Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets. In 1933, on his seventieth birthday, the poet Constantine Cavafy died in an Alexandrian hospital, surrounded by friends. He left behind a small, curated oeuvre of 154 poems, along with fragments and drafts of incomplete works. Throughout his life, Constantine had kept a tight grip on the distribution of his poetry, but after his death his reputation grew and Constantine became the august C. P. Cavafy, a writer known not only as a great composer of Hellenic verse―the man whose poems reshaped the Greek language―but also as a global poet whose writing transcends its geographic origins and is to this day widely loved and translated. This long-awaited study captures the complexities of Constantine Cavafy’s life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In rich detail, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys chronicle the young poet’s life with his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty after they left Egypt and moved successively to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. The biography then centers on Constantine’s adulthood in his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor for modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame. Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography looks closely at Cavafy’s artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian. “Jusdanis and Jeffreys have produced an important biography of an indispensable poet―the first to appear in English in nearly fifty years . . . We owe them a debt for assembling this mosaic of a life and sending us back to the poems where he really resides―at a slight angle to the universe.” ―David Mason, The Wall Street Journal “Deeply researched and engaging . . . [Jusdanis and Jeffreys] brilliantly recreate [Cavafy’s] world and investigate his place in it.” ―Michael Nott, The Guardian “A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work . . . Above all, it sends one back to Cavafy’s extraordinary body of poems both enlightened and newly enthused.” ―Peter Parker, The Spectator “Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys pull the threads of [Cavafy’s] life together, creating an admirable tapestry . . . A wonderful miscellanea about Cavafy and the world around him.” ―Evan Jones, The Times Literary Supplement “[Jusdanis and Jeffreys] have found the perfect ‘form’ for presenting the complex figure of Cavafy―a relatively solitary and self-determined man who intersected with the events of his time and the people in his life, while still establishing his own sense of time and history in a series of unique poetic reflections.” ―Scott Bradfield, The New Republic “Readers will come away from Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography very much feeling they know the man . . . Jusdanis and Jeffreys have brought him into closer focus than ever before.” ―Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review “Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis . . . have trawled monographs, memoirs, letters and the Cavafy Archive to bring [the poet] to life, not just in middle age but also as a youth in Liverpool, London and Istanbul . . . A nuanced and original portrait: no hagiography, but warmly empathetic.” ―Maria Margaronis, The Literary Review “[The authors’] scholarship is exemplary, but quietly within it beats an unmistakable affection for their subject . . . extensive and rewarding.” ―Tim Pfaff, The Bay Area Reporter “A quirky, revelatory biography of the celebrated Greek poet . . . The authors conclude by discussing one of Cavafy’s most intriguing traits, his obsessive, self-confident need to be read and known . . . coupled with his ‘crippling self-doubt.’ A dive into reams of primary source materials reveals a ‘new’ Cavafy.” ― Kirkus Reviews “A painstakingly researched biography of a quiet Alexandrian who left few traces of his life but whose body of poems the world worships and never tires of translating.” ―André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name “In the fifty years since a biography of the poet last appeared, Constantine Cavafy has emerged not only as the great Greek poet of the twentieth century but as an essential poet of modernity on the world stage, an exile (in many senses of the word) whose work seamlessly enfolds history, memory, and desire. Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have given us an extraordinary biography, eminently readable and as unconventional, scholarly, and impassioned as its subject.” ―Mark Doty, au