C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

Beautiful poetry. I am glad I found this translation. Wonderful contemplations on both contemporary and ancient Greece.

If you haven't read Cavafy then I am jealous that you will experience him for the first time. He is such a new and different voice. So elegant, so full of love. Well, you will never be sorry to have read him again and again and again.

This is a good collection of Cavafy poems. I compared two translations and liked this edition better than the other - although that is only my personal taste, not based on knowledge of the original language.

I like poetry, but have not had time to read too much in this book as I just received it. Therefore I can not give a reviewat this time.

the best

I recently came across, and reviewed, "The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy", as translated by Aliki Barnstone. That prompted me to compare Barnstone's translations with the ones Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard made, as contained in this edition, C. P. CAFAVY: COLLECTED POEMS, published by Princeton University Press. I decided that I prefer these; they are slightly more poetic and slightly less cryptic. (Still, there is much to commend in the Barnstone book, including the Notes.) That, in turn, prompted me to go back and read (or re-read) all of the poems as translated by Keeley and Sherrard. Doing so has been a treat.C. P. Cavafy, a Greek living in Alexandria, certainly is one of the great poets of the twentieth century. His poetic output, as contained in this volume, starts in 1896 and ends in 1932. He wrote relatively few poems, about 175. They tend to be short, ranging from four to ninety lines. In the original Greek some were rhymed and many employed some sort of metrical or syllabic pattern. (For most poems, the Notes to this volume contain information as to rhyme and meter of the original Greek.)Many of the poems are set in the Greek world from about 500 B.C. to 1100 A.D.; some of these feature gods and heroes from Greek myth and others feature actual historical figures (for example, Marc Antony, Nero, and Julian the Apostate). To me, the poems of the ancient Classical world are somewhat like Greek or Roman statues, betokening wondrous craftsmanship; some, however, are as cold as marble, but others seemingly come to life and are true works of art. They give the sense of projecting centuries back in time - or is it that they project from Classic times forward to the twentieth century? Whichever, the time travel instills a sense of timelessness. One of the most poignant of these "classical" poems is "Ithaka", which was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, pursuant to her wishes.The other major theme, or context, of Cavafy's poems is love and sensual pleasure, and the recollection of love and sensual pleasure, including lost loves and the deaths of lovers. Cavafy was homosexual, and about three dozen of the poems in COLLECTED POEMS clearly concern love and lovemaking between males. They are more spiritual and abstract in content than physical and concrete, and many of them could easily apply to heterosexual love affairs.Here's one such poem, entitled "Days of 1903":"I never found them again--all lost so quickly . . .the poetic eyes, the pale face . . .in the darkening street . . .I never found them again--mine entirely by chance,and so easily given up,then longed for so painfully.The poetic eyes, the pale face,those lips--I never found them again."In many of the poems the initial setting is a dream or fantasy world, which then is rudely or abruptly interrupted by reality. Irony abounds. But more than anything else, there is the bittersweet awareness of the passage of time . . . and life.I will close with one another short poem from this marvelously sensitive and evocative poet, entitled "In the Same Space":"The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhoodthat I've seen and walked through years on end:I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,with so many incidents, so many details.And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling."

This book was published in 1975. It collected 175 poems written between 1893 and 1933, including 153 that were published during Cavafy’s lifetime and 22 that went unpublished before he died. A revised version of this book came out in 1992, but that's not the one I read.My reading of this poet is that his best work came in the first half of his career: In the 1890s (“Candles,” “An Old Man,” “The City,” “Walls,” “Prayer,” “The Souls of Old Men”). The 1900s (“Voices,” “Longings,” “Ionic,” “Hidden Things,” “Come Back”). And the 1910s (“Ithaka,” “In the Evening,” Since Nine o’Clock,” “Outside the House”). In most of these, the moving themes were life as a voyage and/or the passing of time, captured in striking ways.In comparison with these, his other central concerns --- his own sexual frustration, as well as Ancient Greek and Byzantine history and culture, as explored through obscure characters both real and imagined --- were uninteresting. Into the 1910s and 20s, the references to ancient history increased in frequency and became more and more obscure. And the expression of desire became repetitive and long-winded.