The Complete Poems in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 13, 2019 Nadine in NY Jones rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

I have a few favorite Cavafy poems, and after reading this volume, those will remain the few that I will return to again and again. The rest of his work does not “speak” to me, and much of this volume felt tedious. (My favorites include Ithaca, The City, Monotony, and Thermopylae.). I’m sorry to say it, since I know Cavafy is one of the “greats” but ... not for me.

This is a big book, made bigger by copious notes from Mendelsohn. I skipped the introduction and dove right into the poems. Ahhhh The I have a few favorite Cavafy poems, and after reading this volume, those will remain the few that I will return to again and again. The rest of his work does not “speak” to me, and much of this volume felt tedious. (My favorites include Ithaca, The City, Monotony, and Thermopylae.). I’m sorry to say it, since I know Cavafy is one of the “greats” but ... not for me.

This is a big book, made bigger by copious notes from Mendelsohn. I skipped the introduction and dove right into the poems. Ahhhh The City. It was like diving into the freshest sun-warmed mountain spring (is there such a thing? I’m sure in Cavafy-world, there is).

"The City"
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart – like something dead – lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so manyruined and wasted years.”

You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.

But back to the size of this book ... There are 347 pages of poems (if I counted correctly, there are 261 poems), 59 pages of introduction, and 192 pages of Notes and Index, including a note giving background for each poem. In short, this is an exquisite collection. Read a poem, then read annotations of the poem.

Cavafy is a crisp and brilliant poet, and his poems can be enjoyed without any annotations at all, it’s not necessary to read the Notes, but they can add an extra layer of awesome.

I had originally read Cavafy in college, Edmund Keeley’s translations, and I worried that I wouldn’t like these new translations. I found to my surprise that it didn’t matter. Each translation has a slightly different tone, but Cavafy’s underlying imagery shines through in both. I must have read a “selection” at that time, because I was really shocked by how many poems are retelling of ancient Greek’s lives - famous Greeks, unknown Greeks, Greeks known only from headstone engravings, Greeks he just made up. Like, dude, enough with the retelling of dead guy’s lives. Of the first 100 poems, at least half of them are retelling a of real or imagined Ancient Greek lives (almost always men - any women described do not come off well, they are ambitious and deceitful, in general). For example:

“On the March to Sinope”
As Mithridatis, glorious and powerful,
the lord of great cities,
master of mighty armies and fleets,
made his way to Sinope, he passed along a road
deep in the countryside, quite out of the way,
where a soothsayer had his dwelling place.

Mithridatis sent an officer of his
to inquire of the seer how much more wealth he would acquire
in the future, how many other forces.

He sent an officer of his, and afterwards
proceeded on the march to Sinope.

The soothsayer withdrew into a secret room.
After sbout a half an hour he came out
very much concerned, and told the officer:
“An adequate discernment I could not make.
Today is not a day that’s suitable.
I saw some shadowy things. I didn’t understand them well. –
But the king should rest content, in my opinion, with all he has.
Any more than that will bring him danger.
Remember, officer, to tell him this:
with all that he has, by god, let him rest content!
Fate keeps unexpected changes in store.
Go tell this to King Mithridates:
all too seldom one finds the noble friend
of his forebear, someone who just in time writes with his spear
upon the dust the words that saved him Flee, Mithridates.”

There are pages and pages of that sort of thing! I imagine it has immense appeal to Classicists & Philahellenes. Most of the remaining are descriptions of lusting after some hot young guy; a few of these I found to be expecially poignant, but many of them did not work for me because they felt repetitive. Poor Cavafy hid his homosexuality from the public (I suppose you had to back then), so he may have been trapped in a cycle of longing without consummation.

"Portrait of a Young Man of Twenty-Three Done by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur "

He finished up the portrait yesterday at noon. Now
he studies it in detail. He did him in a gray
jacket, all unbuttoned, a deep gray. Without
any vest or tie. In a shirt of rose;
so a little of the beauty of the chest,
the beauty of the throat, might show through a bit.

The right side of his brow is almost totally
covered by his hair, by his beautifl hair
(which is combed the way he fancies it this year).
The note is utterly the voluptuous one
that he wanted to strike when he did the eyes,
when he did the lips … That mouth of his, the lips
made for the fulfillment of a choice eroticism.

...more

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