Synopsis
The Dedalus Press series of budget pamphlets presents key works by major voices in world poetry. Constantine Peter Cavafy was born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1963 and died there in 1933, though he lived in English for a number of his early year, an experience which left him with a distinctly English accent and an infatuation with English sartorial style. During his lifetime, Cavafy's poems appeared mostly in small private editions circulated among friends, and generally his importance as a poet went unnoticed until well after his death. Today, however, he is recognised as a major figure in modern European poetry. Originally issued in 1998, the present volume was the first translation of his poetry to be made by an Irish poet. The translator, Desmond O'Grady, while travelling widely, taught for two years at Alexandria University. He has published more than a dozen collections of his own poems, most recently On My Way (Dedalus Press, 2006), while a survey of his work is available in The Road Taken 1956-1996 (1996) and of his volume of poetry in translation, Trawling Tradition 1954-1994 (1994), both from the University of Salzburg Press.
Présentation de l'éditeur
C. P. Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth-century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria's ancient past. Figures from antiquity speak with telling interruptions from the author in such poems as 'Anna Comnena' and 'You did not understand', while precise moments of history are seen with a sense of foreboding, as in 'Ides of March', 'The God Abandoning Antony' and 'Nero's Deadline'. And in poems that draw on his own life and surroundings, Cavafy recalls illicit trysts or glimpses of beautiful young men in 'One Night', 'I have gazed so much' and 'The Café Entrance', and creates exquisite miniatures of everyday life in 'An Old Man' and 'Of the Shop'.Winner of the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award 2009
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