Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 SMI; site emacs.uucp Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!cca!emacs!joe 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 <> > ... 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 20 William St. Wellesley, MA 02181 (617) 235-2600