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From: joe@emacs.uucp (Joe Chapman)
Newsgroups: net.motss
Subject: French books and Cavafy's poetry
Message-ID: <123@emacs.uucp>
Date: Thu, 11-Jul-85 19:00:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: emacs.123
Posted: Thu Jul 11 19:00:25 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 19-Aug-85 23:14:23 EDT
Organization: CCA Uniworks, Wellesley, MA
Lines: 38

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> ... a form of poetry which cannot possibly hurt anybody,
> even if translated into French.
>				-- Oscar Wilde

> What other French lesbian-and-gay oriented novels/short stories/poems
> would you recommend?
>				-- oscar!wild

I'm not terribly well-read in this area, but I'd have to recommend A
Lover's Discourse (Fragments d'un Discours Amoureux) by Roland Barthes.
The author was a professor at the Sorbonne who died a few years ago;
most of his books are collections of essays and thick with Semiotic
theory.  The Lover's Discourse isn't gay/lesbian per se---although
Barthes was gay and The Other appears in the book as he/him.  It's a sad
book; I leaf through my copy whenever a dazzling affair, full of promise
and delight, suddenly becomes as one with Nineveh and Tyre.

> Which set of Cavafy poems would you recommend?  What nationality is
> Cavafy?  And in which language did he originally write them?

Constantine P. Cavafy (fl. beginning of 1900s) was Greek, and wrote in
Greek.  The best edition I've seen in English is translated by Rae
Dalven, with an introduction by W. H. Auden.  Cavafy's principal themes,
according to Auden, are ``love, art, and politics in the original Greek
sense.''  His affairs are characterized by casual brevity, and are
recorded in the poems in a flat, unadorned style.  The original is
fairly difficult because Cavafy wrote in an unusual blend of colloquial
and formal Greek; Dalven made no attempt to mimic that aspect of the
style in her translation, but provides some notes at the end of the book
for the curious.

-- 
-- Joseph Chapman                  decvax!cca!emacs!joe
   CCA Uniworks, Inc.              emacs!joe@cca-unix.ARPA
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   Wellesley, MA  02181            (617) 235-2600