An Edition and Translation of C.P. Cavafy: The Major Prose

FAIN: FT-60391-12

Martin S. McKinsey
University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH 03824-2620)

The poetry of Greek-Egyptian C.P. Cavafy continues to attract new readers. There are at present more than ten comprehensive English translations in print, most of them coming over the past ten years. Yet despite such evidence of persistent if not growing interest in the writer whom Joseph Brodsky characterized as the greatest poet of the twentieth-century, Cavafy’s prose writing is little known beyond the world of Cavafy specialists, even in Greece itself. At the invitation of the newly established Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library series from the Harvard Department of Classics, I have undertaken to translate a generous selection of the poet’s work in prose for a bilingual volume entitled "C.P. Cavafy: The Major Prose." The volume will also include my extensive commentary on the texts, locating them in the context of Cavafy’s life and work, and within the cultural and political world in which they were written.

Associated Products

Clearing the Ground: C.P. Cavafy Poetry and Prose 1902-1911 (Book)
Title: Clearing the Ground: C.P. Cavafy Poetry and Prose 1902-1911
Author: Martin McKinsey
Author: C. P. Cavafy
Editor: Martin McKinsey
Abstract: Clearing the Ground illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca." The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics." Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical pensée, these "Notes" were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, according to the eminent critic G. P. Savidis, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language — in certain cases, in any language. The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously — in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming. The afterward by Martin McKinsey examines Cavafy's sexuality and accompanying pressures in historical context and suggests the part they may have played in his poetic breakthrough.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Laertes Books
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 978-1942281009
Translator: Martin McKinsey
Copy sent to NEH?: No

---