Complete Poems

An extraordinary literary event: Daniel Mendelsohn's acclaimed two-volume translation of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy--including the first English translation of the poet's final Unfinished Poems--now published in one handsome edition and featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English, by the renowned critic, scholar, and international best-selling author of The Lost. No modern poet so vividly brought to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863--1933). Whether advising Odysseus on his return to Ithaca or confronting the poet with the ghosts of his youth, these verses brilliantly make the historical personal--and vice versa. To his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory...