Poems by Constantine Cavafy, with various historical themes

[Kyriakos]

Although Cavafy (commonly accepted as the greatest modern greek poet) used history and historical figures to symbolise things in his own life, his poems still feature a great amount of history from the ancient and hellenistic age, and less from the byzantine empire. I found this page that has a large number of the poems, translated to english

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[jonatas]

Luckily most of Cavafy's poems are on the internet, through links like this one. I love Cavafy. He's one of the most important poets of the 20th C. If I wrote poems, they would be like Cavafy's.... and this was true before I had ever read Cavafy. His evocation of Ancient Hellenistic culture is superb.

 

[MCdread]

I acted on a theatre play once that had some texts borrowed or inspired by Cavafy, particulary the poem "Barbarians" (I hope you know to which one I'm referring to), and another one, of which I don't know the title, but this latter one hadn't any historical evocations (at least apparent).

 

[Rambuchan]

I read some of these last night and again today. Excellent stuff! I had only vaguely heard of Cavafy, so thanks a lot!

 

[Kyriakos]

Which poem did you like the most?
Unfortunately the english section has very few of the "disowned" poems (i have the entire collection ofcourse ) and there are some in the greek part of the site too. Also the poems unfortunately lose something in english

 

[Rambuchan]

To Sensual Pleasure

My life's joy and incense: recollection of those hours
when I found and captured pleasure as I wanted it.
My life's joy and incense: that I refused
all indulgence in routine love affairs.

I liked the ones about the craftsmen and professionals. The Sculptor etc...

 

[Kyriakos]

He also wrote some prose, not many pieces, but one which i like a lot is about a ship that is too big to enter a harbour, and so it stays out of it, and the spectators in the dock can only sometimes listen to the songs of the ship's crew, which, however captivating, cannot be heard entirely, and then the ship dissapears again. It symbolises the difficulty in making full use of inspiration (the piece starts by stating that it is about the dangerous trip from phantasy to the paper).
Cavafy lived most of his childhood in England, and then moved to Alexandria which at the time still had a considerably sized greek community; he almost never stayed in Greece apart from some short trips when he was middle-aged.

 

[Rambuchan]

That sounds very much like a Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story with a ship and a lighthouse and with much the same message. I loved that story (it was all one sentence long btw).

How was Cavafy's work disseminated?

 

[Kyriakos]

There is a short biography in english in the same site: http://cavafis.compupress.gr/bio2.htm
Cavafy published all of his work in greek literary magazines in Alexandria.