Freaks of literature, like freaks of nature, turn up in odd and unpredictable places. Why, after all, should Buenos Aires produce a Borges, Palmero a Lampedusa, Trieste a Svevo? The only—and perfectly unsatisfactory—answer is, Why not! Nothing in the traditions out of which any of these writers derive could have anticipated their becoming, as all did, writers of world interest. No very good explanation is available, really, just the brute fact of their arrival, writing quite unlike anyone else before them and producing enduring work of universal value. As they come upon the scene out of nowhere, neither do these writers begin or leave anything like a tradition behind them. Sui generis, in a class by oneself, is, after all, only another phrase for freakish.

C. P. Cavafy, the Greek poet who lived in the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria, is another such freak of literature—perhaps the most interesting, idiosyncratic, and unexplainable of them all. Along with Borges, Lampedusa, and Svevo, Cavafy is a poet whose life, whose subject matter, whose point of view is inextricably bound up with his city. “Outside his poems,” the Greek poet and critic George Seferis has said, “Cavafy does not exist.” But without Alexandria, neither would the poems exist: “for me,” Cavafy wrote, referring to Alexandria in “In the Same Place,” one of his late poems, “the whole of you is transformed into feeling.”

Even though he wrote his poems in Greek, there is a sense in which Cavafy was