Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear regularly in numerous publications, including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. His previous books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and the international bestseller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Prix Médicis, and many other honors. Mr. Mendelsohn is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He teaches at Bard College.
“Cavafy’s distinctive tone–wistfully elegiac but resolutely
dry-eyed–has captivated English-language poets from W.H. Auden to
James Merrill to Louise Glück. Auden maintained that Cavafy’s tone
seemed always to ‘survive translation,’ and Daniel Mendelsohn’ s
new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before.
Together with The Unfinished Poems, this Collected Poems not only
brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it
also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language. . . .
As Mendelsohn argues in his introduction to the poems, any division
between the erotic and historical poems is facile. Whether Cavafy
is describing an ancient political intrigue or an erotic encounter
that occurred last week, his topic is the passage of time. . . .
Mendelsohn has focused his attention on the exquisite care Cavafy
took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. It is only through
attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is
produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. . . . Cavafy
mingled high and low diction, [and] Mendelsohn’ s translations
shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane . . . This shift
lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy’s tone (a directness
that is never not elegant), but it also lets Mendelsohn’s
translation exist fully as an English poem. Mendelsohn is a
classicist, essayist and memoirist [and his] translations of
Cavafy’ s poems come trailing commentaries in which an immense
amount of learning is gracefully and usefully borne. But Mendelsohn
thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of
language through its movement. . . . His translation of the famous
concluding lines of ‘The God Abandons Antony’ embodies the
fortitude the poem recommends. As a result the poem does not
pronounce but arrives at is wisdom, making it happen to us. It is
an event on the page. It’s easy to translate what a poem says; to
concoct a verbal mechanism that captures a poem’s movement, its
manner of saying, requires a combination of skills that very few
possess. Like Richard Howard’s Baudelaire or Robert Pinsky’s Dante,
Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art.”
–James Longenbach, The New York Times Book Review
“Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including
the thirty ‘unfinished’ poems never before rendered in English. The
results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them. . .
.Until his death in 1933, Cavafy would compile one of the great
bodies of poetry in any literature. . . . A connoisseur of
history’s castaways, his work draws from two intensely private
sources: the histories of the Hellenic world, which he read in the
evenings, and nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy,
that ensued. . . . If a great poet hadn’t been sneaking around, an
entire world of cabarets and coffee shops, as vivid in its way as
Dickens’s London, might have passed without notice. . . . Cavafy’ s
Greek is without perfect English equivalent . . . The fact that he
survives translation relatively unscathed should not imply that he
has survived all translations equally intact. . . . What [readers]
heard in Keeley and Sherrard was Cavafy tuned to unobtrusive
English idiom . . . But Keeley and Sherrard had given up on
Cavafy’s rhyme . . . and had generally eliminated the formal
aspects that contribute to Cavafy’s over-all texture, part chamois
and part steel wool. And yet some of Cavafy’s best poems crucially
depend on these formal signatures . . . To me Cavafy’s rhythm [in
the poem ‘In Despair’ ] feels more like masonry, phrase after
phrase laid down and pounded level with a mallet. Not one of these
effects is apparent in Keeley and Sherrard’s low-wattage version of
the [poem] that Mendelsohn so ably translates. . . . Mendelsohn
suggests that Cavafy’s method [of self-publishing] allowed him to
regard ‘every poem as a work in progress,’ which is undoubtedly
right.”
–Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker
“If Cavafy has been well-served by his Anglophone admirers (E. M.
Forster and W. H. Auden notable among them, the classics scholar
and bestselling memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn has now outstripped
them all. His two-volume edition of the Cavafy canon, Collected
Poems and The Unfinished Poems, scrupulously translated, copiously
annotated, and 10 years in the making, not only gives us Cavafy in
full but a Cavafy who sounds so at home in our own lingua franca
that you’d scarcely suspect he might be Greek to us. . . . How is
it that [Cavafy’s] verse manages to impart such a haunting
resonance and palpable presence so far removed from its roots?
Certainly not by aspiring to epic grandeur or by abounding in lyric
airs and graces: On every page he's the epitome of fastidious
understatement and austere brevity, given almost exclusively to
ruminating on the ghostly vestiges of Hellenic and Byzantine
antiquity with pithy stoicism, and chronicling his fleeting
homoerotic encounters in the Alexandrian demimonde with unsanitized
candor.”
–David Barber, Boston Sunday Globe
“This eloquent critic has entered deeply into Cavafy’s world of
stoic longing and elusive memory, intense desire and cool,
appraising intellection. . . . Why do we need another [Cavafy
translation]? Mendelsohn’s answer is ‘to restore the balance,’ by
which he means, to restore Cavafy’ s particularity. Previous
translations have often aimed to make his work accessible by
drawing out what appears universal in it; Mendelsohn wants to
deepen and complicate– to make Cavafy less our contemporary and
more his own, often enigmatic Alexandrian self. . . . Mendelsohn is
at his best as a translator of poems [about desire], rescuing them
from the coyness that dogged earlier versions, with a voice as
tender and forthright as Cavafy’s own. (This is not an easy task.
Some of Cavafy’s favorite words have no good English equivalent.)
Rightly, though, Mendelsohn wants his readers to look beyond Cavafy
as gay icon avant la lettre and comprehend his whole artistic
project, which ‘holds the historical and the erotic in a single
embrace.’ . . . Mendelsohn’ s excellent introduction to the
Collected Poems . . . and his exhaustive notes, parse the most
difficult poems for those of us who can’t tell our Lagids from our
Seleucids . . . Mendelsohn wants nothing less than to offer, ‘as
much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English
the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek,’ which means
translating meter as well as meaning . . . Mendelsohn also
appreciates Cavafy’s subtle use, in almost every poem, of Greek’s
different registers–the formal katharevousa, or purified tongue,
invented by Enlightenment scholars, and the colloquial demotic–and
does his best to find English equivalents: Latinate words and
formal syntax versus Anglo-Saxon phrases. . . . His version of the
short poem ‘Voices,’ is the best I’ve read . . . [This is] the
Cavafy of a brilliant critic who has a true and deep affinity for
the poet–and who has succeeded in giving him to us whole for the
first time.”
–Maria Margaronis, The Nation
“Thrilling . . . The explanatory essays [Mendelsohn] has attached
to almost every poem can contain every bit as much passion and
humanity as the poet’s own work. Mendelsohn is such a felicitous
interpreter of Cavafy because the poet himself was a kind of
scholar: complex allusions to distant figures and events at the
margins of Mediterranean history are as essential to his art as his
evocations of ardent erotic encounters. And our distance from these
places, peoples, and ages makes Cavafy’s achievement all the more
impressive: he brings a ‘Political Reformer’ in a Greek colony in
200 B.C., a hero of the Trojan wars, or a young man bathing at
Alexandria in 1908 into a palpable and immediate presence.”
–Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine
“A triumph . . . These books mark an important moment in
publishing. Collected Poems presents, in careful, professional
translations, virtually all the known poetry of Cavafy, one of the
20th century’s best-known poets. The translator, Daniel Mendelsohn,
an accomplished critic and classicist, is alive to the nuances of
Greek. Best of all, he furnishes us with full, excellent notes to
the life of Cavafy and to the poems. The Unfinished Poems adds to
this by presenting, for the first time, translations of 30 Cavafy
poems left in various states of imperfection . . . Mendelsohn does
the same solid job with these, and his notes are as helpful and
loving. Why the excitement? First of all, there’s Cavafy’s
reputation, never higher than now, and likely to rise even higher,
[with] the unfinished poems . . . His muted, direct poetry tends to
work not through metaphor or simile, but through characters and
situations. His effects in Greek are so subtle that translations
usually miss them and fall into prose. Of his two favorite realms,
one is Greek/Byzantine history–especially moments narrated by
little-known greats, peripheral kings, philosophers, generals, and
onlookers. . . . These poems teach us much about history, politics,
and the foolishness of ever thinking you’ve got it made. . . .
Cavafy’s triumph is that his love poems can evoke the same
enduring, compelling themes as his history poems: loneliness and
loss, the nature of nobility, the ravages of time, the power of
pleasure, and the fleeting nature of happiness. . . . The
unfinished, exquisite poem ‘The Photograph’ [and] several of the
[other] unfinished poems . . . will strengthen Cavafy’s already
high repute, and join his best-known poems. [Mendelsohn] really
does know his modern Greek, and he tries in many subtle ways to
echo the musical effects for which Cavafy is prized by readers of
Greek. [He is] by far the best, most informative critic ever to
talk about this poetry and its many virtues. For this, and for the
incredible feat of bringing it all together and guiding readers
through, he deserves our applause.”
–John Timpane, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Essential . . . Brilliant . . . Mendelsohn’s Collected
Poems has provided context and versions of the poems that deepen
and sometimes fundamentally alter our sense of many of them, and of
the poet himself. . . . Perhaps the most significant addition to
our understanding of Cavafy offered by Mendelsohn’s translations is
a definition of [his] ‘tone of voice,’ [and] ‘personal speech’ . .
. Mendelsohn’s description of and insistence on the formal aspects
of Cavafy’s poetry are also welcome. . . . [Of many Cavafy
translations] only Mendelsohn’s tries consistently to capture
something of the rhythm and rhyme that characterize the
originals [which] add[s] considerably to our understanding of
Cavafy . . . In The Unfinished Poems, meanwhile, Mendelsohn
provides English-speaking readers with something entirely new. . .
. For those of us who love Cavafy, [these poems] come as unexpected
gifts. . . . The expansive notes in these volumes will save all
future Cavafy readers in English from the piles of supplementary
reading I undertook. The next generation will not have to struggle
through the uncertainties of reference, because Mendelsohn has
provided the sources, given the long quotations from Edward Gibbon
and from much older authors. The poems will still make demands on
readers, but these demands will not seem crushing. And for those
who have known the poet for a long time but have not had the
historical knowledge or references at their fingertips,
Mendelsohn’s notes will open up old problems in new ways. With his
passionate reading of this poet-historian, his explanations of the
formal elements of modern Greek verse, his versions of previously
unknown poems, his notes, and mostly his meticulous translations,
Mendelsohn has created not only an essential guide to Constantine
Cavafy for English-speaking readers, but has likely shaped our
understanding of the greatest writer of modern Greek
for generations to come.”
—Keith Taylor, Boston Review
“Superb . . . In Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translations, both of the
‘unfinished’ poems and of the entire corpus of Cavafy’s published
work, the poet’s subtle manipulations of past and present are
everywhere apparent. . . . [The unfinished poems] are as fine as
anything Cavafy did publish, and several strike me as masterpieces.
As Mendelsohn tells it in his excellent introduction,
Cavafy–probably the greatest and certainly the most enigmatic of
modern Greek poets–confided to friends in the last months of his
life, ‘I still have twenty-five poems to write’ . . . In his notes,
Mendelsohn offers a wealth of historical, literary, and even
codicological information . . . Mendelsohn’s translations, in both
the Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems, are not only skilful,
but elegant; best of all, they catch the very tone and cadences,
together with the terse music, of the originals. Cavafy often wrote
in strict meters, and many of his poems employ rhyme–a fact
obscured in most previous translations. Mendelsohn is, in fact,
more accurate [than previous translators]; his version echoes the
Greek exactly. . . . The wonder is that he can stick so close to
the original and still create English versions which read quite
beautifully. [Among recent translations,] Mendelsohn’s two volumes
stand out; not only are the translations consistently fine, at once
scrupulous and musical, but Mendelsohn is also a trained
classicist–he knows his ancient and Byzantine sources. His
annotations offer the fullest possible access to Cavafy’s work.
No poet had a keener sense of the fatal misstep, the augury
misread, the omen unheeded, than Cavafy. As we read him, we feel
that those ancient imbroglios, those small but disastrous swerves
of fate, were intimately his own. All of his best poems
glitter with suspended contradictions; the moralist colludes
uneasily with the sensualist. And yet, perhaps shockingly, it is
lust, remembered pleasure, which quickens the distant past; the
vivid historical evocations arise from the same sensual impulse as
the lovingly recollected one-night stands. Time sets its patina on
vanished moments, but for Cavafy, it was always the cracks in the
glaze that most intrigued in the end. To reread Cavafy in these new
versions is to be reminded, yet again, of how unusual, and how very
idiosyncratic, he is.”
–Eric Ormsby, The New Criterion
“Cavafy is less a text than a place you can inhabit. [His] world
just got bigger and better with Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translation
of the Collected Poems and, in an equally important volume, The
Unfinished Poems. Although his new rendering of the poems will
frequently make you gasp, it’s not because Mendelsohn has made them
prettier. He’s given them back their sturdy skeletons and firm
flesh. . . . The way Mendelsohn renders the sheer directness of
Cavafy’s utterance, its unadorned yet transcendent eloquence, you
wonder why [previous translators] bothered. . . . Mendelsohn’s
fascinating introductions to these two volumes make it clear that
Cavafy’ s life was at least as colorful as many of his colleagues
in the Belle Epoque (Proust’ s, say) and that he found time to
extract from it some of the very greatest poetry of the last
century. Then obscure, he now is the greatest gay poet between Walt
Whitman and John Ashbery . . . The stories, the best of them
Mendelsohn’s, of the private ways [the poems] were first
published–and Cavafy’s steady opening up to the world without–will
make the heart of anyone interested in gay history pound. . . . The
unfinished poems, published for the first time in English here, are
among the finest and most mature utterances of Cavafy the tireless
polisher.”
–Tim Pfaff, Bay Area Reporter
“A tremendous gift to the literary world–particularly the
unfinished works, published in English for the first time. [Cavafy]
was, on the surface, an ordinary man leading a prosaic life.
Mendelsohn notes in his writing, however, that Cavafy was highly
subversive, masterfully addressing themes of ‘erotic longing,
fulfillment and loss. . . . That the desire and longing were for
other men only makes him seem the more contemporary, the more at
home in our own times.’ Cavafy’s longings transcend his sexuality
and seem universal.”
–Carmela Ciuraru, Newsday
“Mendelsohn is absolutely right here–that, as with Proust,
‘Cavafy’s one great subject, the element that unites virtually all
his work, is Time.’ . . . In a series of vividly etched vignettes,
he gave memorable and public expression to a world of deep but
transient passions that had hitherto lacked any true voice, let
alone so remarkable a poetic endorsement. . . . Cavafy’s language
is something rich and strange. . . . Much of [its] intricate
complexity has been ignored, not only by largely Greekless critics
such as Auden, but also, unfortunately, by more than one
translator. . . . We have a great deal to thank Daniel Mendelsohn
for. He has provided us–especially through the inclusion of the
thirty poems still in draft form–with as complete a Cavafy
collection as we are ever likely to get. His notes are excellent .
. . full, accurate, and always helpful; and his theoretical
understanding of Cavafy’s metrics was badly needed, and shows
subtle insights. In a few illuminating pages, Mendelsohn shows how
Cavafy used different meters to highlight dejection,
disappointment, or frustrated desire. He skillfully traces the
cunning juxtapositions of demotic, mandarin, and classical Greek.
He has carefully sorted the various stages of composition and
circulation that the poet went through. He even highlights Cavafy’s
use of puns to create emotional linkage . . . As a critic and an
exegete of Cavafy, Mendelsohn ranks with the best. [He] will remain
indispensable for his thorough critical annotations, and for his
first-time translations of the ‘unfinished’ poems. . . . As
Mendelsohn rightly observes, with the addition of these poems, ‘his
work has, at last, been truly finished.’”
–Peter Green, The New Republic
“Magnificent . . . What is most shocking of all about [Cavafy] is
that he is the one voice in all of modernism who virtually seems
descended directly from the classical Greek and Roman poets two
millennia ago. And now what bids fair to be the crowning
translations of Cavafy in English in our time are being published
simultaneously this month . . . Without for a second demeaning the
excellence or significance of Mendelsohn’s translations of the
poems found unfinished when Cavafy died at 70, it is Mendelsohn’s
“Collected” Cavafy that is the stunning achievement here. [It is]
absolutely the definitive edition of Cavafy in English, with the
contexts of every poem elucidated by a translator whose classical
scholarship is equal to the task of explicating the one poet who,
since the ancients, might truly be said to have written in
continuation of their voice. . . . Mendelsohn’s translations and
notes seem to me the places where all English language readers of
one of the greatest of all poetic modernists should start.”
–Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
“In the last months of his life, Cavafy told a few friends that he
had 25 more poems he was working on. This last work, abandoned at
various stages of drafting, was mostly lost until it was discovered
in the Cavafy Archive, carefully filed and dated by the author, in
the 1960s. . . . Mendelsohn, by special arrangement with the Cavafy
Archive, is the first person to be allowed to translate these poems
into English . . . Most of these pieces seem as ‘finished’ as
anything in the Collected Poems, though perhaps in full command of
a kind of erotic abandon that Cavafy only exposed in the latter
part of his writing life.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred)
“The poetry publishing event of the year. [The Unfinished Poems]
contains the first English versions of 30 poems that Cavafy had not
finished entirely to his satisfaction when he died. All are in his
most developed manner, in which apprehension of the past is so rich
and powerful as to expunge mere nostalgia. They are historical
vignettes of the declines of Alexander’s Hellenistic hegemony,
imperial Rome, and the Byzantine Empire; and glowing memories,
triggered by news items, drink, or moonlight, of decades-old
homosexual rapture. Gay desire often informs historical poems, too.
They are about ideals and love and how idealists and lovers are
confounded by time, the passage of which exposes their follies and
ironizes their triumphs . . . One could be well-informed about
centuries of seldom-taught history just by reading the notes,
though yet more so by absorbing the poems, as well.”
–Ray Olson, Booklist (starred)
“In a vigorous labor of literary love, Daniel Mendelsohn has not
only handed us the definitive and complete Cavafy but he has
brought to light for the first time in English this major poet’s
revealing final poems. Meticulously edited and smartly annotated,
the poems fully embody Cavafy the sensualist and the antiquarian
and his distinctive lyric shuttling between the ancient and the
modern worlds.”
–Billy Collins
“Daniel Mendelsohn’ s superb new renderings are not only formally
acute but aglow with a light that could only be Cavafy’s: a golden
luster both of time and of desire, the poet’s own memory become
part of history, lit by that same ironic, tender and rueful
regard. And with The Unfinished Poems artfully brought into
English for the first time, we have more of this magisterial
poet–one of the towering figures of his time, and of ours–than ever
before.”
–Mark Doty, National Book Award—winning author of Fire to Fire
“Daniel Mendelsohn has afforded us the most informed as well as the
most formally proficient versions of a Total Cavafy, even The
Unfinished Poems now intorted into the canon. Finally we confront a
great oeuvre whose ‘body English,’ secret or celebrated, we now
know–thanks to Mendelsohn’s passionate diligence–to be Required
Reading.”
–Richard Howard
“This book is one of the most exciting discoveries in recent
memory. All of us who care about literature are indebted to
Daniel Mendelsohn for brilliantly bringing forward Constantine
Cavafy’s thirty Unfinished Poems, a splendid addition to our
understanding of a poet whose work is lit by bright starry sparks
of the eternal. The book completes Cavafy’s scrupulously made,
hauntingly beautiful work. I was thrilled to read it.”
–Edward Hirsch
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