Classical scholar and
bestselling memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn explains why the time
is right for his new translation of eminent gay poet C.P.
Cavafy's collected works
Looking at modern
desire through the eyes of history, literature and myth is a
recurring theme in Daniel Mendelsohn's books, including his
family memoir
The Lost: The Story of Six of the Six Million
, and his literary criticism. So it's little wonder to discover
he's been working on a major new translation,
C.P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems
and
The Unpublished Poems
for the last ten years. Cavafy (1864 -1933), one of the most
renowned modern Greek poets of the 20th century, lived most of
his life in Alexandria, Egypt. A journalist and civil servant,
he was also a gay man deeply in touch with his desires though
not always at ease with them. While Cavafy's poem
"Ithaca" has become a staple of LGBT anthologies and
lit courses, many of his other historical poems, with their
references to figures in Greek antiquity that are unfamiliar
even to classicists, have more often fallen by the wayside. But
Cavafy has found a powerful champion in Mendelsohn, whose
sensitive translations and accompanying commentary make this
important poet's haunting meditations on Eros, memory, time and
antiquity significantly more accessible and rewarding.
What do you love most about Cavafy?
He's an erotic realist.
He sees love through the eyes of the historian. Usually, it's
already over and done with by time he starts writing about it.
He goes to the uncomfortable places -- to desire when it's
gone, to desire when you're too old to be desired back. They
may not be prettiest places, but they're important.
He's not embarrassed about it, he's forthright. The
margins, the shady areas, the out of the way places and people
-- these are his themes.
He's also a historian who brings a new context to gay
lives in antiquity.
What Cavafy gives gay
readers is a deep sense of one's position within a group of
people with a history, and within the sweep of History. He's
shows that there have always been cute boys who dissed you,
that people always grew old and stopped being the most
beautiful ones on the block. We get so embroiled in the
day-to-day, we often miss the deepest history. But this history
is crucial for gay people, because they are so often told they
don't have a history. Cavafy's always saying that this
has all happened before -- and every time it happens, it's
thrilling, heartbreaking, and wonderful.
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