"The chamber was poor and lewd,
hidden above the suspicious tavern"
K. P. Cavafis
There is something Platonic in Cavafy's love, which wants him not as a descendant of Aphrodite but of Penia, and as such, love in the Cavafian man is experienced as deprivation. Faced with this unfulfilled, the poet (after)shapes the bodies as tools of freedom in his otherwise heavy monasticism. While with memory, it takes refuge in the chamber of an ideal past that resists corrupting time, ensuring the desire for the beautiful, the eternally sweet and unadulterated.
In the book at hand we gathered all those hedonistic and erotic things from Cavafy's poems, thus composing a literary journey into the innermost desires of the human soul, as it was mapped by one of the greatest poets of Hellenism.
Aristides Petrakis -
Personally, I have two shelves at home for Alexandrinos and it no longer surprises me that so many books are published. This particular volume, however, is not yet another collection of poems because the contributors take care to highlight aspects of Cavafy's poetry that are probably little known. Both the introduction that illuminates the mysterious background of Alexandrinos and the epimeter that almost psychoanalyzes the poet, are key additions to Cavafy's literature and a point of reference. Kudos to the curators of the project. We await other, identical volumes perhaps with other great classics.