Cavafy, Constantine P.

various sizes, within paper covers (258 x 194mm.) and held together by a paper fastener, inscribed by Cavafy on upper cover "To my friend the litterateur Stephanos Pargas", covers and a couple of leaves slightly spotted

Stephanos Pargas (i.e. Nikos Zelitas), owner of the Alexandrian publishing house and journal Grammata (in which at least two of these poems appeared), and a friend of Cavafy's

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There were no published editions of Cavafy's poems in his lifetime; instead he had individual poems printed on separate sheets (including some offprints from various journals) which he gathered together in varying combinations to distribute privately. This is one of the earliest of his select compilations, starting with "The City" and then "The Satrapy"; according to Edmund Keeley (Cavafy's Alexandria, London 1977, p.23), Cavafy only started using these two poems at the start of his collections in 1917.

The printed poems are (in order): H satrapeia (an offprint from the journal Nea Zwh), Martiai eidoi, Teleiwmena, TuaneuV glupthV, Apoleipein i qeoV Antwnion (dated April 1911, an offprint from Grammata), two copies of Iwnikon (also from Grammata, dated June 1911), H doxa twn Ptolemaiwn, Ta epikinduna, and Iqakh. All of these are from his poems 1905-1915, as listed in the 2007 Oxford bilingual edition of his poems.

"The City" was originally written in 1894 and this manuscript seems to be a fair copy (rather than a working manuscript), written presumably in the absence of a printed version to add to the beginning of this collection of monofylla. The only textual differences between this and the (modern) published version are two elisions (in lines 2 and 10).