Cavafy's Poems Research Articles

"Αποταμίευμα ποιητικής ύλης": Αναζητώντας τον Φιλόστρατο στην ποίηση του Κ. Π. Καβάφη

“A treasure trove of poetic material”: Seeking Philostratus in C. P. Cavafy’s poetryThis study focuses on C. P. Cavafy’s poetic and intellectual interest in the movement of the Second Sophistic and especially in the work of Philostratus II – a major representative and historian of the sophistic movement. The paper traces Philostratus’ explicit and implicit presence in Cavafy’s work and offers a close examination of three poems (“Sculptor from Tyana”, “Maker of Wine Bowls”, and “Portrait of a Young Man of Twenty- Three Done by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur”), which center on sophists and rhetorical exercises, with particular attention to the uses of ekphrasis. The paper examines the emergence of a modern poetics based on the art of rhetoric, which is particularly evident in Cavafy poems that focus on ancient artists. The narrative content of these poems presents important statements on cultural creation and on the artists’ relationship with their work and with Art in general. The paper also traces the function of public art as code for the expression of private feelings and explores the use of aestheticist and decadent themes, set in antiquity, as vehicles for the manifestation of modern homosexual longings.

C. P. Cavafy as an Egyptiote

In contradistinction to Anglophone criticism's airbrushing of all things Egyptian/Arab from the iconic image of C. P. Cavafy, this essay dwells on the poet as an Egyptiote. An Egyptiote orientation, it is argued, variously informs given poems and prose texts in his later years. Probing Cavafy's knowledge of Arabic, the essay demonstrates his affinities and solidarities with Egyptians under colonial duress as witnessed in the choice of subject matter and in the intertextual Greek-Egyptian folkloric resonances in his poem “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.” Analyzing how the poem's tropes and temporality riposte to those in extraliterary discourses about the colonial incident it depicts, the essay reads “27 June 1906, 2 P.M.” in relation to other Cavafy poems that reveal an Egyptiote “transculturated” poetics. A set of prose texts—letters, essays, interviews—by Cavafy, it is demonstrated, vest Egyptiote literati with an intercultural literary agency of acquainting the Greek public with the outlines of Egyptian Arabophone literature and the Arabophone Egyptian literati with something of their own Greek language production.

Cavafy and Niketas Choniates: a possible source for ‘Waiting for the barbarians’

This article suggests that a possible source of inspiration for Cavafy's poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ can be identified in a passage of the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates concerning the arrival of German ambassadors at the court of Alexios III in Constantinople in 1196. The context of diplomacy, the city's decadent atmosphere, the emperor's self-humiliation and the unsuccessful ostentation of luxury and royal attire are prominent features linking both texts.

Not Text but Texture: C.P. Cavafy's Poems Unread, Unfinished, Unwritten

C.P. Cavafy often writes poems about poets and their poems. In many cases, though, he fails to describe the poems he refers to, if he describes them at all, in more than the most detached and general terms. Yet a close reading of these apparently vague accounts of the poetry of others shows that although Cavafy does not describe that poetry, he nevertheless communicates its nature to his readers. In "Symeon," he does so by associating it with known literary figures. In most other cases, especially as "That's the One" indicates, Cavafy's poems about the poems others have written themselves constitute the poems about which he is writing. Such poems have a double existence: the very same text turns out to be both a poem by Cavafy himself and a work of the fictional poet to whom he refers without apparently citing.

On Transience, Presence and Anticipation: Notes Towards a Palimpsestic Approach to Temporal Literary Study, with Reference to 1915: Figure:

This article concentrates on issues arising from our engagement with synchrony and diachrony in global literary and art scholarship, and on the use of anniversaries as purported ‘points of puncture’ that may bridge these two modes of scholarly enquiry. Taking the year 1915 as its flexible case study, the article focuses on two types of text – artistic and critical/theoretical: Victor Shklovsky's review of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ (‘Oblako v shtanakh’), Roman Jakobson's poem ‘mzglybzhvuo …/Distraction’ (‘Razsieianost’), Kazimir Malevich's painting The Black Suprematist Square (‘Chernyi suprematicheskii kvadrat’), Constantine Cavafy's poem ‘But the wise perceive things about to happen’ (‘Σοφοί δe προσιόντων’), and Sigmund Freud's article ‘On Transience’ (‘Verganglichkeit’). All these texts/artworks, it is argued, emphatically concern themselves with the issues of synchrony and diachrony, and each of them has something specific to contribute to our thinking about the vitality and value of these hermeneutic postures and tools.

Other Countries, Other Shores

We love poets for the things their poems lead us to imagine; but equally, we love them for how we imagine their lives to be. Confusing poets' lives with their work is an illusion as old as the tradition of confusing words with objects. But in fact it is for the sake of this illusion that we feel such a strong need for poetry, for novels, for literature. There are some poets whose work we read with their lives in mind, and what we know of those lives ensures that their poetry leaves a more enduring impression. C. P. Cavafy is, for me, just such a poet. Like Edgar Allan Poe, like Franz Kafka, Cavafy makes no explicit reference to himself in his best and most stirring work; and yet, with every poem we read, we cannot help thinking of him. I think of him as an old man wandering the familiar streets of an aging city. I think of him as a lover of books living as a member of a minority within a minority. I think of him as a lonely, provincial man who is fully aware of his provinciality, and who turns that knowledge into a kind of wisdom. Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, to a Greek family of wealthy drapers and cloth merchants. (The word kavaf, now forgotten even by Turks themselves, is Ottoman Turkish for a maker of cheap shoes.) Cavafys were originally from Istanbul's Fener neighborhood, where the city's rich and politically influential Greek families lived. Later, they moved to Samatya, a fishermen's neighborhood, and then immigrated to Alexandria, where they lived as members of the Orthodox Christian minority among the Muslim majority. At first, their business activities in Alexandria proved successful, and they lived in a large mansion staffed with English nannies, cooks and servants. In the 1870s, after the death of Cavafy's father, they moved to England, but then returned to Alexandria following the collapse of the family business. After the Arab nationalist uprisings of 1882, they left Alexandria again, this time for Istanbul, and it was in this city, where he was to spend the next three years, that Cavafy wrote his first significant poems and felt the first stirrings of homoerotic desire. In 1885 the family, now impoverished, returned to Alexandria once more, to the very city he wanted to leave behind. return: It is the saddest part. It is the source of the sorrow that permeates his unforgettable poem The City, which I have read again and again in Turkish and in English translation. There is no other city to go to: city that makes us is the one within us. Reading Cavafy's The City has changed the way I look at my own Istanbul. For those who lead a provincial life, life and happiness are always to be found elsewhere, in another city, in another country. But for us provincials, this other place is perpetually out of reach. Cavafy's wisdom is in the dignity and introspective sensibility with which he approaches this sad truth. And finally, with the same linguistic restraint and philosophical simplicity, he concludes by revealing that we have wasted our lives in that city. We come to realize that we have all been wasting our lives, and that the problem lies not in being provincial, but in the very nature of life itself. Great poets can tell their own stories without once saying I, and in doing so, lend their voice to all of humanity. Kierkegaard once said that the unhappy person lives either in the past or in the future. There are many old men in Cavafy's poems; not trusting in the future is, for him, another kind of wisdom. …

Translations and Adaptations of C. P. Cavafy in Albanian

C. P. Cavafy became an important model for Albanian poets during and immediately after the dissolution of the Communist regimes in Albania and the former Yugoslavia. Cavafy was first introduced to Albanian writers through a series of translations. These translations inspired a variety of original Albanian poems which emulated Cavafy's historical and nostalgic themes and poignant symbols: Moikom Zeqo's "Anna Comnena," Bardhyl Londo's "Ithaca," and Lindita Arapi's "Walls," for example, all adapt Cavafy's poems of the same names. Cavafy's poems ground the poems' symbolism in a specifically Hellenic historical, political, and cultural context; the Albanian analogs re-contextualize these truths to suit the unique context of post-Communist Albania and Kosovo.

The Empire Awaits the Barbarians: A New Perspective

When Nikos Kazantzakis traveled to Alexandria as a newspaper correspondent in 1927, a most interesting part of his travel was the visit he paid to C. P.Cavafy at his house. The encounter of the two major Greek writers was narrated by Kazantzakis in a travel article on Cavafy. This travel text interacts mainly with Cavafy's poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" and provides the space for a new approach to Cavafy's text. Introducing the themes of the nomad/barbarian and the empire, later found in the perspective of the theories of nomadology and glo calization, Kazantzakis's travelogue reterritorializes Cavafy's poetry and its scholarship, and provides a new space for the generic identities of texts.

The Rhetoric of Dilemma and Cavafean Ambiguity

In his article "The Rhetoric of Dilemma and Cavafean Ambiguity" Anthony Dracopoulos examines the techniques of expression developed in Cavafy's poem "Young men of Sidon." By the beginning of the twentieth century, Cavafy, like other modernist poets, had become acutely aware of the human inability to grasp essence in its entirety and developed various techniques of expression to accommodate the polyphony of perspectives and the ambiguity inherent in modern society. The article argues that Cavafy structures a number of his poems in the form of binary oppositions or dilemmas. However, contrary to expectation, this form of expression does not aim to privilege one side over the other but rather, to engage the reader in a journey for the search of meaning. His poems inhabit an in-between zone and the resultant ambiguity constructs a topography that remains suspended to attempts at resolution and reduction.

King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII trained in classical history as well as ancient and modern Greek. The magnitude of his achievement in these two volumes is dazzling. In addition toproviding richlydetailed notes to support the reader's under standing of the often obscure his torical contexts of the poems, he also sets the bar for authenticity in translatingunusually high. Mendelsohn demythologizes the popular notion that Cavafy's characteristically plain lines? which are freeof similes and meta phors?are actually a kind of prose masquerading as lyric poetry. He emphasizes the complex, intricately woven texture of the poet's lan guage, which combines the classic forms of vocabulary and grammar known as "Katharevousa" with demotic Greek. Unlike previous translators of Cavafy, not only do Mendelsohn's translations convey the mingling of archaic and modern Greek in the original, but they also restore the rhythm and visual for mat ofCavafy's metrically inventive "tango" poems, inwhich each line contains two fragmented half-lines of threebeats divided by an expanse of white space. To these substan tial innovations, Mendelsohn adds a faithful adherence to the poet's pattern ofwriting lines thatare often enjambed or end-rhymed, compen sating forthe latter with slant rhyme or assonance. The remarkable results give us the closest English equiva lence todate of theelegant Cavafian diction, tone, and music. As a young man of letters writ ing during the 1880s and 1890s, Cavafy was more active as a scholar thana poet, although hewas already writing and publishing poems. Then at some time early in the twentieth century, as his fellow poet George Seferis commented, "something extraordinary happens." Cavafy's MMIIIIIII 11 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIII Mill Illlllllllllll passion for history, invigorated by reading the eighteenth-century Enlightenment historian Gibbons and the nineteenth-century Roman tic historian Paparrigopoulos, merged with the poet's homosex ual passion. A lover of secrets and mysteries, Cavafy began to fusehis focus on marginal figures forgotten in thecracks ofpost-Hellenic history with his own secret homoerotic life conducted inAlexandria's less repu tablequarters.Now Cavafy's poems took on their hauntingly nostalgic tone?the voice of an advice-giver who isworld-weary yetdeeply sym pathetic to human weakness. The principal players in these poems are not the vulnerable his toric figures themselves but time and memory. Although Cavafy's speakers rue the passing of time, theyexalt in theway itperfects and revivifies desire. The older speaker of the exquisitely translated unfin ished poem "It Must Have Been theSpirits" feels a surge of freedom recalling a night of sensual plea sure: "My soul was released; the poor thing,it's / always constrained by the weight of years." Another iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiii aging lover savors anew his origi nal euphoric intensity in the act of remembering and poeticizing it: "as I write, after so many years have passed!, / in my solitaryhouse, I am drunk again." Yet memory doesn't simply evoke the force of love? it clarifies present experience. The pagan speaker in "Mires:Alexandria in 340 a.D." mourns the loss of his companion inpassional pursuits yet suddenly realizes in the midst of his friend's Christian funeral rites that Mires was less an intimate than a strangerwho had followed an alien god; he flees "before their Christian ity/ could get hold of, could alter, the memory ofMires." Although accomplished trans lations of Cavafy's collected poems already exist?notably those of Rae Dalven and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard?Mendelsohn has given us the firstEnglish transla tions of thepoet's thirty unfinished poems, which he continually refined during his lifetimebut never con sidered ready forpublication. While the poems are gracefully rendered, the reason why the poet consid ered them incomplete seems clear: they are essentially narrative and descriptive and, with the exception of "ItMust Have Been the Spirits," they lack the spark of philosophic transformationthattypifies Cavafy's most memorable verse. Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey Marie Etienne.King of a Hundred Horsemen. Marilyn Hacker, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008. xvii + 203 pages. $25. isbn978-0-374 Marilyn Hacker received the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize, established by theNational Poetry Series in 2007, for her translation 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 i^^^H 701World Literature Today , of Roi des cent cavaliers, by Marie 1 Etienne, the...

How to Do Things With Poems Performativity in the Poetry of C.P. Cavafy

Abstract The theory of the performative – in its initial version by J.L. Austin and in its poststructuralist revisions – allows us to explore speech acts within C.P. Cavafy's poem as well as how his poems themselves can function as performatives. Performativity in these poems functions along four interrelated planes of performance, all of which are central to Cavafy's poetry: the erotic, the theatrical/public, the historical, and the linguistic. Recurring instances of “infelicitous” performatives in Cavafy's poems, especially unkept promises, reveal the critical and creative potential of this infelicity. The repeated failures and communicative gaps in the poems nevertheless work towards a notion of a felicitous poetic event, in which failure is transformed into a critical act and a motivating force for practices of constant revaluation.

Cavafy and His Heirs in America

Among early 20th century poets on far side of Atlantic who require translation into English, Alexandrian Greek poet C.P. Cavafy is now one of major figures that an American poet is likely to consider essential reading at some point, if not today, than maybe next month or maybe next summer, someday soon. But if this statement is true, it is only fairly recently true. Though Cavafy, who was born in 1863 and died in 1933, had his devotees in England well before and during Second World War?E.M. Forster, TE. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee, among others?and though John Mavrogordato's translation of his poems appeared in United States in 1952, it was not until next decade that American readers of poetry began to take an interest in Alexandrian's work in significant numbers. first source of this growing interest was publication in 1961 of American edition of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in which Cavafy appeared as the Poet of city and the old man, in both instances identified by novelist in an endnote and celebrated by Durrell's free translations of Cavafy's The City and The God Abandons Antony in Consequential Data addendum to first novel of quartet, Justine. Durrell's work became an immediate and enduring best-seller in United States, as it previously had been in England, and Cavafy's reputation began to prosper to a degree as a consequence. But principal source of his increasingly central standing in minds of American poets was surely introduction that W.H. Auden provided for 1961 publication of Rae Dalven's English translation of Cavafy's poems. Auden, then living in United States and dean of poets for many younger American writers, revealed, at start of his commentary, that for over thir ty years Cavafy had remained an influence on my own writing; that is to say, I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or perhaps not written at all. And he added that this influence was exercised not by way of Modern Greek, which he did not know, but by way of English and

Cavafy and the Sea

Cavafy and the Sea Michael Pieris ΤουλάχιστονστηνθάλασσαμαςπλÎ-ουμε- νεϕάτηςΚϕπϕου,τηςΣυϕίας,καιτηςΑιγϕπτου, αγαπημÎ-νατωνπατϕίδωνμαςνεϕά. —Cavafy, Επάνοδος από την Ελλάδα [1914] (Cavafy 1975: 368) It may be true to say that "untraveled" Alexandrians neglected [Cavafy]; but the same is not true of those who had traveled—the uomini navigati, to use an old favorite expression. I am, of course, taking the word "traveled," navigato, chiefly in its metaphorical sense, that is, people with experience of life. -Vrisimitzakis 1975: 86 [written in 1928] Introduction Cavafy is usually seen as a poet of an enclosed urban space, a poet of the city, of its neighborhoods, houses, and rooms.1 Many scholars and critics, starting from the well-known poem "Θάλασσα του πϕωιου" (published in 1915), have exaggerated the element of his alientation from nature. To make such a judgment, however, is tacitly to avoid the numerous other instances in which nature, and the sea in particular , appear in Cavafy's poetry. A good example of this attitude is Panayotopoulos' essay "Cavafy: Poet of the Enclosed Space" (1982: 89-102), first published in 1946. He established this specific image of the poet, adopting earlier partial observations such as those of Malanos (1957: 134), who had claimed in 1933 that nature in general and the sea in particular were banished from Cavafy's poems after 1900. Two more careful and sensitive critics, however, have pointed to a different perspective. Just as Sareyannis, in his 1949 essay "Cavafy, Man of the Crowd," dismissed the simplistic notion of Cavafy's agoraphobic isolation and loneliness (1964: 80-91), so Vrisimitzakis, in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 7, 1989. 273 274 Michael Pieris his 1928 pioneering article "The Greekness of the Work of Cavafy," offered a number of vital observations on the presence of the sea in Cavafy's poetry (1975: 61-72). He noted, for example, Cavafy's references to shipping, emigration, trade, colonization, voyages, and seafaring . Yet this seminal text was never followed up; subsequent scholars seem not to have realized its importance in helping us to understand the function of maritime themes in the poetry of the Alexandrian. Careful examination of the whole of Cavafy's poetical work (including the canon, the rejected and unpublished poems, the unfinished poems, and the titles of poems that have not survived) reveals that—whether directly or indirectly, literally or metaphorically, in reality or in representation, as a theme or as a setting—the sea appears in no less than 47 poems. This is 17% of his total poetic output. Investigation of the role of maritime themes in Cavafy's verse is imperative. The sea in its various manifestations may also be connected to or combined with other major themes of his work, and may illuminate them from a novel angle—themes such as the quest for alternative historical and geographical settings or the contrast between nature and artifice. If we follow the development of the sea theme from Cavafy's early poems to those of his maturity, moreover, we will be better able to watch his gradual romantic, Parnassian, and symbolist evolution toward an absolutely personal kind of visionary realism. From the thematic point of view, there is no doubt that we are dealing with a number of seas: that of the sensual landscape (linked with themes of hedonism, art, memory, etc.); that of the historical and political aspect (connected to the topics of sea battles, political exile, coastal colonies, etc.); and that of social and economic considerations (combined with themes such as emigration and occupational involvement with the sea). Nor should we forget the poems in which the action simply takes place on board ship; these form a small but fascinating group. While here I am concerned only with Cavafy's experience as a poet, his personal involvement with the sea requires some preliminary comment.2 First of all, both of Cavafy's parents originated from Constantinople , an imperial, mercantile city situated between two seas. In addition, he was born and spent nearly all his life in another maritime cosmopolis, Alexandria. At two formative periods in his early life (the transitions from boyhood to adolescence and from adolescence to manhood), moreover, Cavafy's family circumstances obliged him to spend four years in Liverpool (1873-77) and then another three in Constantinople (1882...

Varieties of Illusion in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

Varieties of Illusion in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy Karl Malkqff Much of C. P. Cavafy's poetry contains puzzling ambiguities, unresolved dichotomies that at times leave the reader uneasy, at times seem to taunt him. Cavafy is an ironist, a man of masks. But unlike such contemporaries as W. B. Yeats or Ezra Pound, he does not use his masks, his multiple perspectives, in the service of a philosophy , a theology, a political or economic theory. Cavafy leaves us with uncertainty, enough uncertainty to send us searching for a key. But since the poet himself did not provide such a key—or at least all attempts to show that he did have proven inconclusive—it is necessary to invent one. In this game, winner takes all. Perfectly reasonable insights into the poetry are pursued obsessively, as if they were exclusive avenues of access. Cavafy's poems are political, indignant responses to Britan 's imperial presence in Egypt; or they are psychological, direct or indirect expressions of the poet's homosexuality; or they are commentaries on the past, the ruminations of a historian manqué; and the like. More recently critics have focused on the irony itself, in many ways a more promising approach, since by concentrating on method one can avoid overwhelming thematic generalities that obscure more than they illuminate. However, in Cavafy, even studies of technique lead to readings of the poems that will negate all other readings. Nasos Vayenás tells us that "Cavafy is neither lyric nor dramatic ; he is an ironic poet" (110). The Cavafian protagonist will never find fulfillment "because life is nothing more than an ironic juxtaposition of opposites" (113). Roderick Beaton accepts Vayen ás' analysis and carries it to its logical conclusion. "Irony, it may be concluded is all pervasive in Cavafy's poetry, and nothing in his poetic world is sacred. . . ." (527). In this world of "shifting relativities " we can trust no point of view. From here it is only a short step to the Structuralists and post-Structuralists, who, undeterred by the ease of their project, pounce eagerly on texts that seem to deconstruct 191 192 Karl Malkoff themselves. Here the critic does not so much do battle with his structurally unsophisticated predecessors as dismiss them with disdain. Vassilis Lambropoulos, for example, announces happily, "there is no such thing as the poem YMS ["Young Men of Sidon"] but only an interminable series of reinterpretations. . . ." (165), thereby reducing the fascinating ambiguities of this particular poem to just one more symptom of the universal impossibility of saying anything without also implying its opposite.1 It is not necessary to deny that Cavafy had attitudes toward experience , or that his poetry embodies those attitudes, in order to admit the importance of irony to his work. Arguing against the extremes of Vayenas and Beaton, Edmund Keeley concludes, "Though irony is central to Cavafy's work, it is not the only mode, and in his as in any other poetic world, the presence of irony depends on context" ("Voice and Context," 177).2 Even with this sensible caveat, irony remains crucial; it is at the heart of Cavafy's vision, the most appropriate expression of his sensibility. Irony, of course, emphasizes the tension between illusion and reality, between the way the world appears and the way it actually is. While this tension is generally present in most literature, few would disagree that it is of special interest to Cavafy, and it may be more useful to start with this central vision rather than the technique used to express it—which seems a case of the tail wagging the dog. Irony is central to Cavafy's work because illusion is central to his vision of the human condition. Whatever its occasional focus, his irony is consistently founded on two perceptions: first, that man is the illusion-making animal, and second, perhaps a corollary of the first, that the human world is infinitely complex, certainly too complex for a merely sequential account of its workings. The virtue of irony is that it permits the writer to say two (usually contradictory) things at once, rendering it particularly suitable in discovering the anatomy of an illusion. Vayenas and Beaton...

Cavafy and Durrell's the Alexandria Quartet

1 See Selected Checklist in Modern Fiction Studies, XIII (1967), 417-421. 2 Durrell's first acquaintance with Cavafy may have come through E. M. Forster's Pharos and Pharillon (London, 1923) before Durrell's residence on Corfu (1935-39) and Athens (1939-40). Forster includes an essay on Cavafy and complete translations of God Abandons Antony, Alexandrian Kings, and the Month of Athyr, and partial translations of Ithaca and City. Durrell's first published translations of a Greek poet were George Seferis' Message in a Bottle and Untitled Poem in 1939 with T. Stephanides and George Katsimbalis, the Greek critic and bibliographer of Cavafy. In 1941 he translated, again with Katsimbalis, Seferis' Myth of Our History; in 1945, six poems from Sikelianos and Seferis; and in 1948, Seferis' King of Asine, with an introduction by Rex Warner, who wrote the Introduction to John Mavrogordato's translations of Cavafy's poems (The Poems of C. P. Cavafy, London, 1951), which Durrell praises in Justine (1957): By now the Cavafy canon has been established by the fine thoughtful translations of Mavrogordato... (p. 251). Before Durrell's translations, in part or in whole, of some of Cavafy's poems appeared in Justine, he published in 1956 translations of three of Cavafy's poems in London Magazine, III (1956). In 1960 he published an essay on Cavafy in 3 Arts Quarterly (see Lawrence Durrell: A Checklist, edited by Robert A. Potter and Brooke Whiting, Los Angeles, 1961). It was probably through Katsimbalis that Durrell became acquainted with the first comprehensive edition of Cavafy's poems (Alexandria, 1935), the texts of fugitive poems, and the critical and biographical works of Kampani (1903), Stavrou (1930), Malanos (1933, 1935), and Peridis (1948) (see Bibliography in Rae Dalven, The Complete Poems of Cavafy, New York, 1961, pp. 233-234).