154 Poems

Cavafy, C. P.

ISBN 10: 9608762707 / ISBN 13: 9789608762701

Published by Athens, Athens, 2003

About this Item

Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou, 2 Language Text on Facing Pages, 2 Page Preface, 4 Page Introduction, 1 B/W Illustration at Front, Previous Owners Ink Dedication on the FFEP. Seller Inventory # 001827

Bibliographic Details

Title: 154 Poems

Publisher: Athens, Athens

Publication Date: 2003

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

Edition: 2nd Edition

About this title

Synopsis:

Excerpt from the Introduction: There is something miraculous in the simple fact of Cavafy’s poems. He was famously reticent to publish a line in any but the most precise and controlled manner. He did not circulate his collected poems. Instead he sent self-published broadsides to carefully selected readers. That enough copies of individual poems survived to find editors and translators, let alone readers, is testimony to the perceptivity of a few devoted followers, Greek-speaking Alexandrians and others, who promoted his work after Cavafy’s death. He wrote as part of a minority European community in a city – though once one of the centers of the world – that had become a minor North African backwater. It seems possible that his poems might never have been taken seriously in in his linguistic homeland. During Cavafy’s lifetime, much of the rest of the world, understandably enthralled by the continuing presence of the classical tradition, could not even imagine modern Greek as a literary language. Cavafy’s rapid acceptance as a major modernist figure seems even more improbably given that prejudice. He was a homosexual poet not much younger than Oscar Wilde who wrote many unembarrassed erotic poems. Perhaps the various literary establishments would have found it expedient to ignore him. That the poems did indeed survive and that they have their extraordinary position in the world is due in part to good fortune, in part to poetic brilliance, and in part to Cavafy’s original method of promoting his work. Nobody had ever written anything quite like the poems Cavafy wrote, and those few readers who foundt he poems early on seemed to recognize that fact immediately.