Comments on Cavafy

The absence of any personal intervention in the poem under discussion makes Saragiannis’s commentaries on Cavafy’s texts seem like a circular extension of the poems, as Cavafy himself might hypothetically have written it, as a prose continuation, or rather a prologue to the poems, the original nebula from which the body of each individual poem was ultimately detached. Of course, the commentaries were compiled and are read ‘in hindsight’; yet they retain a strange dimension, as if we were speaking ‘in advance’, unravelling, as it were, for each of the poems commented upon, a sort of retrospective ribbon containing, as far as possible, everything that Cavafy had in mind before or whilst writing each poem. Scattered as they are today, Sareyannis’s commentaries serve only specialists and remain inaccessible to the Cavafy readership, which has grown so large. And this readership will certainly benefit poetically – interpretatively, so to speak – or at the very least will not be misled ― as with many books ― by this comprehensive reprint. From the introduction to the edition.