Posts featuring Constantine P. Cavafy

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 22, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by MARGENTO and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from Romania and India!

This week, our editors-at-large introduce us to transnational literary communities and newly-translated classic literature. From experimental poetry festivals to reading recommendations in contemplation of the 79th anniversary of India’s independence, read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

Indefatigable Florin Dan Prodan—just back from Egypt where he co-organized the performance poetry festival & interdisciplinary colloquium Interwoven Voices, and on his way to co-organizing a writing residency and poetry-and-music festival in Annapurna National Park (in Nepal’s Himalayas) and Pokhara City—threw a poetry festival in his home, northern Romania. Via Poetica, which ran from August 10th through the 14th, kicked off in the cultural hub and university city of Iasi and featured established names such as Radu Andriescu and Prodan himself alongside remarkable alternative voices such as past Asymptote contributor Simona Nastac, experimental novelist Paul Mihalache, and the lyrically contemplative Luminița Amarie. While the roster of performance poets slightly varied as the festival moved from Iasi to Prodan’s hometown of Suceava to the UNESCO-heritage medieval Voroneț monastery, a mainstay was the experimental avantgarde electronic music of Ranter’s Bay that has already resounded across Europe and beyond.

Special mention should be made of two genuinely experimental poets that were featured on every single night of the festival, whose inclusion contributed significantly to the festival’s international profile. Rhys Trimble, a Zambian-born Welsh poet, recently joined Prodan and the Zidul de Hartie (Paper Wall) collective’s initiatives, participating in both Interwoven Voices in Cairo, and now, Via Poetica in Romania. Trimble does bilingual work in Welsh and English and is strongly active as an improvisational performance and installation artist, musician, visual poet, and interdisciplinary-poetics academic. Another Welsh poet, David Greenslade, has split his time between Wales and Romania for a few years now, after traveling the world as an English teacher. He writes in both English and Welsh while experimenting (and performing) with “used and usable material objects” such as diagrams, tools, vegetables, and signs, and creatively engaging with visual and aural pareidolia (pattern-seeking misperceptions).   READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Constantine Cavafy

November 10, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Alex de Voogt

O memory, I pleaded / for you to assist me / to recreate the image / of the one whom I loved / the young face as it was.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we present two newly translated poems from one of the most influential figures in modern Greek poetry, Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Though known primarily through English translations of his work (championed by Anglophone writers such as E.M. Forster), Cavafy has enjoyed increased attention as a formal innovator of Greek poetics. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, and later educated in Britain, Cavafy would spend the bulk of his life in Alexandria writing poems for private circulation among friends, family, and local periodicals, eschewing the trappings of potential literary fame. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poetry community of mainland Greece eventually embraced Cavafy’s bold new poetics, launching a modernist revival of Greek verse. Scholar and translator Alex de Voogt shares some of his insights on Cavafy’s formal stylings:

Cavafy built on the traditional Dekapentasyllavo or Greek folk song but allowed a flexible number of syllables, six or seven for either hemistich, together with a clear caesura. In later years, Cavafy would break the integrity of the meaningful phrase in each hemistich but never violated his own rules of syllabics . . . Syllabics look, feel and sound different when they are applied in translation. They are a hidden structure with historical antecedents. Cavafy used his hemistiches for an increasingly complex enjambment across line breaks as well as across the caesura.

“In the month of Athyr”

I am struggling to read                         an Ancient stone inscription
that says “Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.”            A “So[u]l” may be distinguished.
“In the month of Athyr”                        “Lefkio[s] w[ent] to rest”
With reference to his age                     “He lived this many years”
the Kappa Zeta shows                           he was laid to rest still young.
I see in the corrupted text                    “Hi[m] . . . Alexandrian”
And then there are three lines            especially disfigured
but some words can be made out      such as “our t[ea]rs,” “suffering”
then once again the “tears”                  and “his [f]riends are mourning [h]im”
It seems that Lefkios                             must have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr                            Lefkios was laid to rest.

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