Thursday, May 07, 2009

Partisan antiquarian ...

... Poet homes in on an ancient vision.

Cavafy manages in these translations to animate a range of antique characters in a poetic idiom that seems for the most part to avoid the taint of anachronism. He evokes not so much the pastness of the past as its presence.
My own favorite among Cavafy's poems is Thermopylae.

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