Three Poems:
"When the Watchman Saw the Light"
"Che Fece... Il Gran Rifiuto"
"Days of 1909, '10, and '11"
The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy
Translated by Aliki Barnstone

C. P. Cavafy:

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was born to Greek parents in Alexandria, Egypt, where he spent most of his life. He preferred to circulate his poems privately in broadsheets and pamphlets, which he gave to trusted friends. He withheld nearly a third of his work, including the most homoerotic, from the public eye. The first collected edition of his poems was published posthumously in 1935. But during his life, his friend E. M. Forster championed his work in the English-speaking world, introducing it to renowned modernists, among them D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, who published "Ithaka" in his journal, Criterion. Now Cavafy is revered as the most innovative and internationally influential Greek writer of the twentieth century, and one of the world's greatest poets.

Aliki Barnstone:

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, editor, and critic whose translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

About The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy:

C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was called "one of the greatest poets of our time" by E. M. Forster, and has written some of the most powerful poems in history. His work uncannily translates history, the record of the many, into an individual personal document. Though Cavafy is wickedly satirical, many of his poems are located in a landscape of intimacy. Drawing on the spectrum of ancient Greek poetic tradition, his poetry is still internal, whether his speaker is a spoiled rich boy who plans to enter politics or a poor, ostracized, pure and beautiful young man, destroyed by poverty and priggish social mores.

In these glimmering and lyrical translations, with an introduction and scholarly endnotes co-written with Willis Barnstone, Aliki Barnstone has been faithful to the original Greek, capturing both Cavafy's song and his vernacular in ways neglected in previous translations. Paying close attention to tone and diction, she has employed her well-tuned poet's ear, making Cavafy's verse breathe new music in English.

"Cavafy takes us deep inside his subject's thought, no matter how delusional or misguided it may be. As such he reminds us that our individual lives are shaped, inevitably, particularly, and sometimes devastatingly, by our historical moment, and, paradoxically, that history is now."
— from the Introduction

"Reading Cavafy through the polished lens of Aliki Barnstone's beautiful, passionate, and lapidary translations, I can't help but marvel at each new insight she awakens in poems I thought I'd known by heart. This is especially remarkable since the tone of voice is everything in Cavafy: his uncanny blend of the demotic and hieratic, the spare and uninflected way the physical world is presented to the eye, the fine modulations of emotion that trail their shadows across his lines. But how to capture a mind that roams both the Alexandrian streets outside his door and the god-haunted alleys of the Panhellenic past? I would venture to say that only a gifted poet could accomplish that task, and in Aliki Barnstone we have found that poet."
— Sherod Santos

"Cavafy's simplicity, learning, pleasure in sex, and tranquility in exile, have healed our anguish for over a century. Poets and seekers, restless souls of every sort, have bathed in the luminous light that emanates from his poems, the light of Greek Mediterranean civilization. Cavafy's deeply cultured melancholy and praise of learning and the body flow unimpeded in Aliki Barnstone's translations. The translator-poet has understood him perfectly because her own self flows between Greek and English without impediment. To re-read Cavafy is always a delight, to re-read him re-rendered so lovingly is blissful."
— Andrei Codrescu

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