The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy

Description

The complete Cavafy poems - including the unfinished works - in a stunning new translation. 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). Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poetry 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. After more than a decade of work, Daniel Mendelsohn - an acclaimed, award-winning author and classicist 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. This volume includes the first-ever English translation of thirty unfinished poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died - a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades. With Mendelsohn's in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation is a literary event - the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times Book Review, and is contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. His previous books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international best seller 'The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million', which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Medicis, and many other honours. He teaches at Bard College.

'The poetry of Cavafy has been my spiritual food for many years now ... Cavafy is a poet who never leaves you. He gets under your skin' Louis de Bernieres 'Magisterial ... A brilliant scholar, a discerning critic and a generous person, Mendelsohn brings Cavafy alive' Times 'This beautifully produced book is as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn's scholarship is formidable. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough' Guardian 'No-one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work ... Mendelsohn's scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet's love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it's impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual' Daily Telegraph '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' New Yorker 'This not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language ... It is an event on the page. Mendelsohn's Cavafy is itself a work of art' New York Times Book Review