Cavafy at Random

Selected Prose Works

Archivio GBB Contrasto / Redux

by Constantine Cavafy

translated and annotated by Peter Jeffreys

Michigan, 184 pp., $24.95

Constantine Cavafy is a major figure in modern poetry, repeatedly translated into English. His prose, however, remained uncollected and unpublished in English​—​until now.

Of course, a good many fine poets have proved no slouches when it came to prose: Baudelaire and Poe, both influences on Cavafy, are prime examples. Yet perhaps the most interesting thing about these 40 short pieces (chosen from 64) is that many of them were written in the decent English Cavafy picked up during several years in England. They stem chiefly from his early to early middle years, and only 13 had been published before. They comprise essays, prose poems, what Peter Jeffreys judiciously terms “attempts at short story writing,” articles on the Greek language, and aesthetic reflections. They extend from Greek folk songs to Shakespeare, from Philostratus to Browning and Tennyson, and touch upon Keats and Wilde, Lucian of Samosata and
Leigh Hunt.

Cavafy goes in for lengthy quotations, sometimes dwarfing his own contributions, either out of scrupulous modesty or to spare himself some effort. Curiously, writing on a poem such as  “The Glove,” he merely paraphrases Schiller’s original, quotes the English of Hunt in full, and concentrates on the extended Browning version. The problem that affected so much of Greek literature concerned Cavafy in Alexandria relatively little: Was one to write in katharevousa, the stiffly purist, or dimotiki, the spoken Greek? The latter won out, but Cavafy himself, though slowly gravitating toward the demotic, eventually coined his own hybrid language. Of course, this does not come across in translation.