Cavafy: Poems

The Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) is a towering figure of twentieth-century literature. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the taboos of his time surrounding homoerotic desire.

In this edition, award-winning  translator and editor Daniel Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet’s best-loved works, including such favorites as “Waiting for the Barbarians,” “Ithaca,” and “The God Abandons Antony.” Accompanied by Mendelsohn’s explanatory notes, the poems collected here cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy’s own lifetime. Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poems make the historic profoundly and movingly personal.

C. P. CAVAFY (1863-1933) was a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and worked as a journalist and civil servant. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete. His fame grew substantially after his death.

DANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is the Editor at Large. His books include the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy; and two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.

Preface
 
PUBLISHED POEMS
 
POEMS 1905–1915
 
The City
The Satrapy
But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent
Ides of March
Finished
The God Abandons Antony
Theodotus
Monotony
Ithaca
As Much As You Can
Trojans
King Demetrius
The Retinue of Dionysus
Alexandrian Kings
Philhellene
The Steps
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian
Tomb of Eurion
Dangerous
Manuel Comnenus
In the Church
Very Rarely
In Stock
Painted
Morning Sea
Song of Ionia
In the Entrance of the Cafe´
One Night
Come Back
He Swears
I Went
Chandelier
 
POEMS 1916–1918
 
Since Nine -
Comprehension
Caesarion
Nero’s Deadline
One of Their Gods
Tomb of Lanes
Tomb of Iases
In a City of Osrhoene
Tomb of Ignatius
In the Month of Hathor
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610
Whenever They Are Aroused
To Pleasure
I’ve Gazed So Much
In the Street
The Window of the Tobacco Shop
Passage
In Evening
Gray
Below the House
The Next Table
Remember, Body
 
POEMS 1919–1932
 
The Afternoon Sun
To Stay
Of the Jews (50 A.D.)
Aboard the Ship
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D
That They Come-
Darius
Their Beginning
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.
I Brought to Art From the School of the Renowned Philosopher
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League
In an Old Book
In Despair
Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.)
Before Time Could Alter Them
He Came to Read –
Of Colored Glass
The 25th Year of His Life
On the Italian Seashore
In the Boring Village
Cleitus’s Illness
In a Municipality of Asia Minor
Priest of the Serapeum
In the Taverns
Sophist Departing from Syria
Julian and the Antiochenes
Days of 1896
Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old
Days of 1901
A Young Man, Skilled in the Art of the Word – in His 24th Year
Portrait of a Young Man of Twenty-Three Done by His Friend of the Same      Age, an Amateur
Potentate from Western Libya
Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11
Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.
Beautiful, White Flowers as They Went So Well
Come Now, King of the Lacedaemonians
In the Same Space
The Mirror in the Entrance
He Asked About the Quality –
According to the Formulas of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians
Days of 1908
 
From THE SENGOPOULOS NOTEBOOK
 
Voices
Longings
Candles
An Old Man
Prayer
Old Men’s Souls
The First Step
Interruption
Thermopylae
Che Fece...Il Gran Rifiuto
The Windows
Walls
Waiting for the Barbarians
 
REPUDIATED POEMS
 
Builders
Bard
Timolaus the Syracusan
Sweet Voices
Hours of Melancholy
Oedipus
Near an Open Window
Horace in Athens
The Tarentines Have Their Fun
 
UNPUBLISHED POEMS
 
To Stephanos Skilitsis
“Nous n’osons plus chanter les roses”
The Hereafter
In the Cemetery
Epitaph
Dread
In the House of the Soul
Julian at the Mysteries
Impossible Things
Garlands
Addition
Strengthening
September of 1903
December 1903
January of 1904
On the Stairs
In the Theatre
Poseidonians
Hearing of Love
That’s How
Theophilus Palaeologus
And I Got Down and I Lay There in Their Beds
Simeon
The Bandaged Shoulder
From the Drawer
The Regiment of Pleasure (prose poem)
Ships (prose poem)
 
THE UNFINISHED POEMS
 
The Item in the Paper
It Must Have Been the Spirits
And Above All Cynegirus
On the Jetty
After the Swim
Birth of a Poem
The Photograph
Remorse
Crime
Of the Sixth or Seventh Century
Abandonment
Nothing About the Lacedaemonians
Company of Four
Agelaus
 
NOTES