C. P. CAVAFY: COMPLETE POEMS - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: With Vintage Souvenir Note Signed And Inscribed by Daniel Mendelsohn Laid-in

Cavafy, C.P. (Author/Poet) & Mendelsohn, Daniel (Translator/Editor)

ISBN 10: 000752336X / ISBN 13: 9780007523368

Published by London, England: Harper Press, 2013, 2013

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 670 pages. Published in 2013. Massive Volume of new, definitive translations of the poet's works. One of the most important - and most valuable - books of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents "C. P. Cavafy's Complete Poems, including The First English Translations of The Unfinished Poems, Translated, With Introduction And Commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn". Namely, THE Cavafy Book of and for our time: Meticulous, exhaustive, tremendous. "Cavafy's distinctive tone - wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed - has captivated English-language poets from W. H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Gluck. Auden maintained that Cavafy's tone seemed always to 'survive translation'. Daniel Mendelsohn's new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. He also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language. As Mendelsohn argues, any division between the erotic and historical poems is facile. Whether Cavafy is describing an ancient political intrigue or an erotic encounter that occurred last week, his theme is the passage of time. Mendelsohn has focussed his attention on the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter, and rhyme. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. Cavafy mingled high and low diction, and Mendelsohn's translations shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane. This shift lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy's tone. But it also lets Mendelsohn's translations exist fully as English poems. Mendelsohn thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of language through its movement. Mendelsohn's Cavafy is itself a work of art" (The New York Times). Cavafy regarded his poetry as a work-in-progress. These translations of ALL his known work, finished and unfinished, are a major and timely event. An absolute "must-have" title for C. P. Cavafy and Daniel Mendelsohn collectors. This title is a great book. This was a lifelong book collector's copy, who also laid in a lovely Vintage Souvenir Note from the author. The Note is very prominently and beautifully signed, dated, and inscribed in black ink-pen: "To - With warmest wishes, Daniel Mendelsohn 18 Jan 2007". This is the only copy (with Signed Vintage Note) of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing (British) available online and is in fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare copy thus. The greatest Greek poet of the 20th century. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER DANIEL MENDELSOHN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 000752336X.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: C. P. CAVAFY: COMPLETE POEMS - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: With Vintage Souvenir Note Signed And Inscribed by Daniel Mendelsohn Laid-in
• Publisher: London, England: Harper Press, 2013
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 000752336X
• ISBN 13: 9780007523368
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author

About this title

Synopsis

The complete Cavafy poems – including the unfinished works – in a stunning new translation, published in the UK on the 150th anniversary of his birth and 80th anniversary of his death .

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 (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry 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.

After more than a decade of work, Daniel Mendelsohn – an acclaimed, award-winning author and classicist 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. This volume includes the first-ever English translation of thirty unfinished poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died – a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades. With Mendelsohn’s in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation is a literary event – the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.

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 best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Médicis, and many other honours. 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.