Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

Jeffreys, Peter
Jusdanis, Gregory

Hardcover

Biographies GeneralLiterary Figures

Publisher Price: $40.00

ISBN10: 0374610428
ISBN13: 9780374610425
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Aug 12 2025
Pages: 560
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.76 Width: 6.36 Depth: 9.24
Language: English

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.

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