Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy

The complete Cavafy poems – including the unfinished works – in a stunning new translation. From the acclaimed author of ‘The Lost’, a translation that scales new heights in modern poetic rendering. With a masterful eye for irony and an ear for the music of Cavafy’s form, Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation brings to English the poet who won acclaim from generations of writers, E.M. Forster and T.S. Eliot among them. Spanning the fall of Homeric heroes to the rise of the modern world, Cavafy’s poetry collapses the spectra of time, geography and age into intimately personal elegies. Works such as "Waiting for the Barbarians" and “Ithica”, famed for their revival of the ancient worlds, continue to address the modern reader in terms of timeless relevance. Here they are accompanied by Cavafy’s unfinished poems, translated into English for the first time. From a highly respected classicist and social essayist, Daniel Mendelsohn’s edition is uniquely placed to become the fresh, definitive edition of Cavafy in English.

’The poetry of Cavafy has been my spiritual food for many years now … Cavafy is a poet who never leaves you. He gets under your skin’ Louis de Bernieres ‘Magisterial … A brilliant scholar, a discerning critic and a generous person, Mendelsohn brings Cavafy alive’ Times ‘This beautifully produced book is as complete an edition as one can expect. Mendelsohn’s scholarship is formidable. No previous editor or translator has been so thorough’ Guardian ‘No-one seeking the fullest possible picture of the poet need go further than Daniel Mendelsohn's exhaustive edition of his work … Mendelsohn’s scholarship and sensitivity manage to persuade us that the poet’s love of history can combine with this more immediate nostalgia, so that in the best poems it’s impossible to separate the cerebral from the sensual’ Daily Telegraph ‘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’ New Yorker ‘This not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language … It is an event on the page. Mendelsohn’s Cavafy is itself a work of art’ New York Times Book Review

Daniel Mendelsohn was born in Long Island and educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books as well as the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of the international best-seller The Lost, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Prix Médicis. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at Bard College.