Constantine Cavafy - by Gregory Jusdanis & Peter Jeffreys (Hardcover)

About the Book

"The first biography in nearly fifty years of the greatest Greek poet of the twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets.

In 1933, on his seventieth birthday, the poet Constantine Cavafy died in an Alexandrian hospital, surrounded by friends. He left behind a small, curated oeuvre of 154 poems, along with fragments and drafts of incomplete works. Throughout his life, Constantine had kept a tight grip on the distribution of his poetry, but after his death his reputation grew and Constantine became the august C. P. Cavafy, a writer known not only as a great composer of Hellenic verse--the man whose poems reshaped the Greek language--but also as a global poet whose writing transcends its geographic origins and is to this day widely loved and translated.

This long-awaited study captures the complexities of Constantine Cavafy's life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In rich detail, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys chronicle the young poet's life with his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty after they left Egypt and moved successively to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. The biography then centers on Constantine's adulthood in his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor for modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet's relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography looks closely at Cavafy's artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

Review Quotes

"A painstakingly researched biography of a quiet Alexandrian who left few traces of his life but whose body of poems the world worships and never tires of translating." --ANDRÉ ACIMAN, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name

"In the fifty years since a biography of the poet last appeared, Constantine Cavafy has emerged not only as the great Greek poet of the twentieth century but as an essential poet of modernity on the world stage, an exile (in many senses of the word) whose work seamlessly enfolds history, memory, and desire. Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have given us an extraordinary biography, eminently readable and as unconventional, scholarly, and impassioned as its subject." --MARK DOTY, author of My Alexandria

"There are four great poets who've written about gay male life--C. P. Cavafy, Thom Gunn, James Merrill, and John Wieners. Before anyone else, Cavafy (1863-1933) spoke for young men with big desires and little money, excluded from society and consumed by love and lust. In his twenties he became ill with debauchery; in his maturity he turned all those wasted nights into the work of a world genius, the most important Greek poet of the twentieth century." --EDMUND WHITE, author of The Loves of My Life

About the Author

A Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at the Ohio State University, Gregory Jusdanis is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, The Necessary Nation, Fiction Agonistes, and A Tremendous Thing. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Peter Jeffreys teaches at Suffolk University in Boston and has written and edited a number of books on Cavafy.