Cavafis is the most widely read and translated poet in the Neo-Greek language, but the vast majority of his readers are much less familiar with his important and varied production in prose, for the simple reason of how late and scarce his edition and translation have been, It is limited, partially, to English and Spanish. The set of his prose, published and unpublished, reveals to us the numerous concerns that he maintained throughout his life, and shows the sharpness of his appreciations, comments, reviews and cultural criticism. The selection of forty-one writings that we offer here in translation tries to show the reader a different, creative and varied facet of the poet's personality and thought.
Cavafian prose constitutes an ideal terrain for our critical understanding of his evolution. Cavafis' complicity with Poe and Baudelaire, authors who had such an influence on him, inspires the best pieces of his prose. Poe's influence inspires a masterful short story, "In the Light of Day," which represents the crowning achievement of Cavafis's prose.
Many of these prose have had their importance to serve as a point of support to gloss or comment on part of his poetry, although this has implied a merely instrumental consideration. For this reason, these texts have rarely been considered as what they truly configure: a corpus in itself, with autonomous, independent texts, which in many cases constitute compositions that, doubly, aspire to inform and persuade.