A contemporary of Fernando Pessoa, Konstantinos Cavafy is one of the greatest, most translated and most quoted poets of the 20th century. In his work, full of melancholic solemnity, desire and escape, pleasure and memory, gravity and lightness, beauty and poverty, biography and history, past and present meet and illuminate each other in poems that combine simplicity and rigour with ‘that ardent fervour of a Greek summer afternoon’, as his French translator Marguerite Yourcenar put it. From the obscurity of a routine and anonymous life, Cavafy extracted gold which was purer than the air over the Sea of Alexandria. Greek Nikos Pratsinis, who, together with poet Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, translated Cavafy’s work into Portuguese, portrays the poet and his poetry for Electra in eight key questions.