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Other Colors: Essays and Stories by Orhan Pamuk. New York. 2007. Knopf. Translated From The Turkish By Maureen Freely. 434 pages. Jacket photograph by Ara Guler. Jacket design by Chip Kidd. 9780307266750. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Orhan Pamuk's first book since winning the Nobel Prize, OTHER COLORS is a dazzling collection of essays on his life, his city, his work, and the example of other writers. Over the last three decades, Pamuk has written, in addition to his seven novels, scores of pieces - personal, critical, and meditative - the finest of which he has brilliantly woven together here. He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter's precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing by turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, OTHER COLORS glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.

Orhan Pamuk is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006. His novel MY NAME IS RED won the 2003 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. He lives in Istanbul.

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Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Millhauser. New York. 1972. Knopf. 306 pages. Jacket design by Alice & Martin Provensen. 0394480090. September 1972. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Steven Millhauser's funny, beautiful, and magically illuminative novel of childhood is cast in the form of a dead-serious, indeed major, biography. It is the Definitive Life of a Great American Writer who died when he was eleven, told by his contemporary and lifelong friend It is organized, thanks to Jeffrey's impeccably neat mind, in three sections: The Early Years, The Middle Years, The Late Years. Thus we closely follow Edwin's development from his pre-verbal noises, scrupulously noted by his admiring biographer, through the long devotion to comic books and animated film that so profoundly influenced Edwin's life and works, to the climactic flowering of his literary genius in his remarkable novel, Cartoons. We are made privy to the influence of home and school, to his friendship with the great muralist Edward Penn who disappeared at age seven, to his obsessive love for Rose Dorn - blonde, imperious, impervious to the Valentines, verses, and 43 gifts with which he pursues her. His pained biographer provides, as well, a full account of Edwin's sudden attachment to his violent, almost wordless classmate, Arnold Hasselstrom; And as we enter Edwin's brilliantly productive Late Years, we are shown the sinister series of events leading inescapably to his foreseen death. A satire on biography, a portrait of the artist set entirely in childhood, a vision of childhood as a state of genius--all the elements of Steven Millhauser's wonderful novel work together to charm, to astonish, and to compel a rich rediscovery of the lost moment-to-moment content of childhood.

Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. The prize brought many of his older books back into print. Millhauser was born in New York City, grew up in Connecticut, and earned a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965. He then pursued a doctorate in English at Brown University. He never completed his dissertation but wrote parts of Edwin Mullhouse and From the Realm of Morpheus in two separate stays at Brown. Between times at the university, he wrote Portrait of a Romantic at his parents' house in Connecticut. His story ‘The Invention of Robert Herendeen’ (in The Barnum Museum) features a failed student who has moved back in with his parents; the story is loosely based on this period of Millhauser's life. Until the Pulitzer Prize, Millhauser was best known for his 1972 debut novel, Edwin Mullhouse. This novel, about a precocious writer whose career ends abruptly with his death at age eleven, features the fictional Jeffrey Cartwright playing Boswell to Edwin's Johnson. Edwin Mullhouse brought critical acclaim, and Millhauser followed with a second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, in 1977, and his first collection of short stories, In The Penny Arcade, in 1986. Possibly the most well-known of his short stories is ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, based on a pseudo-mythical tale of a magician who stunned audiences in Vienna in the latter part of the 19th century. It was made into the film, The Illusionist (2006). Millhauser's stories often treat fantasy themes in a manner reminiscent of Poe or Borges, with a distinctively American voice. As critic Russell Potter has noted, ‘in (Millhauser's stories), mechanical cowboys at penny arcades come to life; curious amusement parks, museums, or catacombs beckon with secret passageways and walking automata; dreamers dream and children fly out their windows at night on magic carpets.’ Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of ‘10 Best Books of 2008’ . Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.

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The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper. New York. 1987. Penguin Books. Introduction By Donald Pease. 548 pages. Cover painting The Spirit of the Indian by Thomas Moran, 1869 Courtesy of the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 0140390618. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - James Fenimore Cooper's spirited romance has been praised for its authenticity as a portrait of life during America's western movement. At Lake Otsego, during the French and Indian Wars, great frontiersman Natty Bumppo forsakes his love to come to the aid of Thomas Hutter, a trapper under the attack of Iroquois Indians. Published in 1841, THE DEERSLAYER is the first of the 'Leatherstocking' tales, which reveal the courageous and perseverant nature of the pioneer. Recognized for his descriptive power, Cooper created in Natty Bumppo a mythical character--one of the most significant in the history of American literature. The text of this book was approved by the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association and published in hardcover by the State University of New York Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

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The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. New York. 1986. Penguin Books. Introduction By Richard Slotkin. 352 pages. Cover painting 'The Last of the Mohicans ' by Asher Durand/Art Resource. 0140390243. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - James Fenimore Cooper's unforgettable portrait of fierce individualism and moral courage, set against the bloody French and Indian War Angered by the values of his materialistic society, Hawkeye lives apart from other white men, sharing the solitude and sublimity of the wilderness with his Mohican Indian friend, Chingachgook. But the savageries of the French and Indian War force them out of exile, and they agree to guide two sisters in search of their father through hostile Indian country. Tragic, fast-paced, and stocked with the elements of a classic frontier adventure - massacres and raids, innocent settlers, hardened soldiers, renegade Indians, and a doomed love affair - the novel's enduring value also lies in its contributions to the American frontier mythos, and its insights into the friendship between two men at odds with their own people.

And in a edition beautifully illustrated by N.C. Wyeth:

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper. New York. 1986. Scribner's. 0684187116. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. 372 pages. hardcover. Cover art by N.C. Wyeth.

DESCRIPTION - James Fenimore Cooper's classic American novel, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826), was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons with N. C. Wyeth's magnificent illustrations in 1919. The original canvases have been newly photographed and reproduced with exceptional fidelity for this new edition. The second volume in Cooper's famed saga, The Leatherstocking Tales, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS remains a moving tale of adventure, treachery, and friendship in the battle-torn wilderness of eighteenth-century upstate New York. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), one of America's first great men of letters, is best known for The Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels of which THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS is the second. N. C. Wyeth was born in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1882 and created more than 4,000 illustrations, murals, and easel paintings. He was one of the greatest of the distinguished artists who worked during the ‘golden years' of illustration in America. Wyeth's dynamic paintings for TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, ROBINSON CRUSOE, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and other great adventure stories of Western literature are among his most famous and lasting work. N. C. Wyeth died in 1945.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

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Four Greek Poets: C.P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, Nikos Gatsos by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard (editors & translators). Middlesex. 1970. Penguin Books. Penguin Modern European Poets Series. Includes Work by - C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, & Nikos Gatsos. Translated from the Greek & Edited by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. 110 pages. 0140420916. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, Seferis - Of the four Greek authors represented in this volume, Cavafy and Seferis are poets with international reputations and Seferis has won a Nobel Prize. Elytis and Gatsos, who belong to a younger generation, are fully established in Greece and now winning recognition abroad.

    The Penguin Modern European Poets offer a series of collections designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of the 20th century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series includes: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prevert, Quasmodo, Greek poets -Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, and Seferis, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gunter Grass, Vasko Popa, Sandor Weores, Ferenc Juhasz, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Holan, Anna Akhmatova, Gunnar Ekelof, Paul Celan, Amichai, Kovner, Sachs, Cesare Pavese, the Czech poets, Nezval, Bartusek, and Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Fernando Pessoa, and even Joseph Brodsky.

CONSTANTINE PETROU CAVAFY, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

GEORGE SEFERIS (the nom de plume of George Seferiades) was born in Smyrna in 1900, and moved to Athens with his family when he was fourteen. He studied in Paris at the end of the First World War and afterward joined the Greek diplomatic service. From 1957 to 1962 he lived in London as Ambassador of Greece to the Court of St. James's. His first collection of poetry, TURNING POINT, was published in 1931. Since then he has published several other collections of both poetry and essays, which have been translated into many languages, and for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He holds honorary degrees from Cambridge (1960), Thessalonika (1964) and Oxford (1964).

ODYSSEUS ELYTIS was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911. He studied law at the University of Athens. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1935; since the publication of his first book of poems in 1940, ten further volumes of his poetry have appeared. He has also published three collections of essays, and translations from a wide range of modern writers including Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Ungaretti and Brecht. In 1940-1 he took part in the campaign against the Italian fascists in Albania. During the Nazi occupation he was one of the most prominent poets of the Greek resistance. He lived in Paris from 1948-52; since then his home has been in Athens. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him 'for his poetry which against the background of Greek tradition depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.'

NIKOS GATSOS (8 December 1911 - 12 May 1992) was a Greek poet, translator and lyricist. Nikos Gatsos was born in 1911 in Asea in Arcadia, a district of the Peloponnese, where he finished primary school (dimotiko). He attended high school (gymnasio) in Tripoli, where he became acquainted with literature and foreign languages. Afterwards, he moved to Athens, where he studied literature, philosophy, and history at the University of Athens for two years only. His knowledge of English and French was quite good and he was already familiar with Kostis Palamas, Dionysios Solomos, Greek folk songs, and recent trends in European poetry. In Athens, he came in contact with the literary circles of the day becoming one of the lifelong friends of fellow poet Odysseus Elytis and published his poems, small in extent and in a classic style, in the magazines Nea Estia (1931–32) and Rythmos (1933). During that period he also published criticism. In 1935 he lived in France, in Paris and the South of France. In 1936 he met Odysseus Elytis, his ‘brother' in poetry. In 1943, Aetos published his long poem Amorgos, a major contribution to contemporary Greek poetry notable especially for its combination of surrealism with traditional Greek folk poetry motifs. He subsequently published three more poems: ‘Elegeio' (1946) in Filologika Chronika, ‘The Knight and Death' (1947), and ‘Song of Old Times' (1963), dedicated to Yorgos Seferis, in Tachydromos magazine. After World War II, he worked with the Greek-British Review as a translator and with Ellinikí Radiofonía as a radio director. During that period he also began writing lyrics for the music of Manos Hadjidakis, opening a brilliant career in modern Greek songwriting. In due course he also collaborated with Mikis Theodorakis and other notable composers. His work as a whole combines universal poetic themes such as the problems of evil, injustice, sacrifice, and the pains of love, with more specifically Greek concerns such as the sorrows of exile. His capability to handle language with accuracy led the ‘Art Theatre', the ‘National Theatre' and the ‘Popular Theatre' of Greece to entrust him with translations of various plays -translations that became ‘legendary'- first and foremost being ‘Blood Wedding' by Federico Garcia Lorca. He had a special relationship with Manos Hadjidakis and Nana Mouskouri. His British friends were Philip Sherrard, Peter Levi and Peter Jay, and his Irish friend, Desmond O'Grady. He died in Athens on 12 May 1992. Nikos Gatsos devoted considerable time to translating plays from various languages in Greek, mainly for the Greek National Theatre, the Greek Theatre of Art, and the Greek Popular Theatre. In 1944, he translated (for Filologika Chronika) the poem ‘Night song' by Federico García Lorca. All of the plays he translated were staged at the Greek National Theatre and the Greek Theatre of Art. He also associated with the magazines Nea Estia, Tram,Makedonikes Imeres, Mikro Tetradio, Nea Grammata, Filologika Chronika, and Kallitechnika Nea. In addition, he directed plays during his association with Greek radio. Nikos Gatsos played a great role, as a poet, in Greek song. He wrote lyrics for major Greek composers, including Manos Hadjidakis, Mikis Theodorakis, Stavros Xarchakos, Demos Moutsis, Loukianos Kelaidonis, Christodoulos Chalaris and Eleni Karaindrou. He wrote lyrics for several films and for the Elia Kazan's ‘America-America'. His lyrics are known over the world because of Nana Mouskouri. His lyrics are collected in the book Ola ta tragoudia (Patakis, 1999).

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Constantine Petrou Cavafy

George Seferis

Odysseus Elytis

Nikos Gatsos

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Selected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. Princeton. 1972. Princeton University Press. Translated From The Greek & With An Introduction by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. 98 pages. 0691013041. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - C. P. Cavafy is now considered by many to be the most original and influential Greek poet of the 20th century. The qualities of his poetry that were unfashionable during his lifetime are the very ones that make his work endure: his sparing use of metaphor; his evocation of spoken rhythms and colloqilia1isms; his use of epigrammatic and dramatic modes; his aesthetic perfectionism; his frank treatment of homosexual themes; his brilliantly alive sense of history; and his commitment to Hellenism, coupled with an astute cynicism about politics. The translations in SELECTED POEMS are completely new. Realizing that Cavafy's language is closer to the spoken idiom than that of other leading Greek poets of his time, and that earlier translations have failed to capture the immediate, colloquial qualities of Cavafy's voice, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard have rendered his most significant and characteristic poems in a style and rhythm as natural and apt in English as the poet's is in Greek.

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

EDMUND KEELEY is Professor of English and Creative Arts and Director of the Program in Creative Writing and Theatre, Princeton University.

PHILIP SHERRARD is a lecturer at King's College, University of London.

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Selected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. New York. 2008. Penguin Books. Translated From The Greek & With An Introduction and Notes By Avi Sharon. keywords: Literature Poetry Greece Translated. 220 pages. Cover - 'Man's Head' by Fred Holland Day. 9781041185613. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - The spellbinding verse of one of the most distinctive poetic voices of the twentieth century. Although the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy died in obscurity, today he is regarded as one of the most original of twentieth-century poets. Whether conjuring moments from Alexandria's ancient past, lyrically evoking homosexual trysts, or painting exquisite miniatures of everyday life, his poems exude a striking inventiveness and staggering beauty, qualities that are preserved here in Avi Sharon's sensitive translations. Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents. He worked as a journalist and civil servant and only late in life began to find a receptive readership for his poems. A volume of his collected poetry was not published until after his death.

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

Avi Sharon has taught classics and the humanities in New York, Boston, and Athens and has published translations in such journals as Partisan Review, Arion, and Dialogos.

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The Unfinished Poems by C. P. Cavafy. New York. 2009. Knopf. Translated From The Greek, With An Introduction and Commentary By Daniel Mendelsohn. 124 pages. Jacket design by Jason Booher. 9780307265463. March 2009. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated UNFINISHED POEMS of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the COLLECTED POEMS—translated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost. When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his papers—some of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all accompanied by notes and variants that offer tantalizing glimpses of the poet’s sometimes years-long method of rewriting and revision. These remarkable poems, each meticulously filed in its own dossier by the poet, remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades before being published in a definitive scholarly edition in Greek in 1994. Now, with the cooperation and support of the Archive, Daniel Mendelsohn brings this hitherto unknown creative outpouring to English readers for the first time. Beautiful works in their own right—from a six-line verse on the birth of a poem to a longer work that brilliantly paints the autumn of Byzantium in unexpectedly erotic colors—these unfinished poems provide a thrilling window into Cavafy’s writing process during the last decade of his life, the years of his greatest production. They brilliantly explore, often in new ways, the poet’s well-established themes: identity and time, the agonies of desire and the ironies of history, cultural decline and reappropriation of the past. And, like the COLLECTED POEMS, the Unfinished Poems offers a substantial introduction and notes that provide helpful historical, textual, and literary background for each poem. This splendid translation, together with the COLLECTED POEMS, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear regularly in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His previous books include the memoir THE ELUSIVE EMBRACE, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international bestseller THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Médicis, and many other honors. Mr. Mendelsohn is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches at Bard College.

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C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. Princeton. 2009. Princeton University Press. Translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. With a new preface by Robert Pinsky. 480 pages. 9780691141244. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - C. P. Cavafy lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. This revised bilingual edition of Collected Poems offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as the standard English translations of Cavafy's poetry. It is this translation that best captures the poet's mixture of formal and idiomatic language and that preserves the immediacy of his increasingly frank treatment of homosexual eroticism, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. This new bilingual edition also features the notes of editor George Savidis and a new foreword by Robert Pinsky.

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

Edmund Keeley is Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, emeritus, and professor of creative writing, emeritus, at Princeton University.

Philip Sherrard was research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and lecturer in the history of the Orthodox Church at King's College, London.

George Savidis was professor of modern Greek at the University of Thessaloniki and George Seferis Visiting Professor at Harvard University.

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Collected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. New York. 2009. Knopf. Translated From The Greek, With An Introduction and Commentary By Daniel Mendelsohn. 553 pages. Jacket design by Jason Booher. 9780375400964. March 2009. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - An extraordinary literary event: the simultaneous publication of a brilliant and vivid new rendering of C. P. Cavafy’s COLLECTED POEMS and the first-ever English translation of the poet’s thirty UNFINISHED POEMS, both featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English—by the acclaimed critic, scholar, and award-winning author of THE LOST. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy Now, after more than a decade of work and study, and with the cooperation of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, Daniel Mendelsohn—a classics scholar who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy’s genius. And we hear for the first time the remarkable music of his poetry: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. The more than 250 works collected in this volume, comprising all of the Published, Repudiated, and Unpublished poems, cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy’s own lifetime. Powerfully moving, searching and wise, whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry brilliantly makes the historical personal—and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian’s assessing eye as well as the poet’s compassionate heart. With its in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation, together with THE UNFINISHED POEMS, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English. 

Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.

Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear regularly in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His previous books include the memoir THE ELUSIVE EMBRACE, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international bestseller THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Médicis, and many other honors. Mr. Mendelsohn is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches at Bard College.

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