Illness Disease And Death In The Poems Of Constantine Cavafy

Constantine Cavafy’s preoccupation with the fragility of the human condition, and his attention to illness, disease and death, old age, alcohol consumption and homosexuality continue to attract and challenge his readers. In turning anew to these themes, this book draws on the medical humanities to provide a new and integrated framework. The medical humanities provide us with a new framework through which Cavafy’s poetry can be investigated, not only by scholars in literary studies and world literature, but also by medical practitioners and researchers in the history of medicine.

Constantine Cavafy's preoccupation with the fragility of the human condition, and his attention to illness, disease and death, old age, alcohol consumption and homosexuality continue to attract and challenge his readers. In turning anew to these themes, this book draws on the medical humanities to provide a new and integrated framework. The medical humanities provide us with a new framework through which Cavafy's poetry can be investigated, not only by scholars in literary studies and world literature, but also by medical practitioners and researchers in the history of medicine.

This volume includes the English translation of 30 unfinished poems that Constantine Cavafy left in drafts when he died. Daniel Mendelsohn provides an in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

Cavafy, the foremost modern Greek poet, is a master at presenting a scene, an intense feeling, or an idea in direct, unornamented verse. Many of the poems are openly homosexual. Sixty-three newly translated poems have been added to the widely praised edition which includes the classic poem "Ithaca." Introduction by W. H. Auden. Translated by Rae Dalven.

This book contains the 154 canonical Collected Poems, plus seven of the Uncollected Poems, and just one of his rejected, early poems, 'Ode and Elegy of the Street, ' used here as a kind of overture to the collection.