Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

    C.P. Cavafy felt that his poems fell into three categories: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual. Of course these categories are never entirely separate in poetry or in life, but one of the arresting things about Cavafy's work is that no matter which of these categories is at the fore, one always senses his unique consciousness hovering over it. His friend E.M. Forster described him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." Whether Cavafy is surveying history, philosophy, or homoerotic sex, it's always from that slight angle. 

Cavafy wrote in Greek and was known for the care, precision, and craftsmanship which went into his work. Unfortunately, those of us who can't read Greek can only assume that much of this is lost in translation. Having said that, the spare simplicty of Cavafy in Keeley and Sherrard's version is effective: Their modernist precision seems just right. One can't imagine that in any language Cavafy would be a poet of crude effects. 

One loves the quiet reflection that is there in a poem of passion. The concluding stanza of "Comes to Rest" reads: 

 

Delight of flesh between

those half open clothes 

quick baring of flesh—the vision of it

that has crossed twenty-six years

and comes to rest now in this poetry.

 

Or from his "Waiting for the Barbarians," the Cavafy poem everybody knows:

 

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer. 

And now what is going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution. 

 

"Poetry," as Ezra Pound almost said, "is news that stays news."