The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems and Prose
- Submitting institution
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The University of Bolton
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 0049_27_REF2_EJ_02
- Type
- V - Translation
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Carcanet
- Month
- September
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- A new translation of poems and prose by the Alexandrian Greek poet, C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), The Barbarians Arrive Today seeks to offer a reading of his work based on new research and ideas. The poems are arranged thematically for the first time in English or Greek, and the translations match more closely the Greek forms and rhythms. The book also includes translations of some of Cavafy’s uncollected prose, including poetics statements and a short story. These further aid in illuminating this important poet’s lifework for an English-language audience. The translations develop out of Jones’s considerable linguistic expertise in both English and Modern Greek, and from his reading and research into Cavafy’s historical sources, including Gibbon, Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius, Plutarch’s Lives, and The Alexiad. Further, the translations develop in a critical mode from the notion of the ‘poet-translator’, arguing for a distinct approach for building English sounds from Modern Greek sense – requiring a level of expertise in both languages. As A.E. Stallings, poet, translator and MacArthur Fellow, has written: Jones does not attempt to give us a complete overview of Cavafy's work, but by putting poems in thematic categories, and allowing 'hidden' poems to brush up against 'canonical' ones…we see them in a new, revealing light. Jones is sensitive not only to the sense, but the sound of the Greek, rhyming where the original does, and his afterword, while wearing its considerable scholarship lightly, reorients Cavafy's oeuvre for the reader.
Poems from the manuscript were published nationally and internationally in Antigonish Review, Manchester Review, PN Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Ireland Review, and The Walrus. Readings took place virtually in Toronto (17 October 2020), Manchester (18 November 2020) and Bolton (8 December 2020).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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