C. P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems - Hardcover

Cavafy, C P

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307265463 ISBN 13: 9780307265463

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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 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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

It Must Have Been the Spirits

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,
it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.

The black wooden column vanished before me,
with the ancient head; and the dining- room door,
and the armchair, the red one; and the little settee.
In their place came a street in Marseille.
And freed now, unabashed, my soul
appeared there once again and moved about,
with the form of a sensitive, pleasure-bent youth-
the dissolute youth: that too must be said.

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,
it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.

My soul was released; the poor thing, it's
always constrained by the weight of the years.

My soul was released and it showed me
a sympathique street in Marseille,
with the form of the happy, dissolute youth
who never felt ashamed, not he, certainly.



Birth of a Poem

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room . . . imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing-
a distant scene, a distant pleasure-
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .




Remorse

Talk about it, this remorse, to soften it-
noble to be sure, but dangerously one- sided.
Don't cling to the past and torment yourself so much.
Don't give so much importance to yourself.
The wrong you did was smaller than you
imagine; much smaller.
The goodness that has brought you this remorse now
was secreted inside you even then.
See how a circumstance that suddenly
returns home to your memory explains
the reason for an action that had hardly seemed
commendable to you, but now is justified.
Don't count too absolutely on your memory;
you've forgotten much-different odds and ends-
that would have justified you quite enough.

And don't presume you knew the man you wronged
so very well. He surely had virtues you were unaware of;
nor perhaps are those deep wounds the ones
that you imagine (out of ignorance of his life)
to be the dreadful blows that came from you.

Don't count on your feeble memory.
Temper your remorse, which is always
so one-sidedly against you, it's casuistry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307265463
• ISBN 13: 9780307265463
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144