Book description
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. Figures
from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such
poems as Anna Comnena and You did not understand , while precise
moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in Ides of
March , The God Abandoning Antony and Nero s Deadline . And in poems
that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit
trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in One Night , I have gazed
so much and The Caf Entrance , and creates exquisite miniatures of
everyday life in An Old Man and Of the Shop .
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.
Avi Sharon is a professor of Classics and the Humanities and has
taught in New York, Boston, and Athens, Greece. He is active as a
translator of ancient and modern Greek, Italian, and Hebrew verse and
has published his work in magazines such as Arion, Partisan
Review, Dialogos and International Quarterly.
