C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems

The collected and translated verse of the modern Greek poet C.P. Cavafy, whose remarkable treatment of ancient myths, dramatic forms and erotic experience influenced the likes of W.H. Auden and E.M. Forster.

Ever since I was first introduced to his poetry... Cavafy has remained an influence on my writing

Constantine P. Cavafy was born on 29 April 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents. He lived in Liverpool and Constantinople as well as Alexandria. He worked as a journalist and as a civil servant, publishing his early poetry in broadsheet form to show to his close friends. His style was very different to most contemporary Greek poetry and his poems were largely unappreciated until the 1920s and his reputation really grew posthumously. He died on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday.

The Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived most of his life in Alexandria, where he was content to circulate his work only among a select group of readers; but since his death he has come to be recognised and widely enjoyed as one of the great poets of the twentieth century in any language celebrated for his elegant formal structures, for his brilliant reanimation of myth and for his subtle treatment of erotic experience. 
 
Lawrence Durrell has written of this masterly translation: ‘Cavafy has now at last fallen upon translators who can do justice to his wry melodious poems, glinting with insight as if from veins of mica’.

Constantine P Cavafy

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." Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poems make the 
historic profoundly and movingly personal. A towering figure of twentieth-century poetry, Cavafy is a stellar addition to the Everyman Pocket Poets series.

Constantine P Cavafy

Cavafy Poems

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author