Poetry
Poems
Ποιήματα
Constantine Cavafy · 1935
Synopsis
Short poems, most of them a few lines long. Some are set in the Alexandria of the Ptolemies or in Byzantium, and watch a king lose, a city wait for barbarians who do not come, a man mistake his era. Others speak of one man's desire for another, and of a memory of a room. Still others speak to the traveller about the road that leads to Ithaca.
Context
The work consists of a hundred and fifty-four short poems that their author regarded as finished, gathered in a volume in 1935 in Alexandria by Rika Sengopoúlou, wife of his heir, in a print run of eighteen hundred copies adorned with woodcuts, which arranged them roughly in order of composition. Two veins answer one another in it: the historical poems, and those of male desire, written without avowal or justification. He wrote a spoken Greek mixed with learned forms that belongs to him alone. Marguerite Yourcenar and Constantin Dimaras translated it for Gallimard in 1958; Dominique Grandmont retranslated it in 1999 under the same title, reissued in 2003 in the Poésie/Gallimard series, and Michel Volkovitch gave a selection in 2015.
Who it is for
Short poems, without effects, often set in Hellenistic antiquity. The historical notes are useful.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the most eminent Greek poet of the century, he gave Europe lines that are quoted without knowing where they come from, Ithaka and Waiting for the Barbarians foremost among them.
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