Konstandinos Kavafis

K. P. Kavafis was a poet born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt. The son of wealthy merchants originally from Constantinople, the family moved to Liverpool, England, after his father's death, where they lived for five years. Returning to Alexandria, Kavafis remained there for the rest of his life, except for a few trips and some years in Constantinople. For over three decades, he worked as an employee in the city's irrigation services, a discreet and monotonous position. His poems circulated, first in newspapers and magazines, among a select group of friends and admirers. It was only in 1904, when Kavafis was forty-one years old, that a group of fourteen of his poems appeared in an edition published by the author himself. However, the publication would be expanded, modified, and revised in a continuous process over the following years, in small notebooks or loose sheets distributed by himself or friends in his inner circle, always containing the same poems: first ordered by theme, then by chronology, and later supplemented with several dozen more. In his later years, three of these collections circulated, to which an unpublished composition would be added to complete the 154 poems of the canon (published in 1935). After being diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, he lost his voice, communicating only through dots and scribbled notes on dozens of small pieces of paper. He eventually died in the city that had always been his, on his birthday, April 29, 1933.