Harvard Early Modern and Modern Greek Library

C. P. Cavafy is one of the most important Greek poets since antiquity. He set in motion the most powerful modernism in early twentieth-century European poetry, exhibiting simple truths about eroticism, history, and philosophy. The Canon plays with the complexities of ironic Socratic thought, suffused with the honesty of unadorned iambic verse.

C. P. Cavafy is one of the most important and influential Greek poets since antiquity. Based on a thirty-year scholarly and literary interaction with Cavafy’s poetry and its Greek and Western European intertexts, Chioles has produced a most authoritative and nuanced translation of the complex linguistic registers of Cavafy’s Canon into English.

The Nobel Prize was awarded to Elytis in 1979 “for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clear-sightedness modern man’s struggle for freedom and creativeness.” This volume contains translations of two late collections, the second published months before his death in 1995.

Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–1985) was one of the most prominent representatives of Greek Surrealist poetry and painting. This volume offers a collection of his most representative poems, including his long poem Bolivár, an emblematic act of resistance against the Nazis and their allies who occupied Greece in 1941.

Elina Tsalicoglou offers an English rendition of Konstantinos Dapontes’s idiosyncratic poem “Canon of Hymns Comprising Many Exceptional Things,” and selected passages from one of his most important works, Garden of Graces. These are accompanied by notes and a detailed introduction to the life and work of this significant Greek author.