Constantine P. Cavafy fut un poète grec majeur dont le style individuel assumé lui a valu une place parmi les figures les plus importantes de la poésie grecque et occidentale. Son œuvre examine de manière critique certains aspects du christianisme, du patriotisme et de l'homosexualité, adoptant souvent un regard sceptique. La majeure partie de sa poésie la plus significative a été composée après son quarantième anniversaire, explorant fréquemment les thèmes de la mémoire, du désir et du passage du temps.
C P Cavafy is one of the most singular and poignant voices of twentieth- century European poetry, conjuring a magical interior world through lyrical evocations of remembered passions, imagined monologues and dramatic retellings of his native Alexandria's ancient past. This title includes selected poems of Cavafy.
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."