In a talk interwoven with readings from his acclaimed new translation of Constantine Cavafy's Collected Poems, and the first-ever English translation of thirty Unfinished Poems, Daniel Mendelsohn will trace the poet's curious and thrilling evolution. Cavafy went from being a conventional fin-de-siècle versifier of the 1880s to the idiosyncratic master whose inimitable voice, in poems from the early 1900s through his death in 1933, arguably made him Greece's greatest poet since antiquity. Mendelsohn will consider Cavafy's status as a man and a poet standing at the margins of history, geography, and sexuality, and will explore how the Alexandrian's work—too often divided into "erotic" and "historical" categories—can be seen as a unified whole, whose great theme is the passage of time.

This event is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

Daniel Mendelsohn is the translator of C.P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems and C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems. His other books include The Elusive Embrace; The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, a collection of critical essays; and a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays. His articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, and New York Magazine. He is the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.