About the Book
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The more than 250 works collected in this volume, comprising all of the Published, Repudiated, and Unpublished poems, cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy's own lifetime.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.
About the Author :
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.
Daniel Mendelsohn's reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear regularly in numerous publications, including "The New Yorker "and "The New York Review of Books. "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 honors. Mr. Mendelsohn is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches at Bard College.
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 Gluck. 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
"The first decade of the 21st century ends as it began, with a new, near-complete translation of Cavafy. But whereas Theoharis' distinguished "Before Time Could Change Them" (2001) let several naive impressions of Greek-less readers stand, and Aliki Barnstone's "Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy" (2006) did nothing to dispel them, Mendelsohn's efforts corrects them. Besides sketching Cavafy's life and appraising his poetry as a whole, the introduction explains Cavafy's poetic techniques and Mendelsohn's approximations of them in English . . . More revelation, for those who haven't ferreted out the historical references in the poems, comes in the 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. It is an immensely gratifying pleasure for Cavafians to follow in his footsteps."
-Ray Olson, "Booklist" (starred)
"In a vigorous labor of literary love, Daniel Mendelsohn has not only handed us the definitive and complete Cavafy but he has brought to light for the first time in English this major poet's revealing final poems. Meticulously edited and smartly annotated, the poems fully embody Cavafy the sensualist and the antiquarian and his distinctive lyric shuttling between the ancient and the modern worlds."
-Billy Collins
"Daniel Mendelsohn's superb new renderings are not only formally acute but aglow with a light that could only be Cavafy's: a golden luster both of time and of desire, the poet's own memory become part of history, lit by that same ironic, tender and ruefulregard. And with "The Unfinished Poems" artfully brought into English for the first time, we have more of this magisterial poet-one of the towering figures of his time, and of ours-than ever before."
-Mark Doty, National Book Award--winning author of "Fire to Fire
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"Daniel Mendelsohn has afforded us the most informed as well as the most formally proficient versions of a Total Cavafy, even "The Unfinished Poems" now intorted into the canon. Finally we confront a great oeuvre whose 'body English, 'secret or celebrated, we now know-thanks to Mendelsohn's passionate diligence-to be Required Reading."
-Richard Howard
"With deep feeling, exacting care, and extraordinary intelligence, Daniel Mendelsohn has given us a stunning new version of the "Collected Poems" of Constantine Cavafy, a great poet whose work is lit by bright starry sparks of the eternal. We will be mining this thrilling book for years to come."
-Edward Hirsch
