The Canon: The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (Hellenic Studies Series) (English and Greek Edition) - Softcover

Cavafy, C. P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674025865 ISBN 13: 9780674025868

Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2007

Synopsis

This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience.

Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories--Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European--and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse.

Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."

About this title

About the Author:

Constantine Cavafy was a major Greek poet who worked as a journalist and civil servant during his lifetime.

About this edition

• Publisher: Center for Hellenic Studies
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0674025865
• ISBN 13: 9780674025868
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 465