Constantine Petrou Cavafy, above, was a man on the margins. Born in Ottoman - ruled Alexandria in 1863, he moved to Liverpool at the age of 9 and then back to Alexandria in 1877 where, for the most part, he remained.

He wrote at first in English, then in Greek, and he lived in a British colonial outpost. He held the same temporary job (renewed annually) in the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years. He never published a collection in book form, but printed his poems on individual sheets. From 1907 he lived in an apartment in the rue Lepsius, of which he said: “Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is a church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”

But the poet C.P.Cavafy is at the centre. Even when his works were still being passed from hand to hand, he counted among his admirers E.M.Forster, W.H.Auden and T.E.Lawrence. After his poems were posthumously collected (in 1948) and translated into English (in 1951) his fans included John Fowles, Derek Mahon and James Merrill.

But ordinary people loved him too. His two most famous poems tell important truths. In Waiting for the Barbarians he shows how we use the threat of the alien “other” to define ourselves: “What are we going to do now, without barbarians?/ Those people, they were a kind of solution.” And in Ithaca he reminds us that the journey, not the destination, matters - “and you arrive an old man on the island, / rich from all that you have gained on the way, / not counting on Ithaca for riches”.

This new translation is true to Cavafy's voice - passionate, intellectual, intense and elusively profound. His is at once a very private viewpoint and yet immediately recognisable. Like Shakespeare, Cavafy died (in 1933) on the same date as he was born (April 29). Like Shakespeare, he addresses all time.

Selected Poems, by C.P.Cavafy, translated by Avi Sharon
Penguin Classics, £9.99

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