Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy - Hardcover

Cavafy, Constantine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005192 ISBN 13: 9780151005192

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Synopsis

Since his death almost seventy years ago, C. P. Cavafy has come to be recognized as one of the greatest poets of modern times. Elegiac, deeply sensual, and able to plumb the heart with language of immense richness, Cavafy evokes the great lost classical world of the Mediterranean with unparalleled beauty. Much of his poetry deals with love, specifically homosexual love. It speaks of human passions, the experience common to all mankind of love offered, sought, and lost. His verse is beautiful and embracing, and remains as alive and sensuous as it was when he wrote it.

Theoharis Constantine Theoharis offers a new translation, one that presents Cavafy's work in the thematic order Cavafy wanted it published and emphasizes the tenderness and intensity of the love poems. Gore Vidal's foreword offers an explication of Cavafy's world, a valuable map for readers of what will be embraced as a signal volume of world poetry.

About this title

About the Author

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents. He is considered to be the greatest of modern Greek poets.

Theoharis Constantine Theoharis (left) has taught comparative literature at Harvard University since 1985 and is the author of Ibsen's Drama and Joyce's Ulysses. He is the editor of the Boston Book Review.

Gore Vidal is the author of many bestselling novels including Julian, Burr, Myra Breckinridge, and Lincoln. He lives in Italy.

Reviews

Though Cavafy never published a book during his lifetime, preferring to circulate his poems privately in broadsides and pamphlets, acclaim for his work has grown steadily, both in the U.S. and abroad, since his death in 1933. A Greek citizen who lived and worked in Alexandria, Cavafy is esteemed both for his elegant redactions of classical and ancient history and myth, and for his gorgeously muted and candidly homosexual poems of erotic longing and loss. As is clear in these conversational and freewheeling versions, those two contexts don't mark a major division in his oeuvre, as desire frequently enters the former, while the latter are typically informed by a classical sense of decorum: "Yesterday, walking in a remote quarter,/ I passed outside the house/ I used to enter when I was very young./ Eros, with his magnificent force,/ had seized my body there." Recurrent themes of the joys of youth and art, along with an emphasis on Hellenism in all eras, also lend the poems a remarkable consistency. Like the expanded edition of Rae Dalven's landmark translations, this book presents a number of earlier efforts that the mature Cavafy repudiated. Unlike Dalven's collection, however, this volume presents Cavafy's authorized work in the order the poet gave it before his death. Though translator Theoharis Theoharis's versions are commendably relaxed, the windily inconsequential preface by Gore Vidal is no substitute for Auden's insightful introduction in the Dalven volume or for the helpful biographical sketch that appears in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's collection. Containing nine poems never before published in English, this volume will no doubt be a necessity for completists readers, though those new to Cavafy's work will do well with any of the collections currently available.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Whether Shakespeare was gay and how gay Whitman was will probably be debated forever. Meanwhile, there is no question that the great Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933) was homosexual. He wrote of furtive homosexual trysts, loves and powers lost, and gracefully meeting defeat by affirming passion and joy. The personae of his poems are fellow homosexuals, contemporary and historical, and defeated figures out of the eastern Mediterranean's long history. His verses are modernly irregular; the later a poem is in his career, the fewer and looser are its rhymes, and his diction is conversational rather than, as in other, including even modern, Greek verse, rhetorical. Theoharis' translation adds a dozen poems to the Cavafy-in-English canon. Otherwise, his versions differ little from Rae Dalven's 1960 and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrerd's 1975 renderings, both still in print. No one objects to new Englishings of the yet more frequently translated Rilke, say, or Akhmatova, and Cavafy is of their stature, a figure whose worth almost mandates multiple editions. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The City

You said: "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will turn up, a better one than this.
My efforts-each is judged and damned beforehand,
and my heart is buried, like a dead man.
And my mind, how long will it remain in this morass.
Anywhere I turn my eye, anywhere I look,
the black ruins of my life are what I see here,

where I have spent so many years, where I have botched and spoiled so many."
You will not find other places, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. All roads you walk will be these roads. And you will age in these same neighborhoods;
and in these same houses you will go gray.

Always you will end up in this city.
For you there is no boat-abandon hope of that-no road to other things.
The way you've botched your life here, in this small corner,

makes for your ruin everywhere on earth.
Copyright &copy2001 by Theoharis C. Theoharis Foward Copyright &copy2001 by Gore Vidal Published by Harcourt, Inc. All rights rerved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151005192
• ISBN 13: 9780151005192
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 384