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A glimpse of Cavafy at work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Anthony Hirst*
Affiliation:
King’s College London

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point Savidis’ description of certain manuscripts of published and unpublished poems written by Cavafy between 1885 and 1904, manuscripts which evidently once formed a unity. Examples of manuscripts containing two or more poems are considered, in order to show how a chronological sequence of poems on unnumbered pages was reorganized by Cavafy, with the addition of page numbers, to form a thematic sequence. (This is compared to Cavafy’s later practice of progressively transferring poems from chronological to thematic collections.) A third stage is noted involving the dispersal and partial destruction of the manuscripts.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1999

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References

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