Upcoming Greek Event
Talk: Antony and Cleopatra and Cavafy
Date: Tuesday 28th February 2017
Time: 5:15pm
Location: Room G.21, Faculty of Classics
THIS PRESENTATION examines C. P. Cavafy's interest in Shakespeare (which perhaps dates from Cavafy's early teenage years in England) and focusses on the Alexandrian Greek poet's adaptations, in several poems, of elements of Shakespeare's Alexandrian play,听Antony and Cleopatra.听Behind this play, of course, lies Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's听Life of Marcus Antonius;听and 听in his Antony-related poems (and others) Cavafy also draws directly on Plutarch, short-circuiting what is elsewhere the tortuous linguistic journey from Plutarch's Greek prose through Jacques Amyot's French translation of Plutarch and North's English translation of Amyot (both sixteenth-cetury) to Shakespeare's seventeenth-century transformation of North's text into an听English verse drama, and听back to Greek in the twentieth-century poetry of Cavafy.
