The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Daniel Mendelsohn

Theophilus Palaeologus

       And I Got Down and I Lay There in Their Beds

       Half an Hour

       House with Garden

       A Great Feast at the House of Sosibius

       Simeon

       The Bandaged Shoulder

       Coins

       It Was Taken

       From the Drawer

       Prose Poems

       The Regiment of Pleasure

       Ships

       Clothes

       Poems Written in English

       [More Happy Thou, Performing Member]

       Leaving Therápia

       Darkness and Shadows

       IV: THE UNFINISHED POEMS (1918–1932)

       The Item in the Paper

       It Must Have Been the Spirits

       And Above All Cynegirus

       Antiochus the Cyzicene

       On the Jetty

       Athanasius

       The Bishop Pegasius

       After the Swim

       Birth of a Poem

       Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor)

       The Dynasty

       From the Unpublished History

       The Rescue of Julian

       The Photograph

       The Seven Holy Children

       Among the Groves of the Promenades

       The Patriarch

       On Epiphany

       Epitaph of a Samian

       Remorse

       The Emperor Conon

       Hunc Deorum Templis

       Crime

       Of the Sixth or Seventh Century

       Tigranocerta

       Abandonment

       Nothing About the Lacedaemonians

       Zenobia

       Company of Four

       Agelaus

       The Fragmentary Sketches

       [Bondsman and Slave]

       [Colors]

       [My Soul Was on My Lips]

       [Matthew First, First Luke]

       Notes

       Further Reading

       Acknowledgments

       Textual Permissions

       A Note About the Translator

       Also by Daniel Mendelsohn

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

      INTRODUCTION

      The Poet-Historian

      “OUTSIDE HIS POETRY Cavafy does not exist.” Today, seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the judgment passed in 1946 by his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh at the time, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious life, no great fame or recognition until relatively late in life (and even then, hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. All this—the ordinariness,