Constantine P. Cavafy fue un importante poeta griego cuyo estilo conscientemente individual le valió un lugar entre las figuras más destacadas no solo de la poesía griega, sino también de la occidental. En su obra, examina críticamente aspectos del cristianismo, el patriotismo y la homosexualidad, a menudo desde una perspectiva escéptica. Gran parte de su poesía más significativa fue compuesta después de cumplir los cuarenta años, explorando temas como la memoria, el deseo y el paso del tiempo.
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."