The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy: A New Translation [Hardcover]

C. P. Cafavy (Author), Aliki Barnstone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2006

A new translation of a poet widely considered one of the most important of the twentieth century.

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) has written some of the most powerful poems in history. His work uncannily translates history, the record of the many, into an individual personal document. Though Cavafy is wickedly satirical, many of his poems are located in a landscape of intimacy. Drawing on the spectrum of ancient Greek poetic tradition, his poetry is still internal, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boy who plans to enter politics or a poor, ostracized, pure and beautiful young man destroyed by poverty and priggish social mores.

In these glimmering and lyrical translations, with an introduction and scholarly endnotes cowritten with Willis Barnstone, Aliki Barnstone has been faithful to the original Greek, capturing both Cavafy's song and his vernacular in ways neglected in previous translations. Paying close attention to tone and diction, she has employed her well-tuned poet's ear, making Cavafy's verse breathe new music in English.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Excellent as the versions of Theoharis Constantine Theoharis ( Before Time Could Change Them, 2001), Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard ( Collected Poems, 1975), and Rae Dalven ( Complete Poems, 1961) are, Barnstone's translations of the great Greek modernist poet are the most immediate of all. Gerald Stern acknowledges as much in the foreword here and seconds Auden's wonder that poetry in a language he doesn't know could so powerfully influence him. Stern attributes Cavafy's impact to the "tender humanism" he shares with such peers as Yeats, Rilke, and Stevens. Cavafy wrote two kinds of poetry, often in the same poem. One is about homosexual love; the other, about turning points in Greek history from the Trojan War to the late Byzantine Empire. There is always in a Cavafy poem a focal consciousness, the poet's or a historical figure's, that has become alienated from his or her most intense experiences--sexual in the erotic poems, usually political in the historical poems. All a Cavafy persona retains is memory, but that is what life is: memory. Ray Olson
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Review

How to capture a mind that roams both the Alexandrian streets outside his door and the god-haunted alleys of the Panhellenic past? I would venture to say that only a gifted poet could accomplish that task, and in Aliki Barnstone we have found that poet. (Sherod Santos )

Cavafy’s simplicity, learning, pleasure in sex, tranquility in exile, have healed our anguish for over a century. . . . Cavafy’s deeply cultured melancholy and praise of learning and the body flow unimpeded in Barnstone’s translations. (Andrei Codrescu )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (March 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393061426
• ISBN-13: 978-0393061420
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,219,454 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "wish that the way be long", April 28, 2008

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This review is from: The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy: A New Translation (Paperback)

The second line from Constantine Cavafy's "Ithaka," as translated by Aliki Barnstone, perfectly expresses the feeling one has when reading her fine new translation of Cavafy's collected poems; one wants the journey to last, to be slow, thoughtful, recursive, if possible, neverending. In Cavafy's poetic imagination, the history of thousands of years emerges in perfectly realized vignettes, with ironies teased out of time into timeless applicability. Reading Cavafy is the pleasure of a lifetime.

I first encountered Cavafy among Robert Lowell's Imitations, published in 1961, and quickly sought out Keeley and Sherrard's Six Poets of Modern Greece--coincidentally, published the same year--and subsequently, when it became available, their joint translation of Cavafy's selected poems) to read more of Cavafy. Later, I found Rae Dalven's translation, as well. As Aliki Barnstone generously affirms in her acknowledgments, all these poets have done fine work in making available to the English-only reader as much of Cavafy's poetry as can be carried over into English. None has done this better than Ms. Barnstone.

The clarity and grace of Aliki Barnstone's translations, and her sensitivity to degrees of emphasis and (I choose to believe) subtleties of tone seem to me to contribute to the great success of these translations. Her versions of the more familiar poems ("When the Watchman Saw the Light," "Waiting for the Barbarians," "The Gods Abandon Antony" and others) are distinctive and yet comforting in their reassurance that we have experienced well before, may experience more deeply now. Ms. Barnstone, a fine poet in her own right, brings poetic authority (and a family of supportive poets, as well)to this work, and all readers must be grateful.

This volume, arranged chronologically, offers very useful historical and contextual notes for many of the poems, as well as a thoughtful but not overbearing introduction. I would recommend this volume to anyone who cares for modern poetry, but especially for the indispensable poems of Cavafy.