Books 2010: pray that the road be long
Jan. 7th, 2010 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbBooks 2010: 3
3. C.P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems, translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou.
Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863, and died there in 1933. Described by novellist E.M. Forster as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe", his poems are full of a looking back on lost things: it cannot be called nostalgia, precisely, because they are weighted with irony, and the ones that do not deal with things long past have a quiet, bitter homoeroticism and remembrance of youth.
I love "Ithaca" and "Donations of Alexandria" and "The god abandons Anthony" and many of the poems that treat Alexandria-the-city, but the other poems are beautiful, too. I wholeheartedly recommend them.
This edition has a parallel Greek text. My Greek is too poor (and too ancient) to properly appreciate this, but it's interesting to see where the stresses and the rhythm falls in the original, and in the translation.
3. C.P. Cavafy, The Collected Poems, translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou.
Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863, and died there in 1933. Described by novellist E.M. Forster as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe", his poems are full of a looking back on lost things: it cannot be called nostalgia, precisely, because they are weighted with irony, and the ones that do not deal with things long past have a quiet, bitter homoeroticism and remembrance of youth.
I love "Ithaca" and "Donations of Alexandria" and "The god abandons Anthony" and many of the poems that treat Alexandria-the-city, but the other poems are beautiful, too. I wholeheartedly recommend them.
This edition has a parallel Greek text. My Greek is too poor (and too ancient) to properly appreciate this, but it's interesting to see where the stresses and the rhythm falls in the original, and in the translation.
