Constantine Cavafy
A New Biography
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- USD 20.99
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- USD 20.99
Publisher Description
A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets.
In 1933, on his seventieth birthday, the poet Constantine Cavafy died in an Alexandrian hospital, surrounded by friends. He left behind a small, curated oeuvre of 154 poems, along with fragments and drafts of incomplete works. Throughout his life, Constantine had kept a tight grip on the distribution of his poetry, but after his death his reputation grew and Constantine became the august C. P. Cavafy, a writer known not only as a great composer of Hellenic verse—the man whose poems reshaped the Greek language—but also as a global poet whose writing transcends its geographic origins and is to this day widely loved and translated.
This long-awaited study captures the complexities of Constantine Cavafy’s life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In rich detail, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys chronicle the young poet’s life with his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty after they left Egypt and moved successively to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. The biography then centers on Constantine’s adulthood in his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor for modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography looks closely at Cavafy’s artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The early 20th-century Greek Egyptian poet behind "Waiting for the Barbarians" and "Ithaca" surmounted star-crossed circumstances with his profound verse and feverish self-promotion, according to this labyrinthine biography. Ohio State classics professor Jusdanis (The Poetics of Cavafy) and Suffolk University English professor Jeffreys (Reframing Decadence) recap Cavafy's early misfortunes, including his father's death when Cavafy was seven and the folding of the family business soon after. Then, in 1882, the British bombardment of Alexandria forced his family to flee their home. Cavafy responded to this tumult by writing poetry, which proved pathbreaking, with its symbolic reflection on ancient Greco-Roman and Byzantine history, modern formalism, and homoerotic imagery. Much of the book is an esoteric analysis of Cavafy's literary efforts, tying his poetry back to his relationships, art, and his studies of history and other poets. The authors' academic prose and dry critical appreciations of Cavafy's verse are less than riveting, but the book comes alive when it turns to Cavafy's efforts to win fame. In these colorful sections, the mature Cavafy emerges as a narcissist convinced of his own genius who would invite young men to his apartment, flatter them, and send them home with stern admonitions to talk up his poems. The result is an intermittently captivating portrait of an artist perennially on the make.
