Review by Choice Review
Mendelsohn (Bard College) delivers a treasure trove, a two-volume set that will be the standard resource on Cavafy (1863-1933) for the foreseeable future. Mendelsohn's fresh translations breathe both clarity and subtle nuance into Cavafy's work, and his introduction and extensive commentary provide access to the poems previously available only to classicists. Cavafy's poems have been considered in two distinct arenas: historical and sensual. The sensual poems have enjoyed popularity because of academic and political interest in gay and lesbian issues and because of the "appealingly straightforward style"; the historical poems require a knowledge of classical history that has left them obscure to most readers. Mendelsohn opens up the historical poems, not only with concise yet thorough commentary on individual poems but also by relating the individual poems to Cavafy's entire oeuvre and thus reintegrating the two arenas heretofore seen as distinct. Revealing the intersections of power, desire, ego, ambition, failure, humor, pathos, tragedy, and absurdity, Cavafy's work brings to the fore the humanity that shaped the classical histories and continues to shape the present. Cavafy saw himself as "a poet of the future," and this volume reveals that to be the case. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. M. F. McClure Virginia State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"A GREEK gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." With this sentence the novelist E.M. Forster introduced the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy to the English-speaking world in 1919. Since then, 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 seems always to "survive translation," and Daniel Mendelsohn's new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with "The Unfinished Poems" (the first English translation of poems Cavafy was still drafting when he died in 1933), 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. In what ways did Cavafy stand at an angle to the universe? He was born in Alexandria in 1863 to a family that could trace its lineage back to the nobility of the Byzantine Empire. His father, originally from Constantinople, was a partner in a successful export business that maintained offices in London and Liverpool as well as several cities in Egypt; the young Cavafy lived in England for five years, acquiring both a longstanding fascination with English poetry and a slightly British inflection that accented his Greek. But when his father died, Cavafy's family was plunged into poverty. Socially, linguistically, personally, Cavafy lived on the outskirts. He had his first homosexual affair around the age of 20. Soon after, he found a job in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works - the "Third Circle of Irrigation" - where he worked for more than 30 years. He wrote consistently but almost never published through traditional means. There is nothing more detrimental to art, he maintained, than succumbing to "how the public thinks and what it likes and what it will buy." Today, Cavafy is well known for writing what might initially seem like two kinds of poems. Beginning in 1911, he wrote poems depicting homosexual desire with an unsensational directness: "They were slow getting dressed, they were sorry to cover/the beauty of their supple nudity/which harmonized so well with the comeliness of their faces." At the same time, he wrote poems about Greek history - not the well-known glories of the classical era but the long decline that finally concluded with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire: "He wasn't completely wrong, poor old Gemistus/ (let Lord Andronicus and the patriarch suspect him if they like),/in wanting us, telling us to become pagan once again." But as Mendelsohn argues in his elegant 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. The lines I've just quoted are in fact from the same unfinished poem, "After the Swim": the naked youths, dressing on the beach, are revealed to be students of Gemistus, a Byzantine Neoplatonist who was condemned by authorities of the Orthodox Church for proclaiming that Zeus was the supreme god. In Cavafy's world, everything has already happened. The fortune is spent, the pantheon abandoned, the body grown old. This overpowering sense of belatedness is what provokes the tone of his poems - rueful, distanced, knowing but never wise. Mendelsohn maintains that, given the translatability of Cavafy's tone, he has focused his attention on "other aspects of the poetry" - the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. But in fact this is not exactly the case. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. Earlier translators have, to varying degrees, rightly emphasized the prosaic flatness of Cavafy's language; the flatness is crucial to the emotional power of the poems, since it prevents their irony from seeming caustic, their longing from seeming nostalgic. But as Mendelsohn shows, Cavafy's language was in subtle ways more artificial than we've understood. Most important, Cavafy mingled high and low diction, employing both vernacular Greek and a literary Greek invented at the turn of the 19th century. Taking advantage of the fact that English contains words descended not only from German but from Latin roots, Mendelsohn's translations shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane: This poem, "Days of 1909, '10, and '11," extols the beauty of a working-class boy who sells his body to buy expensive clothes. The tensions between high and low are registered in the diction. Following a line dominated by Latinate words (glorious, possessed, beauteous), the Germanic and colloquial monosyllable in the third line carries an unexpected poignancy: a kid. This shift in diction 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. Because of the polyglot nature of the English language, the sound of great English poetry is the sound of monosyllabic Germanic words chiming against multisyllabic Latinate words (Shakespeare's "seas incarnadine" or Tennyson's "immemorial elms"). Echoing such effects, Mendelsohn makes me wonder if it wasn't the deliciously mongrel nature of English, which Cavafy spoke and wrote perfectly, that first provoked him to forge his own hybridized idiom. The fact that the few poems Cavafy wrote in English contain phrases like "penetrating eye" and "transcendent star" (the Latinate word wedged against the Germanic) suggests that the poet's ear for English was at least as acute as his translator's. Mendelsohn is a classicist, essayist and memoirist, the author of "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million." 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. Listen to his translation of the famous concluding lines of "The God Abandons Antony": The final line embodies the fortitude the poem recommends. While the preceding lines falter, breaking the syntax into edgy pieces, the final line is syntactically complete. As a result, the poem does not pronounce but arrives at its 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's most recent books are "Draft of a Letter," a collection of poems, and "The Art of the Poetic Line," essays on poetry.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The first decade of the twenty-first century ends as it began, with a new, near-complete translation of Cavafy. But whereas Theoharis Constantine Theoharis' literarily distinguished Before Time Could Change Them (2001) let several naive impressions of Greek-less readers stand, and Aliki Barnstone's yet more readable Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy (2006) did nothing to dispel them, Mendelsohn's effort corrects them. Besides sketching Cavafy's rather bland life and appraising his poetry as a whole, the introduction explains Cavafy's poetic techniques and Mendelsohn's approximation of them in English. Cavafy's Greek originals are mostly rhymed, metrically regular verses, in familiar forms early on and relaxing into verse paragraphs as he matured. His diction became more demotic as he developed, though he always used bits of nineteenth-century literary Greek for historical and cultural nuance. This technical information may be revelatory for ardent yet unscholarly admirers of the poetry but should only increase their admiration. More revelation, for those who haven't ferreted out the historical references in the poems, comes in the 282 pages of notes Mendelsohn has written as clearly and gracefully as the introduction. There are at least three older translations than Mendelsohn's, Barnstone's, and Theoharis', and in them Cavafy is the same. But Mendelsohn has gone the extra mile, so to speak. If it was a great effort for him, it is an immensely gratifying pleasure for Cavafians to follow in his footsteps.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Already a celebrated critic, memoirist and classicist, Mendelsohn drew together his interests in ancient history, literature, gay life and culture, and beautiful language to produce the finest, most readable version of the modern Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933) to come along in decades. Cavafy has long been highly regarded by American readers, especially for the straightforward, seemingly timeless, hard-to-pin-down tone of his poems-which alternately revel in and suffer from both ancient Greek history and homoerotic desire-but, as Mendelsohn observes in his deeply impassioned and informative introduction, many American readers overlook "those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past... in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal." With this new, completely annotated, translation, Mendelsohn says he aims to "restore the balance," to help readers reanimate Greek history with Cavafy, to see how relevant and pressing his whole oeuvre truly is. This larger volume (Knopf is also publishing Mendelsohn's version of Cavafy's Unfinished Poems, never before translated into English, as a separate volume, reviewed below) contains all the poems by Cavafy we have known in English, from famous works like "Ithaka" ("you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean") and "The First Step" ("you must claim your right to be/ a citizen of the city of ideas"), all rendered with a lucid music. This is likely to be the definitive Cavafy for some time to come. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
