Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 12

As a critic and an exegete of Cavafy, Mendelsohn ranks with the best. Unfortunately, when he sets about putting all this theoretical knowledge to practical use, he does not do as well. His translations, for all his expert metrical knowledge (and sometimes, I suspect, because of it), have an oddly flat and constrained quality. His iambic imitations do not feel rhythmically comfortable, and to my mind he gives up far too easily in his search for rhymes, offering instead "off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English." His laudable aim is to let the reader "feel the formal elements of Cavafy's verse," but the actual result not only fails to do this, but unintentionally creates a series of jarring irritations. He is, predictably, at his best in the unrhymed poems of emotion. Yet even here there are avoidable flaws--the flat shift of Cavafy's careful "in the voice" to "in voices," of "how they glistened,/remember" to the prosaic "remember how/they glistened," eyes that "looked" rather than "gazed."

At least as far as Cavafy's "canon" of 154 sanctioned poems is concerned, it seems likely that the long-established version by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, together with Evangelos Sachperoglou's more recent bilingual edition for the Oxford World's Classics series, will continue, deservedly, to hold the field. Where Mendelsohn will remain indispensable is for his thorough critical annotations, and--for the time being, at least--for his first-time translations of the "unfinished" poems.

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Cf. Cavafy's poems - Bilingual versions, Mendelsohn, Cavafy - Life of a Poet, Cavafy resources

More about New Hellenism / Constantinople

The Greek Word Library

Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/modern/cavafy-green.asp?pg=12