Today’s Quotation is care of C. P. Cavafy. Listen in! Subscribe to Quotomania on quotomania.com or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born on April 29, 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s, and died on the same day in 1933. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends.

Cavafy is the leading poet of the periphery, writing in Greek far from Greek lands. The body of his poetry includes the 154 poems of the “canon”; 37 “repudiated poems,” most of which are juvenilia written in romantic katharevousa; 75 “hidden” poems that were found finished in his papers; and 30 “unfinished” poems. His poems often feature historical figures or creations of the poet’s imagination, with frequent references to elements of Homeric, Hellenistic, and Byzantine years. Today, his poetry occupies a prominent place in both Greek and world literature.

You may read the complete C. P. Cavafy bio here https://cavafy.onassis.org/creator/cavafy-c-p/and discover the digital collection of the Cavafy Archive here https://cavafy.onassis.org/.

For more information about C. P. Cavafy:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Daniel Mendelsohn about Cavafy, at 11:50: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-096-daniel-mendelsohn

C. P. Cavafy: Complete Poems: https://www.danielmendelsohn.com/book/c-p-cavafy-complete-poems

“Cavafy Archive”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/

“Man With a Past: Cavafy Revisited”: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past

“The City”: https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/the-city

“Handwritten notes on ‘The City’”: https://cavafy.onassis.org/object/ad3m-a5bh-hs47/