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Clearing the Ground: C. P. Cavafy, Poetry and Prose, 1902-1911
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About Clearing The Ground: C. P. Cavafy, Poetry And
Product Description Clearing the Ground illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca." The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics." Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical pensée, these "Notes" were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, according to the eminent critic G. P. Savidis, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language in certain cases, in any language. The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming. The afterward by Martin McKinsey examines Cavafy's sexuality and accompanying pressures in historical context and suggests the part they may have played in his poetic breakthrough. This is a revelatory work for students and lovers of Cavafy one of the great outsider poets of the twentieth century. Review I scanned Cavafy availed by 15 pundits of translation and criticism; only now I begin to discern this poet to be a man as I would be, a man whose diversified fulfillments and consummations were to be held within one apprehension, the which, I now discern, he had achieved. Thank you, Martin McKinsey. Richard Howard It strikes me as a must for anyone interested in modern poetry, queer studies, or (as I am most) how a poet discovers the courage and conviction to make a lasting mark in language. Joshua Weiner An important contribution to primary and secondary bibliographies of modern gay letters. Josiah Blackmore McKinsey's technique of reporting the poet's jottings and then placing a relevant poem in the midst of those jottings brings Cavafy (not to mention the poem in question) alive in a way that, at least for me, has never happened before. Peter A. Bien The notes put each poem in a new light. Thomas W. Laqueur If you have read Rae Dalven's and Daniel Mendelsohn's translations, among others, you will appreciate McKinsey's translations all the more for their discard of earlier memes about Cavafy. He has concentrated on a specific period in Cavafy's life . . . when Cavafy bid his imagination go where he hadn't gone and probably wouldn't go, and, accordingly, Cavafy had to deal with a plaintive rue within himself, and he had to find a way to etch the stone of his reality, in this case his timidity, with the acid of that rue . . . No one interested in the hidden currents that electrify great literature can afford to miss Clearing the Ground. Djelloul Marbrook --from the book jacket About the Author The Greek-Egyptian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) has come to be the most recognizable name in Modern Greek literature and a major figure in twentieth-century world poetry. His poems of the ancient Hellenized Middle East of peoples "who were not of the Greek race, and who spoke the Greek language with Asiatic intonations and faulty syntax" have permanently altered our conception of the world of antiquity, and have struck a chord in their seeming relevance to our own times. Concurrently, his "modern" poems depicting casual urban pickups and doomed erotic passion have been recognized as groundbreaking contributions to the development of contemporary gay consciousness. Martin McKinsey teaches literature at the University of New Hampshire. His most recent translations from Modern Greek are Petrified Time: Poems from Makronisos by Yannis Ritsos (with Scott King, 2014); and Acropolis and Tram: Poems 1937-1977 by Nikos Engonopoulos (2008). He is also the author of Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott (2010).
