Constantine P. Cavafy was een vooraanstaand Grieks dichter wiens bewust individuele stijl hem een plaats bezorgde tussen de belangrijkste figuren van niet alleen de Griekse, maar ook de westerse poëzie. Zijn werk onderzoekt kritisch aspecten van het christendom, vaderlandsliefde en homoseksualiteit, vaak vanuit een sceptisch en neo-paganistisch perspectief. Een groot deel van zijn meest betekenisvolle poëzie werd na zijn veertigste verjaardag geschreven, met een focus op thema's als herinnering, verlangen en het verstrijken van de tijd.
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. This title includes selected poems of Cavafy.
This volume of 154 poems by Constantine Cavafy is the entire body of work by the artist widely considered a master of modern Greek poetry. Published only privately during his lifetime, Cavafy's poems achieved international acclaim when writers such as E. M. Forster, Laurence Durrell, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden brought his work to a worldwide audience. Cavafy was a poet of Alexandria, the city of his birth and his home throughout his adult life. At the confluence of many histories--Greek, Egyptian, Byzantine, modern European--and many religions, the city provided endless inspiration for his brief, intimate portraits of individuals, historic and contemporary, real and imagined. Homoerotic desire, artistic longing, and a nostalgic fatalism suffuse the subjects he examined and laid bare, without metaphor or simile, in free iambic verse. Published here in the original Greek, with a new English translation by the noted poet Stratis Haviaris on each facing page, and with a foreword by Seamus Heaney, The Canon is Cavafy, familiar and fresh, seen through new eyes, yet instantly recognized: "the Greek gentleman in a straw hat," as Forster called him, "standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."