Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.

'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ - Guardian

‘A nuanced and original portrait’ - Literary Review

‘A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work’ - The Spectator

'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New Statesman

'This thematically organised study restores to full and vivid life the writer' - The New World

In this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

About the Author :
Peter Jeffreys is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston and has written, translated and edited a number of books on Cavafy: Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster; C. P. Cavafy; The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle; C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works; Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C.P. Cavafy. He is a member of the International Cavafy Archive Academic Committee at the Onassis Foundation and served as a consultant for the exhibits at the Cavafy House in Alexandria and the Cavafy Archive Space in Athens. Gregory Jusdanis, a Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Ohio State University, is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, The Necessary Nation, Fiction Agonistes, and A Tremendous Thing.

Review :
‘In the fifty years since a biography of the poet last appeared, Constantine Cavafy has emerged as an essential poet of modernity on the world stage. Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have given us an extraordinary biography, eminently readable and as unconventional, scholarly, and impassioned as its subject.'  'A painstakingly researched biography of a quiet Alexandrian who left few traces of his life but whose body of poems the world worships and never tires of translating'  ‘Cavafy spoke for young men with big desires and little money, excluded from society and consumed by love and lust. In his maturity he turned all those wasted nights into the work of a world genius.’  'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ 'A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work . . . it sends one back to Cavafy’s extraordinary body of poems both enlightened and newly enthused'

  ‘A wonderful miscellanea about Cavafy and the world around him… detailed and fascinating…  Jusdanis and Jeffreys are insightful critics’  'A tender investigation . . . I closed Alexandrian Sphinx with a different and richer sense of a poet I’ve read for decades . . . a nuanced and original portrait' 'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New Statesman

'This thematically organised study restores to full and vivid life the writer' - The New World