Μια συζήτηση με τον Daniel Mendelsohn για τον Καβάφη.

Αντιγράφω από το περιοδικό Advocate:

Polishing Cavafy’s Dazzle: A Conversation With Daniel Mendelsohn
By Charlotte Abbott
An Advocate.com exclusive posted April 1, 2009

Classical scholar and best-selling memoirist Daniel Mendelsohn explains why the time is right for his new translation of eminent gay poet C.P. Cavafy's collected works.

Looking at modern desire through the eyes of history, literature, and myth is a recurring theme in Daniel Mendelsohn’s books, including his family memoir The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, and his literary criticism. So it’s little wonder to discover he’s been working on a major new translation, C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems and The Unpublished Poems for the last 10 years. Cavafy (1863–1933), one of the most renowned modern Greek poets of the 20th century, lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt. A journalist and civil servant, he was also a gay man who was deeply in touch with his desires -- though not always at ease with them. While Cavafy's poem "Ithaca" has become a staple of LGBT anthologies and lit courses, many of his other historical poems, with their references to figures in Greek antiquity that are unfamiliar even to classicists, have more often fallen by the wayside. But Cavafy has found a powerful champion in Mendelsohn, whose sensitive translations and accompanying commentary make this important poet’s haunting meditations on Eros, memory, time, and antiquity significantly more accessible and rewarding.

- What do you love most about Cavafy?

He’s an erotic realist. He sees love through the eyes of the historian. Usually, it’s already over and done with by the time he starts writing about it. He goes to the uncomfortable places -- to desire when it’s gone, to desire when you’re too old to be desired back. They may not be the prettiest places, but they're important. He's not embarrassed about it, he’s forthright. The margins, the shady areas, the out of the way places and people -- these are his themes.

He's also a historian who brings a new context to gay lives in antiquity.
What Cavafy gives gay readers is a deep sense of one’s position within a group of people with a history, and within the sweep of history. He shows that there have always been cute boys who dissed you, that people always grew old and stopped being the most beautiful ones on the block. We get so embroiled in the day-to-day, we often miss the deepest history. But this history is crucial for gay people, because they are so often told they don't have a history. Cavafy's always saying that this has all happened before -- and every time it happens, it’s thrilling, heartbreaking, and wonderful.

- We take it for granted that Greek antiquity was a haven for homosexuality. But how does Cavafy play with that idea?
Classical Greek antiquity was a time when men and boys had erotic relationships with impunity, and it makes sense that people would idealize it as a moment of safety, even though the actual historical picture was more complicated and weird. But Cavafy has no interest in that era at all. He likes the Hellenistic period, around the third and fourth century A.D., when that safety was disappearing and homosexuality was becoming problematized. He’s looking at the survival of Greek love as Christianity is rising.

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Ο Δημήτρης Χορν διαβάζει "Απολείπειν ο Θεός Αντώνιον:

From: Kirkh70
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Η Έλλη Λαμπέτη διαβάζει "Επέστρεφε":

From: Kirkh70
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Ο Charles Bryant διαβάζει στα αγγλικά το ποίημα του Καβάφη "Παράθυρα-Windows". Οι εικόνες απ' το σπίτι του Καβάφη:

From: ekalliga