{"id":1319,"date":"2009-05-10T12:39:40","date_gmt":"2009-05-10T16:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2009-05-10T12:39:40","modified_gmt":"2009-05-10T16:39:40","slug":"george-economou-on-cp-cavafy-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/george-economou-on-cp-cavafy-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"George Economou on C.P. Cavafy Translations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cavafy18_3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some weeks ago, The New York Times Book Review<\/em> published<\/a> a review of recent translations of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. A rather sloppy job by someone who doesn’t in fact know Greek. The poet, translator & scholar George Economou sent a letter to the editor, critical of this (& other) reviews of Cavafy’s work in translation, which the Times<\/em> did not deign publish. Economou’s points are well taken, and the whole business of reviewing translations in the “major” presses and lit mags being very much of the same ilk, it seems more than worthwhile to print the letter here:<\/p>\n

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To the Editor:<\/p>\n

Although the practice of assigning books of poetry in translation to reviewers who lack knowledge of the original\u2019s language has become something of a commonplace in our literary culture, one hopes for a higher standard from the New York Times Book Review. Sadly, that standard has been neglected in the April 19 review \u201cA Poet\u2019s Progress\u201d of the recently published translations of C. P. Cavafy\u2019s Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems by Daniel Mendelsohn, just as it was in the review of Aliki Barnstone\u2019s volume of translations of the same poet in the issue of 26 March 2006. In each case, it appears a writer of repute was invited to provide an expert assessment of a kind of work for which he is not fully qualified. Two years ago in his review of Barnstone\u2019s translations of Cavafy, Brad Leithauser prepared his readers at certain points to infer that he was not familiar with the poet\u2019s texts in Greek; this past week in his review of Mendelsohn\u2019s two-volume Cavafy James Longenbach is notably less transparent about his familiarity with the poems in the original. In each case, the reviewer fulfills the requirement of producing a lively and informative read, but both devote too much space to rehearsing what others, including the translators in their introductions, have written about Cavafy and his poetry.<\/p>\n

Mr. Longenbach, who begins his review with yet one more quotation of E. M. Forster\u2019s once iconic but by now exhausted remark about Cavafy \u201cstanding absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe\u201d (at least Mendelsohn waits until the eleventh page of his long introduction to invoke it), keeps addressing the question of Cavafy\u2019s \u201ctone\u201d with a kind of confidence that might suggest he has engaged with it in the poet\u2019s own language. But a careful comparative reading of his review and Mendelsohn\u2019s introduction reveals that the critic\u2019s praise of the translator\u2019s achievement in capturing Cavafy\u2019s tone is not a privately earned position but merely a recapitulation of what Mr. Mendelsohn almost simultaneously announces as his intention and accomplishment.\u00a0 The one passage in the review in which the reader might suspect the critic actually compared the words in one of the translations with its counterparts in the original, the discussion of the choice of the word kid in the poem \u201cDays of 1909, \u201910 and \u201911,\u201d turns out to be nothing more than a paraphrase of the translator\u2019s own explanation of his strategies in dealing with it (p. xliv of the introduction).<\/p>\n

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It is disappointing that Longenbach (unlike Mr. Leithauser) fails to mention a single other translator from among the many who have contributed to the current phenomenon of translating Cavafy into English. Mendelsohn also pays scant attention to his eminent predecessors, making only token mentions of John Mavrogordato, Rae Dalven, and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, all of whom first published their Cavafy translations between 1951 and 1975, and ignoring the numerous men and women who have contributed to the enterprise since then. By outdoing Mendelsohn in this department, Longenbach relegates them all to the nameless status of the \u201cearlier.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, the only specific comparative literary observation he bothers to make doesn\u2019t come until the end of the review, where it seems his interest lies in proclaiming a triumvirate of contemporary translations, Mendelsohn\u2019s Cavafy, Richard Howard\u2019s Baudelaire, and Robert Pinsky\u2019s Dante (based on the last time I looked, shouldn\u2019t this read Inferno?).<\/p>\n

\u2013\u2013George Economou<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some weeks ago, The New York Times Book Review published a review of recent translations of the Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. A rather sloppy job by someone who doesn’t in fact know Greek. The...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,103],"tags":[782,345,572,728],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-translation","tag-c-p-cavafy","tag-george-economou","tag-nyrb","tag-translations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}