Cavfay

I must admit that I don't know a whole lot about C.P. Cavafy other than his fantastic poem Ithaca, one of the few poems that has stuck with me over the years. This new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn seems like it's worth checking out. The linked review makes it sound delicious, with commentary like:

In Cavafy's world, everything has already happened. The fortune is spent, the pantheon abandoned, the body grown old. This overpowering sense of belatedness is what provokes the tone of his poems — rueful, distanced, knowing but never wise.

and

Because of the polyglot nature of the English language, the sound of great English poetry is the sound of monosyllabic Germanic words chiming against multisyllabic Latinate words (Shakespeare’s "seas incarnadine" or Tennyson’s "immemorial elms"). Echoing such effects, Mendelsohn makes me wonder if it wasn’t the deliciously mongrel nature of English, which Cavafy spoke and wrote perfectly, that first provoked him to forge his own hybridized idiom. The fact that the few poems Cavafy wrote in English contain phrases like "penetrating eye" and "transcendent star" (the Latinate word wedged against the Germanic) suggests that the poet’s ear for English was at least as acute as his translator’s.