Clearing the Ground

Name: Clearing the Ground
Brand: Laertes, a Press for Literary Translation, Inc
Price: 13.49 GBP
Availability: InStock

C P Cavafy, Poetry & Prose, 1902-1911

Written by C P Cavafy and Martin McKinsey

£13.49 £17.99

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This book illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca". The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics". Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical penseé, these notes were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language -- in certain cases, in any language. The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously -- in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming. This is a revelatory work for students and lovers of Cavafy -- one of the great outsider poets of the twentieth century.

The Greek-Egyptian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) has come to be the most recognizable name in Modern Greek literature and a major figure in twentieth-century world poetry. His poems of the ancient Hellenized Middle East of peoples 'who were not of the Greek race, and who spoke the Greek language with Asiatic intonations and faulty syntax' have permanently altered our conception of the world of antiquity, and have struck a chord in their seeming relevance to our own times. Concurrently, his 'modern' poems depicting casual urban pickups and doomed erotic passion have been recognized as groundbreaking contributions to the development of contemporary gay consciousness.