Read By: Caryl Phillips
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Caryl Phillips on his selection:
It\\u2019s over thirty years since I first came upon the work of C.P. Cavafy. A friend of mine, a Polish poet, had recommended Cavafy\\u2019s Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. I worried a little that, not being a poet, there would not be any real point of connection. However, from the first page I recognized something in Cavafy\\u2019s work that struck a chord with me. Cavafy lived between two worlds\\u2014the Egyptian and the Greek\\u2014and had a complex relationship to the word \\u201chome.\\u201d He underpinned his work with historical detail and had little interest in the world of publishing. His was an essentially reflective, and reclusive, muse\\u2014looking back at time past and wondering about what lay ahead. This seems to be exactly what many of us are now doing. Taking this time to think about how to stitch together our past and present so that when we return to \\u201cnormal\\u201d we might have a more balanced, and purposeful, sense of what we should do with the rest of our lives.
Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy, trans. Keeley and Sherrard at Bookshop.org
Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0
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