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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