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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 808
EAN: 9780674025868
ISBN: 0674025865
Label: Center for Hellenic Studies
Manufacturer: Center for Hellenic Studies
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 465
Publication Date: 2007-11-30
Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies
Studio: Center for Hellenic Studies

This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.

Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories--Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European--and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.

Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Interesting plates of original manuscripts in the back
Review: Though this is not my favorite translation, there are several plates in the back of the book of works in the poet's original hand.

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