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C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, by C. P. Cavafy
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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The more than 250 works collected in this volume, comprising all of the Published, Repudiated, and Unpublished poems, cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy’s own lifetime.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.
- Sales Rank: #1057476 in Books
- Published on: 2009-04-07
- Released on: 2009-04-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.51" h x 1.56" w x 6.45" l, 2.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 624 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Already a celebrated critic, memoirist and classicist, Mendelsohn drew together his interests in ancient history, literature, gay life and culture, and beautiful language to produce the finest, most readable version of the modern Greek poet Cavafy (1863–1933) to come along in decades. Cavafy has long been highly regarded by American readers, especially for the straightforward, seemingly timeless, hard-to-pin-down tone of his poems—which alternately revel in and suffer from both ancient Greek history and homoerotic desire—but, as Mendelsohn observes in his deeply impassioned and informative introduction, many American readers overlook those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past... in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal. With this new, completely annotated, translation, Mendelsohn says he aims to restore the balance, to help readers reanimate Greek history with Cavafy, to see how relevant and pressing his whole oeuvre truly is. This larger volume (Knopf is also publishing Mendelsohn's version of Cavafy's Unfinished Poems, never before translated into English, as a separate volume, reviewed below) contains all the poems by Cavafy we have known in English, from famous works like Ithaka (you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean) and The First Step (you must claim your right to be/ a citizen of the city of ideas), all rendered with a lucid music. This is likely to be the definitive Cavafy for some time to come. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* The first decade of the twenty-first century ends as it began, with a new, near-complete translation of Cavafy. But whereas Theoharis Constantine Theoharis’ literarily distinguished Before Time Could Change Them (2001) let several naive impressions of Greek-less readers stand, and Aliki Barnstone’s yet more readable Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy (2006) did nothing to dispel them, Mendelsohn’s effort corrects them. Besides sketching Cavafy’s rather bland life and appraising his poetry as a whole, the introduction explains Cavafy’s poetic techniques and Mendelsohn’s approximation of them in English. Cavafy’s Greek originals are mostly rhymed, metrically regular verses, in familiar forms early on and relaxing into verse paragraphs as he matured. His diction became more demotic as he developed, though he always used bits of nineteenth-century literary Greek for historical and cultural nuance. This technical information may be revelatory for ardent yet unscholarly admirers of the poetry but should only increase their admiration. More revelation, for those who haven’t ferreted out the historical references in the poems, comes in the 282 pages of notes Mendelsohn has written as clearly and gracefully as the introduction. There are at least three older translations than Mendelsohn’s, Barnstone’s, and Theoharis’, and in them Cavafy is the same. But Mendelsohn has gone the extra mile, so to speak. If it was a great effort for him, it is an immensely gratifying pleasure for Cavafians to follow in his footsteps. --Ray Olson
Review
“Cavafy’s distinctive tone–wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed–has captivated English-language poets from W.H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Glück. Auden maintained that Cavafy’s tone seemed always to ‘survive translation,’ and Daniel Mendelsohn’ s new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with The Unfinished Poems, this Collected Poems not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language. . . . As Mendelsohn argues in his introduction to the poems, any division between the erotic and historical poems is facile. Whether Cavafy is describing an ancient political intrigue or an erotic encounter that occurred last week, his topic is the passage of time. . . . Mendelsohn has focused his attention on the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. . . . Cavafy mingled high and low diction, [and] Mendelsohn’ s translations shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane . . . This shift lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy’s tone (a directness that is never not elegant), but it also lets Mendelsohn’s translation exist fully as an English poem. Mendelsohn is a classicist, essayist and memoirist [and his] translations of Cavafy’ s poems come trailing commentaries in which an immense amount of learning is gracefully and usefully borne. But Mendelsohn thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of language through its movement. . . . His translation of the famous concluding lines of ‘The God Abandons Antony’ embodies the fortitude the poem recommends. As a result the poem does not pronounce but arrives at is wisdom, making it happen to us. It is an event on the page. It’s easy to translate what a poem says; to concoct a verbal mechanism that captures a poem’s movement, its manner of saying, requires a combination of skills that very few possess. Like Richard Howard’s Baudelaire or Robert Pinsky’s Dante, Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art.”
–James Longenbach, The New York Times Book Review
“Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them. . . .Until his death in 1933, Cavafy would compile one of the great bodies of poetry in any literature. . . . A connoisseur of history’s castaways, his work draws from two intensely private sources: the histories of the Hellenic world, which he read in the evenings, and nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy, that ensued. . . . If a great poet hadn’t been sneaking around, an entire world of cabarets and coffee shops, as vivid in its way as Dickens’s London, might have passed without notice. . . . Cavafy’ s Greek is without perfect English equivalent . . . The fact that he survives translation relatively unscathed should not imply that he has survived all translations equally intact. . . . What [readers] heard in Keeley and Sherrard was Cavafy tuned to unobtrusive English idiom . . . But Keeley and Sherrard had given up on Cavafy’s rhyme . . . and had generally eliminated the formal aspects that contribute to Cavafy’s over-all texture, part chamois and part steel wool. And yet some of Cavafy’s best poems crucially depend on these formal signatures . . . To me Cavafy’s rhythm [in the poem ‘In Despair’ ] feels more like masonry, phrase after phrase laid down and pounded level with a mallet. Not one of these effects is apparent in Keeley and Sherrard’s low-wattage version of the [poem] that Mendelsohn so ably translates. . . . Mendelsohn suggests that Cavafy’s method [of self-publishing] allowed him to regard ‘every poem as a work in progress,’ which is undoubtedly right.”
–Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
“This eloquent critic has entered deeply into Cavafy’s world of stoic longing and elusive memory, intense desire and cool, appraising intellection. . . . Why do we need another [Cavafy translation]? Mendelsohn’s answer is ‘to restore the balance,’ by which he means, to restore Cavafy’s particularity. Previous translations have often aimed to make his work accessible by drawing out what appears universal in it; Mendelsohn wants to deepen and complicate–to make Cavafy less our contemporary and more his own, often enigmatic Alexandrian self. . . . Mendelsohn is at his best as a translator of poems [about desire], rescuing them from the coyness that dogged earlier versions, with a voice as tender and forthright as Cavafy’s own. (This is not an easy task. Some of Cavafy’s favorite words have no good English equivalent.) Rightly, though, Mendelsohn wants his readers to look beyond Cavafy as gay icon avant la lettre and comprehend his whole artistic project, which ‘holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace.’ . . . Mendelsohn’s excellent introduction to the Collected Poems . . . and his exhaustive notes, parse the most difficult poems for those of us who can’t tell our Lagids from our Seleucids . . . Mendelsohn wants nothing less than to offer, ‘as much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek,’ which means translating meter as well as meaning . . . Mendelsohn also appreciates Cavafy’s subtle use, in almost every poem, of Greek’s different registers–the formal katharevousa, or purified tongue, invented by Enlightenment scholars, and the colloquial demotic–and does his best to find English equivalents: Latinate words and formal syntax versus Anglo-Saxon phrases. . . . His version of the short poem ‘Voices,’ is the best I’ve read . . . [This is] the Cavafy of a brilliant critic who has a true and deep affinity for the poet–and who has succeeded in giving him to us whole for the first time.”
–Maria Margaronis, The Nation
“Thrilling . . . The explanatory essays [Mendelsohn] has attached to almost every poem can contain every bit as much passion and humanity as the poet’s own work. Mendelsohn is such a felicitous interpreter of Cavafy because the poet himself was a kind of scholar: complex allusions to distant figures and events at the margins of Mediterranean history are as essential to his art as his evocations of ardent erotic encounters. And our distance from these places, peoples, and ages makes Cavafy’s achievement all the more impressive: he brings a ‘Political Reformer’ in a Greek colony in 200 B.C., a hero of the Trojan wars, or a young man bathing at Alexandria in 1908 into a palpable and immediate presence.”
–Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
“If Cavafy has been well-served by his Anglophone admirers (E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden notable among them, the classics scholar and bestselling memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn has now outstripped them all. His two-volume edition of the Cavafy canon, Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems, scrupulously translated, copiously annotated, and 10 years in the making, not only gives us Cavafy in full but a Cavafy who sounds so at home in our own lingua franca that you’d scarcely suspect he might be Greek to us. . . . How is it that [Cavafy’s] verse manages to impart such a haunting resonance and palpable presence so far removed from its roots? Certainly not by aspiring to epic grandeur or by abounding in lyric airs and graces: On every page he's the epitome of fastidious understatement and austere brevity, given almost exclusively to ruminating on the ghostly vestiges of Hellenic and Byzantine antiquity with pithy stoicism, and chronicling his fleeting homoerotic encounters in the Alexandrian demimonde with unsanitized candor.”
–David Barber, Boston Sunday Globe
“A triumph . . . These books mark an important moment in publishing. Collected Poems presents, in careful, professional translations, virtually all the known poetry of Cavafy, one of the 20th century’s best-known poets. The translator, Daniel Mendelsohn, an accomplished critic and classicist, is alive to the nuances of Greek. Best of all, he furnishes us with full, excellent notes to the life of Cavafy and to the poems. The Unfinished Poems adds to this by presenting, for the first time, translations of 30 Cavafy poems left in various states of imperfection . . . Mendelsohn does the same solid job with these, and his notes are as helpful and loving. Why the excitement? First of all, there’s Cavafy’s reputation, never higher than now, and likely to rise even higher, [with] the unfinished poems . . . His muted, direct poetry tends to work not through metaphor or simile, but through characters and situations. His effects in Greek are so subtle that translations usually miss them and fall into prose. Of his two favorite realms, one is Greek/Byzantine history–especially moments narrated by little-known greats, peripheral kings, philosophers, generals, and onlookers. . . . These poems teach us much about history, politics, and the foolishness of ever thinking you’ve got it made. . . . Cavafy’s triumph is that his love poems can evoke the same enduring, compelling themes as his history poems: loneliness and loss, the nature of nobility, the ravages of time, the power of pleasure, and the fleeting nature of happiness. . . . The unfinished, exquisite poem ‘The Photograph’ [and] several of the [other] unfinished poems . . . will strengthen Cavafy’s already high repute, and join his best-known poems. [Mendelsoh...
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 27 people found the following review helpful.
A feast of poetry
By Christopher W. Coffman
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
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent edition.
By John S. LaCasce
This volume is a real pleasure to read. Start with the introduction to get grounded; then read the poems; then skim through the extensive notes on the poems in the back of the book; then return to the poems you really liked to reread them AND the notes that go with them. Getting to know Cavafy is well worth the time.
I did not find the second volume satisfying, however. The unfinished poems were not up to the ones in the main volume. I'd skip it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Hellenic poetry
By Gregory K. Tobkes
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
[...]
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