Son of an honorable citizen—most important of all, a good-looking young man of the theatre, amiable in many ways. I sometimes write highly audacious verses in Greek and these I circulate—surreptitiously, of course. O gods, may those puritans who prattle about morals never see those verses about an exceptional kind of sexual pleasure, the kind that leads toward a condemned, a barren love.
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