C. P. Cavafy Complete Poems

"Extraordinary." --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

"Cavafy's distinctive tone--wistfully elegiac but resolutely dry-eyed--has captivated English-language poets from W. H. Auden to James Merrill to Louise Glück. . . . Mendelsohn's new translations not only bring us closer to one of the great poets of the twentieth century; [they] also reinvigorate our relationship to the English language . . . Like Richard Howard's Baudelaire or Robert Pinsky's Dante, Mendelsohn's Cavafy is itself a work of art." --The New York Times Book Review

"Brilliant . . . With his passionate reading of this poet-historian . . . Mendelsohn has created not only an essential guide to Cavafy for English-speaking readers, but has likely shaped our understanding of the greatest writer of modern Greek for generations to come." --Boston Review

"Eloquent . . . [This is] the Cavafy of a brilliant critic who has a true and deep affinity for the poet--and who has succeeded in giving him to us whole for the first time." --The Nation

"Thrilling . . . Mendelsohn is such a felicitous interpreter of Cavafy . . . The explanatory essays he has attached to almost every poem can contain every bit as much passion and humanity as the poet's own work." --Harper's Magazine

"Superb . . . Mendelsohn's translations are not only skillful, but elegant; best of all, they catch the music of the originals." --The New Criterion

"A vigorous labor of literary love . . . The poems fully embody Cavafy the sensualist and the antiquarian and his distinctive lyric shuttling between the ancient and the modern worlds." --Billy Collins

"With deep feeling, exacting care, and extraordinary intelligence, Mendelsohn has given us a stunning new Cavafy . . . All of us who care about literature are indebted to Mendelsohn for bringing forward a splendid addition to our understanding of a poet whose work is lit by bright starry sparks of the eternal." --Edward Hirsch