The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy

The complete Cavafy poems – including the unfinished works – in a stunning new translation, published in the UK on the 150th anniversary of his birth and 80th anniversary of his death .

From the acclaimed author of ‘The Lost’, a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering. With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy’s form, Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation brings to English the poet who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot among them.

Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise of the modern world, Cavafy’s poetry collapses the spectra of time, geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as "Waiting for the Barbarians" and “Ithica”, famed for their revival of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy’s unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel Mendelsohn’s edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh, definitive edition of Cavafy in English.

Reviews

’The poetry of Cavafy has been my spiritual food for many years now … Cavafy is a poet who never leaves you. He gets under your skin’ Louis de Bernieres

‘Magisterial … his translations are plain, but his scholarship is exemplary … A brilliant scholar, a discerning critic and a generous person, Mendelsohn brings Cavafy alive’ Times

‘This beautifully produced book is as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn’s scholarship is formidable. He produces mini-biographies of the emperors, mystics and martyrs who populate the ancient civilisation Cavafy captures with such beguiling immediacy. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough’ Guardian

‘No-one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work … With this edition of Cavafy, you come for the poems, and stay for the notes. Mendelsohn’s scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet’s love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it’s impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them’ New Yorker

‘Thrilling . . . The explanatory essays [Mendelsohn] has attached to almost every poem can contain every bit as much passion and humanity as the poet’s own work. Mendelsohn is such a felicitous interpreter of Cavafy because the poet himself was a kind of scholar’ Harper’s Magazine

‘A tremendous gift to the literary world’ Newsday

‘This not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language … It is an event on the page. Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art’ New York Times Book Review