Superstar Poet. Cavafy in Italy (1919-1964)

Abstract

The article examines the foundational period of Cavafy’s poetry in Italy through a parallel presentation and analysis of all the areas that gradually came together, allowing the Alexandrian poet’s work to gain, by the mid-1960s, the position and initial symbolic capital it acquired in Italy. From the study of the material, it becomes clear that the contribution and interaction among cultural mediators of Greece in Italy – academics, writers, and publishers – were decisive for the broader and rapid dissemination of Cavafy’s poetry to wider segments of Italian society in a very short period of time. Finally, the article focuses on the first Italian editions of Cavafy’s poems, edited by F. M. Pontani in 1956 and 1961, presenting how these two works endowed the Italian translated Cavafy poetry with particular literary prestige and gradually symbolic capital, which soon led—thanks also to the support of prominent Italian publishers of the time (All’insegna del pesce d’oro and Arnoldo Mondadori) — to the recognition and distinction of Cavafy’s translated poetry in Italian.