Essential Cavafy (The Essential Poets Series) - Softcover

Cavafy; Keeley, Edmund

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9780880015165: Essential Cavafy (The Essential Poets Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0880015160 ISBN 13: 9780880015165

Publisher: Ecco, 1996

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Cavafy's mythical world presents us with an image of the good life--the life of exquisite sensuality, refined tastes, and mixed faiths--that more often than not carries within it the ripening prospect of its own death; yet in his work there appears to be no other life more worthy of celebration.... As ironist and realist, his vision is readily translatable into the language of contemporary experience; and the commitment to hedonism, to political skepticism, and to honest self-awareness... anticipates the prevailing aura of our times.

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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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