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Gay poet for the ages Bay Area Reporter

by Tim Pfaff

	Poet C.P. Cavafy, circa 1889.
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My introduction to the poetry of C.P. Cavafy came when author Anne Lamott thrust a copy of the Edmund Keely-Philip Sherrard translation of the Collected Poems – the one to have then – into my hand and said something like, "Here," meaning "Eureka; read this." It crossed the Pacific with me and has remained a companion because, like the wider world I sought, Cavafy is less a text than a place you can inhabit.

That world just got bigger and better – and about how many other things can you say that these days? – with Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation of the Collected Poems and, in an equally important volume, The Unfinished Poems (Knopf). Although his new rendering of the poems will frequently make you gasp, it's not because Mendelsohn has made them prettier. He's given them back their sturdy skeletons and firm flesh.

posted by Tom Jackson @ Wednesday, June 10, 2009