I’ve had a wonderful time revisiting the wistful, erudite, tender, sharp-eyed poetry of C. P. Cavafy this past winter into early spring, diving primarily into the excellent translation of Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf 2009). Mendelsohn’s Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy offers stellar positives: a sensitive rendering of exquisitely felt poetry from the Greek into English, reproduced in the order in which Cavafy himself circulated his poetry so you can get a feel for Cavafy’s intentional presentation, with generous annotations for the historical vignettes (for which Cavafy is famous) placed in the back of the book. This way, one can enjoy the poems and access the annotations when needed, or leave them for later too. I believe the prior translation that I have, read about a decade ago, organized the poems simply in chronological order. However, Cavafy’s thoughtful and subtle poetry is enhanced even more when the dance of his ordering can be felt.
In conjunction, I also have been perusing The Selected Prose Works of Cavafy, translated and edited by stateside scholar Peter Jeffreys. Published by the University of Michigan in 2010, this collection offers a handful of early prose poems that prefigure Cavafy’s celebratory nostalgia, allegiance to beauty, and also reverence for the mystery inherent in resonance. These seven prose poems are worth the price of the entire collection.
In the prose poem “The Pleasure Brigade,” for instance, Cavafy announces a Dionysian-like allegiance to aesthetic joy with panache, though I do not imply the poem is anything but utterly serious. His prose poem, “The Ships,” was new to me and tackles the question of the masterpiece in art, and the experience of it as glimpsed enough to know of its existance, as it sails off out of reach. These two prose poems in particular are as memorable as his lyrics. Even here, Cavafy balances romantic feeling with classical restraint, and it was intriguing to note how early on, Cavafy’s themes were present to him, even if these prose poems are dated between 1885 and 1900, while his first accomplished lyrics are finished and circulated in a chapbook form of fourteen poems in 1904. I will circle back to that chapbook below at the end.
The Selected Prose Works also gathers commentary by Cavafy on other writers, including Shakespeare, Homer, Browning, and calls attention to the aesthetic passion and rhetorical delights of the ancient sophists, for instance, over more sober logic and the Socratic preference to be accurate more than artful; this gives one insight to what drives some of Cavafy’s lyric poetry when, including within his historical reenactments, Cavafy and his narrators are navigating dilemmas and competing claims. Overall it’s an outstanding, slender prose collection, simply put, with some gems.
Cavafy’s wistful and at times nostalgic romanticism–watching the world from the dark room of loneliness at times–is illuminated too by the recent biography, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Jeffreys and co-author Gregory Jusdanis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025). Its first half is helpful especially in situating Cavafy in the context of his family life, their economic struggles, his relationship with his brothers, as well as within the 19th century Greek diaspora. It frames Cavafy’s focus on Hellenistic history as advancing Greek identity after centuries under Turkish rule, and re-sees the Mediterranean in a way that does not cede everything to Roman dominance and Rome’s imperial shadows.
The careful scholarship and engaging discussions of Jeffreys and Jusdanis led me to the prose work of Cavafy, especially when they discussed the prose poem, “The Ships,” which they identified as a potential early masterpiece.
Lastly the biography, for my purposes, began to wander in the bulky middle section, after detailed recounting of debates among Cavafy’s contemporaries within the Greek literary world of 1870-1930 approx., which segued into an open ended, but also selective, discussion of Cavafy’s poetry. Here, the biography might have hewed closer to its genre’s task. This said, it enriched my ability to see into Cavafy’s perspective.
Cavafy is a delight of a poet. He authorized about 200 total pages of poetry, so the lyric corpus imparts a real aesthetic sensibility and worldview through a lifetime’s honed output.
I decided to stay away from some of his unpublished and repudiated poems that have been gathered from his papers, to savor better the flavor of his fully realized work, though these are in the Collected, including the clever early poem “The Bank of the Future” (1897).
Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation is my favorite so far. However, Cavafy circulated an early pamphlet of fourteen poems, “Poems 1904,” which has translated by Paul Merchant, and republished as a chapbook by Tavern Books (Oregon 2016). According to Merchant and Tavern Books, Cavefy circulated this pamphlet in 100 total copies, one of which made its way to novelist E. M. Foster. Foster soon enough helped make Cavafy widely known. In the back of Mendelsohn’s Collected Poems, these fourteen poems are combined with a few other good ones under a section called, “the Sengopoulos Notebook.” It was not entirely clear to me, from Mendelsohn’s introduction or notes, why he did not reproduce this circulated chapbook in the same manner as reproducing the order of Cavafy’s larger and later folios. This said, Merchant’s fourteen poems are exquisite in English, including in the order as presented by Cavafy, and necessary supplement in my library.
Cheers,
G. H. Mosson
Maryland, USA