From Publishers Weekly
Though Cavafy never published a book during his lifetime, preferring to circulate his poems privately in broadsides and pamphlets, acclaim for his work has grown steadily, both in the U.S. and abroad, since his death in 1933. A Greek citizen who lived and worked in Alexandria, Cavafy is esteemed both for his elegant redactions of classical and ancient history and myth, and for his gorgeously muted and candidly homosexual poems of erotic longing and loss. As is clear in these conversational and freewheeling versions, those two contexts don't mark a major division in his oeuvre, as desire frequently enters the former, while the latter are typically informed by a classical sense of decorum: "Yesterday, walking in a remote quarter,/ I passed outside the house/ I used to enter when I was very young./ Eros, with his magnificent force,/ had seized my body there." Recurrent themes of the joys of youth and art, along with an emphasis on Hellenism in all eras, also lend the poems a remarkable consistency. Like the expanded edition of Rae Dalven's landmark translations, this book presents a number of earlier efforts that the mature Cavafy repudiated. Unlike Dalven's collection, however, this volume presents Cavafy's authorized work in the order the poet gave it before his death. Though translator Theoharis Theoharis's versions are commendably relaxed, the windily inconsequential preface by Gore Vidal is no substitute for Auden's insightful introduction in the Dalven volume or for the helpful biographical sketch that appears in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's collection. Containing nine poems never before published in English, this volume will no doubt be a necessity for completists readers, though those new to Cavafy's work will do well with any of the collections currently available.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Whether Shakespeare was gay and how gay Whitman was will probably be debated forever. Meanwhile, there is no question that the great Alexandrian Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933) was homosexual. He wrote of furtive homosexual trysts, loves and powers lost, and gracefully meeting defeat by affirming passion and joy. The personae of his poems are fellow homosexuals, contemporary and historical, and defeated figures out of the eastern Mediterranean's long history. His verses are modernly irregular; the later a poem is in his career, the fewer and looser are its rhymes, and his diction is conversational rather than, as in other, including even modern, Greek verse, rhetorical. Theoharis' translation adds a dozen poems to the Cavafy-in-English canon. Otherwise, his versions differ little from Rae Dalven's 1960 and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrerd's 1975 renderings, both still in print. No one objects to new Englishings of the yet more frequently translated Rilke, say, or Akhmatova, and Cavafy is of their stature, a figure whose worth almost mandates multiple editions.
Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
