C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, Revised Edition

by Constantinos P. Cavafy

Book Overview

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. Here is an extensively revised edition of the acclaimed translations of Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, which capture Cavafy's...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691015376
• ISBN13: 9780691015378
• Release Date: September 1992
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

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!

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.

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.

Absolutely wonderful!

Kavafy is the the perfect guide in our exploration of life. I reccommend this book highly. Edmund Keeley has done a wonderful job in bringing Kavafy's poetry to us.