Constantine P. Cavafy was a major Greek poet whose consciously individual style earned him a place among the most important figures not only in Greek but also in Western poetry. His work critically examines aspects of Christianity, patriotism, and homosexuality, embracing his role as a nonconformist. The majority of his most significant poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.
In 2009 Knopf published a new translation of Cavafy's Complete Poems by the brilliant and award-winning writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn. Now Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works for a Pocket Poets edition, including such favorites as Waiting for the Barbarians, Ithaca, and The God Abandons Antony.
A Complete Poems of one of the most distinguished Greek-language poets of the 20th century, translated by Greek-Canadian poet and critic Evan Jones.
"Clearing the Ground" illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca." The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics." Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical pensée, these notes were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, according to the eminent critic G. P. Savidis, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language - in certain cases, in any language. The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously - in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming. The afterward by Martin McKinsey examines Cavafy's sexuality and accompanying pressures in historical context and suggests the part they may have played in his poetic breakthrough. This is a revelatory work for students and lovers of Cavafy - one of the great outsider poets of the twentieth century.
C P Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth- century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria's ancient past. This title includes selected poems of Cavafy.
Documents the literary friendship between the English novelist EM Forster and the Greek-Alexandrian poet CP Cavafy. This book includes extant letters, the earliest published Cavafy translations, facsimiles of Cavafy's authorial revisions, poems by EM Forster, archival photographs, and related letters.
Moving, sensual verses on nostalgia and desire by the masterful early twentieth-century Greek poet.