Verse – Constantine P. Cavafy

On Hearing of Love

 

Translated from Greek by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

On hearing about powerful love, respond, be moved
like an aesthete. Only, fortunate as you’ve been,
remember how much your imagination created for you.
This first, and then the rest—the lesser loves—
that you experienced and enjoyed
in your life: the more real and tangible.
Of loves like these you were not deprived.

 
 

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), a Greek poet from Alexandria, Egypt.