PRAISE FOR DM's TWO-VOLUME TRANSLATION OF THE "COMPLETE POEMS" AND "UNFINISHED POEMS" OF C. P. CAVAFY, PUBLISHED IN APRIL 2009:
"EXTRAORDINARY." --THE NEW YORKER:
Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy's poems, including the thirty Unfinished Poems never before rendered in English. The results are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them.
--Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker, 23 March 2009
"MENDELSOHN'S CAVAFY IS ITSELF A WORK OF ART." -- THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Cavafy's distinctive tone - wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed - has captivated English - language poets from W.H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Gluck. . . Daniel Mendelsohn's new translations render that tone more pointedly than ever before. Together with The Unfinished Poems, this Collected Poems not only brings us closer to one of the great poets of the 20th century; it also reinvigorates our relationship to the English language. . . .
Mendelsohn has focused his attention on the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. . . . Cavafy mingled high and low diction, [and] Mendelsohn's translations shift similarly between the lofty and the mundane . . . This shift lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy's tone (a directness that is never not elegant), but it also lets Mendelsohn's translation exist fully as an English poem.
Mendelsohn is a classicist, essayist and memoirist [and his] translations of Cavafy's poems come trailing commentaries in which an immense amount of learning is gracefully and usefully borne. But Mendelsohn thinks like a poet, which is to say he inhabits the meaning of language through its movement. . . . It is an event on the page. It's easy to translate what a poem says; to concoct a verbal mechanism that captures a poem's movement, its manner of saying, requires a combination of skills that very few possess. Like Richard Howard's Baudelaire or Robert Pinsky's Dante, Mendelsohn's Cavafy is itself a work of art.
- -James Longenbach, The New York Times Book Review, 19 April 2009
"SUPERB." --THE NEW CRITERION:
Superb . . . In Daniel Mendelsohn's new translations, both of the Unfinished poems and of the entire corpus of Cavafy's published work, the poet's subtle manipulations of past and present are everywhere apparent. . . . [The unfinished poems] are as fine as anything Cavafy did publish, and several strike me as masterpieces. As Mendelsohn tells it in his excellent introduction, Cavafy--probably the greatest and certainly the most enigmatic of modern Greek poets--confided to friends in the last months of his life, 'I still have twenty-five poems to write'. . . In his notes, Mendelsohn offers a wealth of historical, literary, and even codicological information . . . Mendelsohn's translations, in both the Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems, are not only skilful, but elegant; best of all, they catch the very tone and cadences, together with the terse music, of the originals. Cavafy often wrote in strict meters, and many of his poems employ rhyme--a fact obscured in most previous translations. Mendelsohn is, in fact, more accurate [than previous translators]; his version echoes the Greek exactly. . . The wonder is that he can stick so close to the original and still create English versions which read quite beautifully. [Among recent translations,] Mendelsohn's two volumes stand out; not only are the translations consistently fine, at once scrupulous and musical, but Mendelsohn is also a trained classicist--he knows his ancient and Byzantine sources. His annotations offer the fullest possible access to Cavafy's work. To reread Cavafy in these new versions is to be reminded, yet again, of how unusual, and how very idiosyncratic, he is.
--Eric Ormsby, THE NEW CRITERION, April 2009
'AN ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CONSTANTINE CAVAFY'--THE BOSTON REVIEW
With his passionate reading of this poet-historian, his explanations of the formal elements of modern Greek verse, his versions of previously unknown poems, his notes, and mostly his meticulous translations, Mendelsohn has created not only an essential guide to Constantine Cavafy for English-speaking readers, but has likely shaped our understanding of the greatest writer of modern Greek for a couple of generations to come.
--The Boston Review, November 2009
'A TREMENDOUS GIFT TO THE LITERARY WORLD'--NEWSDAY
...Particularly the unfinished works, published in English for the first time. [Cavafy] was, on the surface, an ordinary man leading a prosaic life. Mendelsohn notes in his writing, however, that Cavafy was highly subversive, masterfully addressing themes of 'erotic longing, fulfillment and loss. . . . That the desire and longing were for other men only makes him seem the more contemporary, the more at home in our own times.' Cavafy's longings transcend his sexuality and seem universal.'
--Carmela Ciuraru, NEWSDAY (March 29, 2009)
'THE FINEST, MOST READABLE VERSION TO COME ALONG IN DECADES...LIKELY TO BE THE DEFINITIVE CAVAFY FOR SOME TIME TO COME': - - PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY:
* Collected Poems C.P. Cavafy, trans. from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn, Knopf, $35 (624p) ISBN 978-0-375-40096-4
Already a celebrated critic, memoirist and classicist, Mendelsohn drew together his interests in ancient history, literature, gay life and culture, and beautiful language to produce the finest, most readable version of the modern Greek poet Cavafy (1863 to 1933) to come along in decades. Cavafy has long been highly regarded by American readers, especially for the straightforward, seemingly timeless, hard-to-pin-down tone of his poems, which alternately revel in and suffer from both ancient Greek history and homoerotic desire; but, as Mendelsohn observes in his deeply impassioned and informative introduction, many American readers overlook 'those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past... in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal.' With this new, completely annotated, translation, Mendelsohn says he aims to 'restore the balance,' to help readers reanimate Greek history with Cavafy, to see how relevant and pressing his whole oeuvre truly is. This larger volume (Knopf is also publishing Mendelsohn's version of Cavafy's Unfinished Poems, never before translated into English, as a separate volume, reviewed below) contains all the poems by Cavafy we have known in English. . . all rendered with a lucid music. This is likely to be the definitive Cavafy for some time to come. (Mar.)
* The Unfinished Poems C.P. Cavafy, trans. from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn. Knopf, $30 (144p) ISBN 978-0-307-26546-3
In the last months of his life, Cavafy told a few friends that he had 25 more poems he was working on. This last work, abandoned at various stages of drafting, was mostly lost until it was discovered in the Cavafy Archive, carefully filed and dated by the author, in the 1960s. An authoritative Greek-language edition of Cavafy's unfinished poems (30 in all, written between 1918 and the poet's death) did not appear until the 1990s. Mendelsohn, by special arrangement with the Cavafy Archive, is the first person to be allowed to translate these poems into English, to be published alongside Mendelsohn's Collected Poems of Cavafy (reviewed above). Mendelsohn, in his introduction, says these poems 'represent the last and greatest phase of the poet's career' and that they 'fully partake of Cavafy's special vision, in which desire and history, time and poetry are alchemized into a unified and deeply meaningful whole'. Most of these pieces seem as finished as anything in the Collected Poems, though perhaps in full command of a kind of erotic abandon that Cavafy only exposed in the latter part of his writing life: 'Ah the ancient Greeks were men of taste,/ to represent the loveliness of youth/ absolutely nude.' (Mar.)
--Publisher's Weekly, 16 March 2009
