Tuesday, July 21, 2009

News at Eleven: [Daniel] Mendelsohn wants nothing less

than Ammon's friend: to offer, "as much as possible, a [Constantine] Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek," which means translating meter as well as meaning. Dalven, Keeley and Sherrard dispensed with rhyme and made Cavafy sound modern; Forster announced in an essay that Cavafy didn't use rhyme at all. Until now, only the early versions by John Mavrogordato and the poet's brother John (worth reading, and available on the website of the Cavafy Archive: cavafy.com) tried extensively to reproduce the poet's formal choices.

from The Nation: Mixing History and Desire: The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy

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