Picture of a 23-Year-Old Painted by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur
He finished the picture yesterday noon. Now he looks at it detail by detail. He’s painted him wearing an unbuttoned gray jacket, no vest, tieless, with a rose-colored shirt, open, allowing a glimpse of his beautiful chest and neck. The right side of his forehead is almost covered by his hair, his lovely hair (done in the style he’s recently adopted). He’s managed to capture perfectly the sensual note he wanted when he did the eyes, when he did the lips... That mouth of his, those lips so ready to satisfy a special kind of erotic pleasure
Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press. For reuse of these translations, please contact Princeton University Press.
The Canon