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FeaturesApril 2009 Waiting for the grammarians by Eric Ormsby On the Collected Poems and The Unfinished Poems of C. P. Cavafy, newly translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. No doubt it would have delighted C. P. Cavafy, probably the greatest—and certainly the most enigmatic—of modern Greek poets, to know that some sixty years after his death on April 29, 1933, the two dozen or so poems he left unfinished would emerge into the light, lovingly assembled from scattered drafts through the painstaking efforts of his editors. If Greek lyric poetry begins in the seventh-century BC with the poet Archilochus, one of whose long and splendidly smutty poems was recovered from the papyrus wrapping of an Egyptian mummy in the 1960s, it seems fitting that Cavafy, his modern successor of sorts, should benefit from the same erratic hand of contingency—fitting too because, for Cavafy, the remote Alexandrian past was characterized by nothing so much as simultaneity; it formed a secret continuum with the flitting present moment. (He would have approved of Faulkner’s remark, “The p ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 27 April 2009, on page 4 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Waiting-for-the-grammarians-4047
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Hints, fragments & scintillations by Eric Ormsby on Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1820-1842 (Library of America) & Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Journals 1841-1877 (Library of America) by Ralph Waldo Emerson,Lawrence Rosenwald Christopher, for better & for worse On the critic, polemicist & raconteur Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011). Webcasts
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