C. P. Cavafy

Zusatztext 77468228 Informationen zum Autor C. P. Cavafy; Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn Klappentext A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated Unfinished Poems of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the Collected Poemstranslated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost. When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his paperssome of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all accompanied by notes and variants that offer tantalizing glimpses of the poet's sometimes years-long method of rewriting and revision. These remarkable poems, each meticulously filed in its own dossier by the poet, remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades before being published in a definitive scholarly edition in Greek in 1994. Now, with the cooperation and support of the Archive, Daniel Mendelsohn brings this hitherto unknown creative outpouring to English readers for the first time. Beautiful works in their own rightfrom a six-line verse on the "birth of a poem to a longer work that brilliantly paints the autumn of Byzantium in unexpectedly erotic colorsthese unfinished poems provide a thrilling window into Cavafy's writing process during the last decade of his life, the years of his greatest production. They brilliantly explore, often in new ways, the poet's well-established themes: identity and time, the agonies of desire and the ironies of history, cultural decline and reappropriation of the past. And, like the Collected Poems, the Unfinished Poems offers a substantial introduction and notes that provide helpful historical, textual, and literary background for each poem. This splendid translation, together with the Collected Poems, is a cause for celebrationthe definitive presentation of Cavafy in English. It Must Have Been the Spirits It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.The black wooden column vanished before me,with the ancient head; and the dining- room door,and the armchair, the red one; and the little settee.In their place came a street in Marseille.And freed now, unabashed, my soulappeared there once again and moved about,with the form of a sensitive, pleasure-bent youth-the dissolute youth: that too must be said.It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,it must have been that I was drowsing, I'd been tired all day long.My soul was released; the poor thing, it'salways constrained by the weight of the years.My soul was released and it showed mea sympathique street in Marseille,with the form of the happy, dissolute youthwho never felt ashamed, not he, certainly. Birth of a Poem One night when the beautiful light of the moonpoured into my room . . . imagination, takingsomething from life: some very scanty thing-a distant scene, a distant pleasure-brought a vision all its own of flesh,a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . . Remorse Talk about it, this remorse, to soften it-noble to be sure, but dangerously one- sided.Don't cling to the past and torment yourself so much.Don't give so much importance to yourself.The wrong you did was smaller than youimagine; much smaller.The goodness that has brought you this remorse nowwas secreted inside you even then.See how a circumstance that suddenlyreturns home to your memory explainsthe reason for an action that had hardly seemedcommendable to you, but now is justified.Don't count too absolutely on your memory;you've forgotten much-different odds and ends-that would have justified you quite enough.And don't presume you knew the man you wrongedso very well. He surely had virtues you were unaware of;nor perhaps are those deep wounds the onesthat you im...

ldquo;Cavafy’s distinctive tone–wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed–has captivated English-language poets from W.H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Glück. Auden maintained that Cavafy’s tone seemed always to ‘survive translation,’ and Daniel Mendelsohn’ s new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with The Unfinished Poems, this Collected Poems not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language. . . . As Mendelsohn argues in his introduction to the poems, any division between the erotic and historical poems is facile. Whether Cavafy is describing an ancient political intrigue or an erotic encounter that occurred last week, his topic is the passage of time. . . . Mendelsohn has focused his attention on the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. . . . Cavafy mingled high and low diction, [and] Mendelsohn’ s translations shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane . . . This shift lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy’s tone (a directness that is never not elegant), but it also lets Mendelsohn’s translation exist fully as an English poem. Mendelsohn is a classicist, essayist and memoirist [and his] translations of Cavafy’ s poems come trailing commentaries in which an immense amount of learning is gracefully and usefully borne. But Mendelsohn thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of language through its movement. . . . His translation of the famous concluding lines of ‘The God Abandons Antony’ embodies the fortitude the poem recommends. As a result the poem does not pronounce but arrives at is wisdom, making it happen to us. It is an event on the page. It’s easy to translate what a poem says; to concoct a verbal mechanism that captures a poem’s movement, its manner of saying, requires a combination of skills that very few possess. Like Richard Howard’s Baudelaire or Robert Pinsky’s Dante, Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art.”

–James Longenbach, The New York Times Book Review

“Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them. . . .Until his death in 1933, Cavafy would compile one of the great bodies of poetry in any literature. . . . A connoisseur of history’s castaways, his work draws from two intensely private sources: the histories of the Hellenic world, which he read in the evenings, and nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy, that ensued. . . . If a great poet hadn’t been sneaking around, an entire world of cabarets and coffee shops, as vivid in its way as Dickens’s London, might have passed without notice. . . . Cavafy’ s Greek is without perfect English equivalent . . . The fact that he survives translation relatively unscathed should not imply that he has survived all translations equally intact. . . . What [readers] heard in Keeley and Sherrard was Cavafy tuned to unobtrusive English idiom . . . But Keeley and Sherrard had given up on Cavafy’s rhyme . . . and had generally eliminated the formal aspects that contribute to Cavafy’s over-all texture, part chamois and part steel wool. And yet some of Cavafy’s best poems crucially depend on these formal signatures . . . To me Cavafy’s rhythm [in the poem ‘In Despair’ ] feels more like masonry, phrase after phrase laid down and pounded level with a mallet. Not one of these effects is apparent in Keeley and Sherrard’s low-wattage version of the [poem] that Mendelsohn so ably translates. . . . Mendelsohn suggests that Cavafy’s me…

#	Onlineshop	Preis CHF	Versand CHF	Total CHF
1	Seller	0.00	0.00	0.00