The story they tell involves a number of major twentieth century literary personalities - Arnold Toynbee, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Lawrence, and Leonard Woolf all participated in Forster's early translation project. Forster ultimately succeeded in launching Cavafy's reputation in the English-speaking world, setting an important precedent for his present global literary fame. The volume includes all extant letters, the earliest Cavafy translations by George Valassopoulos (incorporating Cavafy's own authorial emendations), poems by E.M.
Interrogating how Alexandria became enshrined as the exemplary cosmopolitan space in the Middle East, this book mounts a radical critique of Eurocentric conceptions of cosmopolitanism. The dominant account of Alexandrian cosmopolitanism elevates things European in the city's culture and simultaneously places things Egyptian under the sign of decline. The book goes beyond this civilization/barbarism binary to trace other modes of intercultural solidarity. Halim presents a comparative study of literary representations, addressing poetry, fiction, guidebooks, and operettas, among other genres. She reappraises three writers--C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, and Lawrence Durrell--whom she maintains have been cast as the canon of Alexandria. Attending to issues of genre, gender, ethnicity, and class, she refutes the view that these writers' representations are largely congruent and uncovers a variety of positions ranging from Orientalist to anti-colonial. The book then turns to Bernard de Zogheb, a virtually unpublished writer, and elicits his Camp parodies of elite Levantine mores in operettas one of which centers on Cavafy. Drawing on Arabic critical and historical texts, as well as contemporary writers' and filmmakers' engagement with the canonical triumvirate, Halim orchestrates an Egyptian dialogue with the European representations.
Constantine Cavafy’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human condition, and his attention to illness, disease and death, old age, alcohol consumption and homosexuality continue to attract and challenge his readers. In turning anew to these themes, this book draws on the medical humanities to provide a new and integrated framework. The medical humanities provide us with a new framework through which Cavafy’s poetry can be investigated, not only by scholars in literary studies and world literature, but also by medical practitioners and researchers in the history of medicine.
An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy—including the first English translation of the poet’s final Unfinished Poems—now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal—and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity, Cavafy brings the historian’s assessing eye along with the poet’s compassionate heart. After more than a decade of work and study, Mendelsohn—a classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world—gives readers full access to the genius of Cavafy’s verse: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. Complete with the Unfinished Poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died—a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades—and with an in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory translation is a cause for celebration: the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.
This book is a literary, social, and political portrait of Alexandria at a high point of its history. Drawing on diaries, letters, and interviews, Michael Haag recovers the lost life of the city, its cosmopolitan inhabitants, and its literary characters. Located on the coast of Africa yet rich in historical associations with Western civilization, Alexandria was home to an exotic variety of people whose cosmopolitan families had long been rooted in the commerce and the culture of the entire Mediterranean world. Alexandria famously excited the imaginations of writers, and Haag folds intimate accounts of E. M. Forster, Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and Lawrence Durrell into the story of its inhabitants. He recounts the city’s experience of the two world wars and explores the communities that gave Alexandria its unique flavor: the Greek, the Italian, and the Jewish. The book deftly harnesses the sexual and emotional charge of cosmopolitan life in this extraordinary city, and highlights the social and political changes over the decades that finally led to Nasser’s Egypt.
A remarkable discovery, an extraordinary literary event: the never-before translated Unfinished Poems of the great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, published for the first time in English alongside a revelatory new rendering of the Collected Poems—translated and annotated by the renowned critic, classicist, and award-winning author of The Lost. When he died in 1933 at the age of seventy, C. P. Cavafy left the drafts of thirty poems among his papers—some of them masterly, nearly completed verses, others less finished texts, all accompanied by notes and variants that offer tantalizing glimpses of the poet’s sometimes years-long method of rewriting and revision. These remarkable poems, each meticulously filed in its own dossier by the poet, remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades before being published in a definitive scholarly edition in Greek in 1994. Now, with the cooperation and support of the Archive, Daniel Mendelsohn brings this hitherto unknown creative outpouring to English readers for the first time. Beautiful works in their own right—from a six-line verse on the “birth of a poem” to a longer work that brilliantly paints the autumn of Byzantium in unexpectedly erotic colors—these unfinished poems provide a thrilling window into Cavafy’s writing process during the last decade of his life, the years of his greatest production. They brilliantly explore, often in new ways, the poet’s well-established themes: identity and time, the agonies of desire and the ironies of history, cultural decline and reappropriation of the past. And, like the Collected Poems, the Unfinished Poems offers a substantial introduction and notes that provide helpful historical, textual, and literary background for each poem. This splendid translation, together with the Collected Poems, is a cause for celebration—the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.
The most detailed and wide-ranging comparative study to date of how European literatures written in less well known languages try, through translation, to reach the wider world, rejecting the predominant narrative of tragic marginalization with case studies of endeavour and innovation from nineteenth-century Swedish women’s writing to twenty-first-century Polish fantasy.
English novelist E.M. Forster wrote his last and best-loved work, A Passage to India, both as a paean to his love for India and as a tribute to the relationships he formed with Indians. Forster became entranced by the India of the Raj at a young age, and his love affair with the sub-continent, its princes, and peoples, was to last all his life. At his most socially transgressive, it was with Indians that Forster chose to connect and with whom he put into effect his belief in man’s duty to value friendship over state or ideology. His time in India was undoubtedly when he was at his most human and most vulnerable. At once a contemporary reflection on India’s rich history and a biographical retelling of Forster’s travels through the country in the early 1900s, Developing the Heart delves into the past to better understand the profound impact certain events and people had on his writing. In doing so, it allows readers to look on as Forster matures and softens over time in his behaviour with others as well as with himself. Often using Forster’s own words to evoke a vivid landscape, this is the story of the most dramatic and exotic part of the life of one of England’s greatest novelists.
Conversing Identities: Encounters Between British, Irish and Greek Poetry, 1922-1952 presents a panorama of cultures brought in dialogue through travel, immigration and translation set against the insularity imposed by war and the hegemony of the national centre in the period 1922-1952. Each chapter tells a story within a specific time and space that connected the challenges and fissures experienced in two cultures with the goal to explore how the post-1922 accentuated mobility across frontiers found an appropriate expression in the work of the poets under consideration. Either influenced by their actual travel to Britain or Greece or divided in their various allegiances and reactions to national or imperial sovereignty, the poets examined explored the possibilities of a metaphorical diasporic sense of belonging within the multicultural metropolis and created personae to indicate the tension at the contact of the old and the new, the hypocritical parody of mixed breeds and the need for modern heroes to avoid national or gendered stereotypes. The main coordinates were the national voices of W.B. Yeats and Kostes Palamas, T.S. Eliot’s multilingual outlook as an Anglo-American métoikos, C.P. Cavafy’s view as a Greek of the diaspora, displaced William Plomer’s portrayal of 1930s Athens, Demetrios Capetanakis’ journey to the British metropolis, John Lehmann’s antithetical journey eastward, as well as Louis MacNeice’s complex loyalties to a national identity and sense of belonging as an Irish classicist, translator and traveller.
