating.

The apparent differences are bridged by Forster's penchant for antiquities and interest in matters Oriental, by Cavafy's Anglophilia and British education. While these facts have generated comparative criticism that places novelist and poet in a Hellenistic continuum, the scholarly discussion to date has overlooked the ideological tensions that separate these two important modernists along a cultural divide. Hellenism is a way into their shared interests in the classical past, yet it also marks a point of dissension regarding the essence of Greek civilization. Similarly, their Orientalist visions led them to radically diverse configurations of the East.

Dr. Jeffreys's parallel reading of Forster and Cavafy explains not only how Forster and Cavafy were both rooted in Western Hellenism, but also how their suppositions about it diverged significantly and how the two confronted the Orient in quite different ways. New light is also cast on their friendship; their different political views may have impeded its development.

|Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy| makes use of unpublished documents, newly edited unfinished poetry (here made available for the first time to an English readership), and lesser-known texts, both fictional and nonfictional. The exchange between literary and non-literary texts, prose and poetry, focuses the ideological center of Forster's lifelong engagement with Greece and India and identifies the essence of Cavafy's prolonged fixation on matters Hellenic. In the process Jeffreys's New Historicist study applies contemporary critical trends in modern Greek studies to Forster criticism, producing an incisive, fresh reading of the relationship and the Cavafy and Forster canons. ... Read more

Product Description

This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis), one of the most important twentieth-century European poets. Written by leading international scholars in a number of disciplines (critical theory, gender studies, comparative literature, English studies, Greek studies, anthropology, classics), the essays of this volume situate Cavafy’s poetry within the broader contexts of modernism and aestheticism and investigate its complex and innovative responses to European literary traditions (from Greek antiquity to modernity) as well as its multifaceted impact on major figures of world literature—from North America to South Africa.

Contributors include Eve Sedgwick, Helen Vendler, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Richard Dellamora, Mark Doty, James Faubion, Diana Haas, John Chioles, Edmund Keeley, Albert Henrichs, Kathleen Coleman, Gregory Nagy, Michael Paschalis, Peter Jeffreys, Diskin Clay, and Panagiotis Roilos.

Customer Reviews (1)

More sensual translations are out there
Cavafy is a VERY sensual poet.Unfortunately for those of us who do not read Greek, we have to depend on a translator to give us his or her version of the original.Since I don't know Greek, I compared three different translations of these poems.This particular translation was good, but didn't capture the sensuousness I felt from the Keeley/Sherrard translation.That translation used more action words that gave the poetry a more palpable mood.Unfortunately I don't know what the literal translation is, so I can't say which is more true to Cavafy's intent.As in all art, this is a matter of personal preference.One must read for him or herself. ... Read more