A spread from Constantine Cavafy’s last passport, listing “Poet” as occupation and two discrete birth dates, both erroneous. www.cavafy.com |
“What is it, I wonder, about our increasingly cosmopolitan, multi-cultural and multilingual cities, whether New York or Athens, that needs a poet like Cavafy? What are the best ways to learn and go on learning from his poetry? How can we reconcile public legacies with the privateness of literature?”
I won’t say that scholar and translator Karen Van Dyck fully answers these questions in “Forms of Cosmopolitanism,” but her ponderings are fascinating to say the least.