Constantine Cavafy Libri

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."

La poesia di C.P. Cavafy si distingue per le sue qualità uniche, tra cui un uso parsimonioso della metafora e un focus sui ritmi parlati e sui colloquialismi. La sua opera presenta stili epigrammatici e drammatici, mettendo in mostra un perfezionismo estetico e un'esplorazione sincera di temi omosessuali. La vivace consapevolezza storica di Cavafy e il suo impegno per l'ellenismo sono temperati da un cinismo acuto riguardo alla politica, rendendo la sua poesia sia originale che duratura, nonostante inizialmente fosse considerata fuori moda durante la sua vita.