5 ms·
A Poet of Computation Who Uncovers Distant Truths
- mrkgnao 8y agoCavafy's The Satrapy, mentioned in the article (and a poem I love very much myself): http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=60 http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=60
- dmreedy 8y agoIt reminds me very much of Whitman's The Untold Want. Or at least, how I've always read it. A very lovely poem indeed.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago>> Scroll down to the bottom of Constantinos Daskalakis’ web page — past links to his theoretical computer science papers and his doctoral students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — and you will come upon a spare, 21-line poem by Constantine Cavafy, “The Satrapy.” Meh. Cavafy was a pretentious twat. His poetry was boring and tedious and he only became famous because he constantly winked conspiratorially to the self-important intellectuals and academics of his time. Modern Greece has much better poets than Cavafy. Nikos Kavvadias, for instance, or Kostas Karyotakis. Vigorous, dynamic and youthful, poets who spoke to ordinary people and not to stuffy patrons of the Athens Literary Society. Their verse was in rhyme (Kavvadias' more often than Karyotakis') and their subjects were human, ordinary, everyday, down-to-earth. Kavvadias wrote of magical sea voyages to faraway lands. Karyotakis ...well, he was a bit goth, and a horrible swimmer, but OK. I guess neither of them translated well. And then of course, there were the classics- Seferis, Elytis (both Nobelists), Palamas, Solomos...