“The Elusive Poet of Desire Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down” – Langdon Hammer writes perceptively for The Yale Review
More reviews of the Cavafy biography – here, here and here
An excerpt from the biography- here
Recent scholarship and continuing scholarship has benefitted enormously, since 2012, by the materials coordinated and made available by the Onassis Foundation – The Cavafy Archive, now fully digitalized – “an archive open to all” – see here
“Cavafy collected and archived his work on a systematic basis, hence creating a unique literary and personal archive. The Cavafy Archive consists of manuscripts of poems, hand-compiled printed editions, prose literary works, articles, studies and notes by the poet. These materials are now readily at hand, along with correspondence, texts, and photographs.”
Cavafy’s poems in English
The Cavafy Enigma
A Cavafy postscript: (Allen to Peter Orlovsky)
“When we parted in Tangier
We said ten years or perhaps a few months.
Whatever fate and railroads bring, whatever cities or deserts –
Now I’m in the holy land, alone
reading Cavafy – it’s half past twelve
My letters haven’t reached you, yet you’re somewhere here, Petra or Syria
Perhaps have entered the Gate to this land and are looking for me in Jerusalem –
I wrote to all your addresses and to your mother –
Tonight I am reading books and remembering our old nights together naked –
I hope fate brings us together, a letter answered, held in the red hand –
or crossing some modern streetcorner, look joyfully in each others’ eyes.”
– Allen Ginsberg from “The Journals, Early Fifties, Early Sixties” (November 1961)