BOOKS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CAVAFY translated by Rae Dalven, with an introduction by W. H. Auden. Harcourt, Brace & World. 1961. $6.75. Spain, Italy, Greece-these once remote countries can now be reached by jet plane in a matter of hours from any U. S. airport. The world shrinks. Yet we are startled when a Juan Jiminiz wins the Nobel Prize-a great modern poet of whom we have never heard because he writes in Spanish. Salvatore Quasimodo's name and work were unknown to Englishspeaking readers until the Nobel Committee chose to honor him in 1959. He writes in Italian. We are a rich country, but our confinement to one language makes us poor.

Constantine Cavafy, the greatest modern poet writing in Greek, died in 1932. Yet not until Lawrence Durrell mentioned him in notes to his Alexandria Quartet novels, did his name reach any numerically important group of U. S. readers his name and two poems. Only last year a reference in the London Times asserted Cavafy was embarrassingly untranslatable because he "writes exclusively of his homosexual pickups."

Now, however, this quiet but powerful and moving poet can be read complete in crisp and accurate English translation. His poems are brief, unadorned, direct. They share with Japanese poetry a subtlety that

is never difficult. They achieve greatness in that they seize the reader and face him directly with the event the poet wants him to experience. Here, for example, is a poem called "The Next Table."

He must be scarcely twenty-two years old.

And yet I am certain that nearly

as many

years ago, I enjoyed the very same body.

It isn't at all infatuation of love. I entered the casino only a little while ago;

I didn't even have time to drink much.

I have enjoyed the same body.

If I can't recall where-one lapse of memory

means nothing.

Ah see, now that he is sitting down at the next table

I know every movement he makes and beneath his

clothes once more I see the beloved bare limbs.

There are some 200 poems in this collection. Of that number perhaps half deal directly with what the translator calls deviate love. The other poems, lean, economical, taut with restrained emotion, deal with Hellenic history, particularly during the era when Rome controlled Greece. But whatever his subject he brings it

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