Available Formats
Paperback, Bilingual Edition
Published: 6th December 2009
Paperback, Revised Edition
Published: 6th December 1992
Paperback
Published: 1st March 2025
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems - Bilingual Edition
By (Author) C. P. Cavafy
Edited by George Savidis
Translated by Edmund Keeley
Translated by Philip Sherrard
Preface by Robert Pinsky
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press
6th December 2009
Bilingual Edition
United States
Paperback
496
Width 152mm, Height 235mm
652g
C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature. This revised bilingual edition of Collected Poems offers the reader the original Greek texts facing what are now recognized as the standard English translations of Cavafy's poetry. It is this translation that best captures the poet's mixture of formal and idiomatic language and that preserves the immediacy of his increasingly frank treatment of homosexual eroticism, his brilliant re-creation of history, and his astute political ironies. This new bilingual edition also features the notes of editor George Savidis and a new foreword by Robert Pinsky.
"At least as far as Cavafy's 'canon' of 154 sanctioned poems is concerned, it seems likely that the long-established version by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard ... will continue, deservedly, to hold the field."--Peter Green, New Republic
Edmund Keeley (19282022) was the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, emeritus, and professor emeritus of creative writing at Princeton University. Philip Sherrard (19221995) was research fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and lecturer in the history of the Orthodox Church at King's College London. George Savidis (19291995) was professor of modern Greek at the University of Thessaloniki and George Seferis Visiting Professor at Harvard University.