Essential Cavafy (Essential Poets) - Hardcover

Cavafy; Keeley, Edmund

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9780880014267: Essential Cavafy (Essential Poets)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880014261 ISBN 13: 9780880014267

Publisher: Ecco, 1995

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Though not published until after his death in 1933, the poetry of C.P. Cavafy has come to be recognized as having a unique and fundamental influence upon modern literature.
Much of Cavafy's verse explores the history and culture of his Alexandria, often in the context of his own uneasy relationship with its contemporary incarnation. In a sensual, meditative, sometimes playfully didactic style all his own, Cavafy reflects upon the "myth" of Alexandria and the ironies of its entanglement with his own existence and memories.
In this most recent volume in the Essential Poets Series, editor Edmund Keeley has gathered together the poems for which Cavafy has come to be regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century. In addition, Keeley has provided readers with an insightful introduction and biography of the poet.

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About the Author:

Edmund Keeley was born in Damascus, Syria, of American parents and lived in Canada and Greece before his family settled in Washington, D.C. He studied at Princeton and Oxford, and taught Creative Writing and Hellenic Studies at Princeton until his retirement in 1994 as Straut Professor of English Emeritus. He is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry in translation, five volumes of non-fiction, and six novels, most recently School for Pagan Lovers. His fiction won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and selection by the PEN/NEA Fiction Syndicate. His translations received the Harold Morton Landon Award of the Academy of American Poets and the European Community's First European Prize for the Translation of Poetry. He has served as President of PEN American Center and twice as President of the Modern Greek Studies Association, of which he was a founding member. With his wife, Mary, he lives part of the year in Princeton and part in Athens, Greece.

The Horses of Achilles

When they saw Patroklos dead
--so brave and strong, so young--
the horses of Achilles began to weep;
their immortal nature was upset deeply
by this work of death they had to look at.
They reared their heads, tossed their long manes,
beat the ground with their hooves, and mourned
Patroklos, seeing him lifeless, destroyed,
now mere flesh only, his spirit gone,
defenseless, without breath,
turned back from life to the great Nothingness.

Zeus saw the tears of those immortal horses and felt sorry.
"At the wedding of Peleus," he said,
I should not have acted so thoughtlessly.
Better if we hadn't given you as a gift,
my unhappy horses. What business did you have down there,
among pathetic human beings, the toys of fate.
You are free of death, you will not get old,
yet ephemeral disasters torment you.
Men have caught you up in their misery."
But it was for the eternal disaster of death
that those two gallant horses shed their tears.

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