Items related to Constantine P. Cavafy -- Poems
Translations, like everything else, wear out over time, as language, and those who read or use it, change. With a poet like Cavafy, who was so precisely tuned to the idiom of his peers, it is even more important to update the English versions of his poems frequently, so that they have the same immediate resonance with the times as the originals had with their time. This is, of course, an impossible task. There is no single word, much less any phrase, that has exactly the same weight and hierarchy of primary and secondary meanings in another language. Add to that the differences in sound patterns and rhythmic signatures or emphases, and it becomes clear that the best one can do is to approximate, sometimes by straying from the awkwardness of literal, dictionary definitions, the poetic effects of the original poems. Robert Lowell called his attempts "Imitations" and I think that the ambition and humility of that designation makes it a more or less accurate label for what is presented here, English versions of a celebrated body of work that could never have been written in English, much less in Canadian English with our vastly different history and culture, different even from the English that evolved in Britain over many centuries. Certainly there are problematics that have remained unresolved, and occasional passages of unavoidable clumsiness, but we have tried to approximate both Cavafy's intimate, precise sense of idiomatic speech, and his consummate ear for traditional forms revitalized by the Demotic Greek of Alexandria. If we haven't fully succeeded, our hope is that something of the poet's distinctive genius and skill remains, and remains accessible to our readers, if only as a trace element here and there, or in the cumulative force of the book as a whole.
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About the Author:
Review:
"I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria-at a house on Seriph Street; I left at a young age and spent a lot of years of my childhood in England. I visited that country later on as an adult although for a short period of time. I also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived in Constantinople for about two years. I haven't visited Greece for a lot of years.
My last employment was as a clerk at a Government office under the Ministry of Public works of Egypt. I speak English, French, and some Italian."
This self-biographical note of Constantine P. Cavafy or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, published in 1924 in the celebratory issue of the magazine "New Art".
He is considered one of the most influential poets of modern Greece and along with Palamas, Kalvos, Seferis, Elytis, Egonopoulos, Ritsos he was instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both in Greece and abroad.
Cavafy's poems have been translated into just about all the European languages, and the majority of his more mature poetic creations have been translated and published since 1951 to 1980: twice in English, twice in French, once in German, and once in Italian.
"Cavafy's soul is barely contained by the dam of reason. It escapes in spurts of ink. Urgency, despair, enormous guilt and anger. A tortured man seeking oblivion from himself. Time and society are his jailors. Secretly written words his only escape. A rose blooms. Petals upon petals unfold, and one awaits the time when there are no more. But there is no taking your eyes from the process. It is like peeking through a hole in the wall, watching a man undress his soul." --Luisa Maria Celis, author of Arrows in the Sky
"This is a beautiful collection of poems by one of the most important Greek poets, Constantine Cavafy, translated from the original text by Manolis, another very talented Greek-Canadian poet. Translations are most effective when they pay attention to the contextual integration of the author's culture, its mannerisms, the resonance and reach of the words, making the flow from one language to the other appear natural, not acquired. When a poet translates another poet's work, it is like a musical exchange. This is exactly what Manolis did with Cavafy's poetry: unwrapping creatively the pulse and the rhythm of the original text. He doesn't disturb the breathing and fulgurations of this melodious voice from Alexandria. Actually, he joins these timeless songs which are Cavafy's poems, and sings along in a duet that bridges over from Greek into English in the most harmonious manner." --Eduardo B. Pinto, author of Travelling with Shadows
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (a.k.a. Constantine Peter Cavafy) lived from 1863 to 1933, mostly in Alexandria, Egypt. Working slowly and meticulously, he wrote 154 poems in his lifetime. He became known as "the poet of the city" and is mentioned many times in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Manolis, a White Rock writer who was born on Crete, prepared this new translation, attempting to "unwrap creatively" the pulse and rhythm of such poems as Craftsman of Wine Bowls and In a Small Town in Asia Minor. In the introduction, Manolis suggests looking beyond reductive statements that have been made about Cavafy's homosexuality and concentrating instead on that "most sweet, lonely, desperate man who loved life, who loved people ... who was a beacon in the midst of human mediocrity and banality..." --Editor, The Vancouver Sun
"This is a beautiful collection of poems by one of the most important Greek poets, Constantine Cavafy, translated from the original text by Manolis, another very talented Greek-Canadian poet. Translations are most effective when they pay attention to the contextual integration of the author's culture, its mannerisms, the resonance and reach of the words, making the flow from one language to the other appear natural, not acquired. When a poet translates another poet's work, it is like a musical exchange. This is exactly what Manolis did with Cavafy's poetry: unwrapping creatively the pulse and the rhythm of the original text. He doesn't disturb the breathing and fulgurations of this melodious voice from Alexandria. Actually, he joins these timeless songs which are Cavafy's poems, and sings along in a duet that bridges over from Greek into English in the most harmonious manner." --Eduardo B. Pinto, author of Travelling with Shadows
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (a.k.a. Constantine Peter Cavafy) lived from 1863 to 1933, mostly in Alexandria, Egypt. Working slowly and meticulously, he wrote 154 poems in his lifetime. He became known as "the poet of the city" and is mentioned many times in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Manolis, a White Rock writer who was born on Crete, prepared this new translation, attempting to "unwrap creatively" the pulse and rhythm of such poems as Craftsman of Wine Bowls and In a Small Town in Asia Minor. In the introduction, Manolis suggests looking beyond reductive statements that have been made about Cavafy's homosexuality and concentrating instead on that "most sweet, lonely, desperate man who loved life, who loved people ... who was a beacon in the midst of human mediocrity and banality..." --Editor, The Vancouver Sun
Cavafy, now considered by many to be the best Greek poet of the twentieth century, died at seventy in 1933. Obscure during his lifetime, he lived reclusively and published few of his poems. Manolis, the translator and publisher of this book, describes Cavafy in his introduction as "the most sweet, lonely, desperate man who loved life, who loved people" (23).
In these, his classical poems, Cavafy recalls the ancient birthright of the poet, so sorely lacking in today's verse-makers: the role of teacher, of cultural archivist, of sage who–like his heroes–will go to the dark place for his readers, to heal our collective wounds.
This voice, unlike that of fellow Greek poets George Seferis or Yiannis Ritsos, has the prophetic clarity of Homer, Rumi, Blake, or post-Beatles John Lennon. At times he does employ irony to poke fun at human folly. For example, in "Nero's Deadline" a soothsayer tells Nero he'll live to seventy-three, so he goes on a comically debauched vacation, "which consisted totally of days of pleasure" (103). Yet Cavafy's fallback voice is tender, free of fiddle or clever wordplay. He is a truth-teller.
His other, more personal, poems are frank statements of admiration for good-looking young men, usually wistful memories of lust. These pieces are fragile, quiet–as if penned by a modern masculine Sappho. He recollects trysts from many years past, or simple sightings of beautiful youths in their mid-twenties: reading a book (160), at a casino (122), through a tobacco shop window (117), at the entrance of a café (86). These longings soothe and torture him. It's hard not to imagine the lonely poet, oppressed by the ubiquitous Greek Orthodox Church, daydreaming at his Alexandrian job of thirty years, with its Kafka-worthy title: special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works. Such personal reveries, like his classical allegories, are tales of human corrosion.
Cumulatively, these mournful episodes read like spiritual epiphanies. How does he do this? By passing them through "the High World of Poetry" (118)? Is this like an Aeolian harp? He was, we are gathering, an odd duck. And what poet isn't? The poems work. The precious few that do not work read like the masturbatory fantasies of a fetishist, with the reader as uninvited voyeur. But, on second thought, even such miscues contain something of the fated tragic inevitability of Hector and Patroklos. The singular vision that links Cavafy's two types of poems declares that decadence comes to a bad end, in civilizations as in individuals.
This, like any good poem, eludes category; certainly it doesn't fit into either of my neat classifications. It's haunted, ineffably. This city isn't just Alexandria, where Cavafy was born and died. It's the archetypal locus of remorse, of regret, of shame–of all our unlived lives. The last two lines sound flat, yet this does not detract from the general eeriness of tone or from the devastating line, "there is no ship for you."
Manolis deserves kudos for this project: it's ambitious, and not particularly Canadian. We Canucks often leave the work of reinvigorating "classics" to the publishing houses of the US and UK. Manolis' translation, in my opinion, is not nimble. He's often wordy, without a strong ear for music. But Cavafy's Greek verse itself has been critiqued as flat. Thankfully, Manolis errs on the side of simplicity, retaining the lonesome urgency of the line and the clumsy honesty of Cavafy's heart.
--John Wall Barger, Prairie Fire Review of Books"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherLibros Libertad
- Publication date2008
- ISBN 10 0981073514
- ISBN 13 9780981073514
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages240
- EditorGeorge Amabile
- Rating
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