The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy

The Patriarch (#litres_trial_promo)

On Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)

Epitaph of a Samian (#litres_trial_promo)

Remorse (#litres_trial_promo)

The Emperor Conon (#litres_trial_promo)

Hunc Deorum Templis (#litres_trial_promo)

Crime (#litres_trial_promo)

Of the Sixth or Seventh Century (#litres_trial_promo)

Tigranocerta (#litres_trial_promo)

Abandonment (#litres_trial_promo)

Nothing About the Lacedaemonians (#litres_trial_promo)

Zenobia (#litres_trial_promo)

Company of Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Agelaus (#litres_trial_promo)

The Fragmentary Sketches (#litres_trial_promo)

[Bondsman and Slave] (#litres_trial_promo)

[Colors] (#litres_trial_promo)

[My Soul Was on My Lips] (#litres_trial_promo)

[Matthew First, First Luke] (#litres_trial_promo)

Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Textual Permissions (#litres_trial_promo)

A Note About the Translator (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Daniel Mendelsohn (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION

The Poet-Historian

“OUTSIDE HIS POETRY Cavafy does not exist.” Today, seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the judgment passed in 1946 by his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh at the time, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious life, no great fame or recognition until relatively late in life (and even then, hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. All this—the ordinariness, the obscurity (whether intentional or not)—stands in such marked contrast to the poetry, with its haunted memories of passionate encounters in the present and its astoundingly rich imagination of the Greek past, from Homer to Byzantium, from the great capital of Alexandria to barely Hellenized provincial cities in the Punjab, that it is hard not to agree with Seferis that the “real” life of the poet was, in fact, completely interior; and that outside that imagination and those memories, there was little of lasting interest.

As the man and everyone who knew him have passed into history, the contrast between the life and the art has made it easy to think of Cavafy in the abstract, as an artist whose work exists untethered to a specific moment in time. This trend has been given impetus by the two elements of his poetry for which he is most famous: his startlingly contemporary subject (one of his subjects, at any rate), and his appealingly straightforward style. Certainly there have always been many readers who appreciate the so-called historical poems, set in marginal Mediterranean locales and long-dead eras and tart with mondain irony and a certain weary Stoicism. (“Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey; / without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road. / But now she has nothing left to give you,” he writes in what is perhaps his most famous evocation of ancient Greek culture, which tells us that the journey is always more important than the inevitably disappointing destination.) But it is probably fair to say that Cavafy’s popular reputation currently rests almost entirely on the remarkably prescient way in which those other, “sensual” poems, as often as not set in the poet’s present, treat the ever-fascinating and pertinent themes of erotic longing, fulfillment, and loss; the way, too, in which memory preserves what desire so often cannot sustain. That the desire and longing were for other men only makes him seem the more contemporary, the more at home in our own times.

As for the style, it is by now a commonplace that Cavafy’s language, because it generally shuns conventional poetic devices—image, simile, metaphor, specialized diction—is tantamount to prose. One of the first to make this observation was Seferis himself, during the same 1946 lecture at Athens in which he passed judgment on Cavafy’s life. “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order to become prose,” he remarked, although not without admiration. “He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know.” Bare of its own nuances, that appraisal, along with others like it, has inevitably filtered into the popular consciousness and been widely accepted—not least, because the idea of a plainspoken, contemporary Cavafy, impatient with the frills and fripperies characteristic of his Belle Epoque youth, dovetails nicely with what so many see as his principal subject, one that seems to be wholly contemporary, too.

No one more than Cavafy, who studied history not only avidly but with a scholar’s respect for detail and meticulous attention to nuance, would have recognized the dangers of abstracting people from their historical contexts; and nowhere is such abstraction more dangerous than in the case of Cavafy himself. To be sure, his work—the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets—is timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing particulars of the poet’s life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him—one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself). His style, to begin with, is far less prosaic, far richer and more musical, and indeed is rooted far more deeply in the nineteenth century—which, astoundingly it sometimes seems, he inhabited for more than half his life—than is generally credited. (Some readers will be surprised to learn that many of Cavafy’s lyrics, until he was nearly forty, were cast as sonnets or other elaborate verse forms.) As for his subject, there is a crucial specificity there as well, one that tends to be neglected because it can strike readers as abstruse. Here I refer to those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past: poems that, because they seem not to have much to do with our concerns today, are too often passed over in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal.

The aim of the present translation and commentary is to restore the balance, to allow the reader to recapture some of that specificity of both content and, particularly, form. Any translation of a significant work of literature is, to some extent, as much a response to other translations of that work as to the work itself; the present volume is no exception. The most important and popular English translations of Cavafy in the twentieth century were those of John Mavrogordato (1951), Rae Dalven (1961), and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1975); the latter in particular, with its briskly contemporary tone, its spare prosody, and its arresting use of Modern Greek spellings, was instrumental in persuading a new and younger audience that Cavafy’s “unmistakable tone of voice,” as Auden memorably put it, was one worth listening to. And yet precisely because (as Auden went on to observe) that tone of voice seems always to “survive translation,” I have focused my attention on other aspects of the poetry. In attempting to restore certain formal elements in particular, to convey the subtleties of language, diction, meter, and rhyme that enrich Cavafy’s ostensibly prosaic poetry, this translation seeks to give to the interested reader today, as much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek. A Greek, to deal with first things first, that is not at all a straightforward and unadorned everyday language, but which, as I explain below in greater detail, was a complex and subtle amalgam of contemporary and archaic forms, one that perfectly mirrored, and expressed, the blurring of the ancient and the modern that is the great hallmark of his subject matter. And a Greek, too, whose internal cadences and natural music the poet exploited thoroughly. There is no question that Cavafy in Greek is poetry, and beautiful poetry at that: deeply, hauntingly rhythmical, sensuously assonant when not actually rhyming. It seemed to me worthwhile to try to replicate these elements whenever it was possible to do so.

Cavafy’s content also merits renewed attention—both the specific subjects of individual poems and also his larger artistic project, which in fact holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace. For this reason I have provided extensive Notes in addition to a general Introduction. A necessary aspect of the project of presenting Cavafy anew to a public that enjoys poetry but is unlikely to be familiar with many of the eras and places where he likes to situate his poems (late Hellenistic Syria, say, or the fourteenth century in Byzantium; Seleucia, Cyrene, Tigranocerta) is to provide readers with the rich background necessary to decipher those works. Cavafy seems to have inhabited the remote past as fully as he inhabited the recent past, and so to appreciate his poems fully, with their nuances and, so often, their ironies—the latter in particular arising from the tension between what the characters in the poem knew while events were transpiring and what we know now, one or two millennia later—the reader also needs to be able to inhabit both of those pasts; to know what they knew then, and to know what we know now, too.

Readers will also find commentary on certain poems with subjects and settings that might not, at first, appear to require elucidation: poetic creation, erotic desire, the recent past. And yet however familiar or obvious to us the emotions that Cavafy describes may seem to be (the feeling of being “special”—of belonging to a rarefied elite—that comes with being a creative artist), or however self-evident or transparent the circumstances about which he writes, it is worth keeping in mind that the poet’s presentation of such themes was often deeply marked by his reading in the poets and authors of his time—or unexpectedly indebted to his lifelong immersion in ancient history. Our understanding of an ostensibly simple short poem like “Song of Ionia,” for instance—a poem that seems to revel straightforwardly in the fizzy possibility that even today the old gods still dart among the hills on the coast of Ionia—is deepened when we learn that it stemmed from the poet’s poignant vision, while reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of the late Roman emperor Attalus (who was born in Ionia) “singing a touching song—some reminiscence of Ionia and of the days when the gods were not yet dead.” By the same token, “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent,” a poem about the special perception granted to certain gifted men, begins with an epigraph from an ancient biography of the first-century B.C. sage Apollonius of Tyana; but the reader who is given a note explaining who Apollonius was, without being made aware of the strong influence exerted by Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century French Parnassian school on the young Cavafy’s thinking about poetry and “special” vision, is being deprived of a full appreciation of the poem.

That Apollonius poem, which comments implicitly on the role of the artist in the present even as it invokes a very ancient text, embodies a crucial aspect of the entire Cavafian oeuvre. Despite the persistent tendency to divide Cavafy’s poems into two categories—scholarly poems set in the ancient world, and poems about sexual love set in a more or less recognizable present—there is an overarching and crucial coherence to the work as a whole, one we can grasp only when we unravel the meaning of the poet’s famous description of himself as not “a poet only” but as a “poet-historian.” To fail to appreciate his unique perspective, one that (as it were) allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye, is to be deprived of a chance to see the great and moving unity of the poet’s lifelong project.

The Introduction that follows provides a brief survey of the life, in order to give readers a sense of who Cavafy was “outside his poetry”; an extended critical appreciation of the work; a discussion of Cavafy’s handling of formal devices such as rhyme, meter, and enjambment; a note on the arrangement of the various groups of poems in this volume (always a thorny issue in the case of a poet who himself never published a complete collection of his poems); and, finally, an overview of the “Unfinished Poems,” the thirty nearly complete drafts that the poet left among his papers at his death, and which appeared in English for the first time in my translation of The Unfinished Poems (2009). It is my hope that the essay will serve to do what an Introduction is supposed to do if we take seriously the etymology of the word, which is to lead someone into something—the something, in this case, being a destination every bit as worthwhile as the journey.

I

IN ONE SENSE, it was an unexceptional life—or, at least, no more exceptional or distinguished than the lives of certain other great poets, in whom the richness of the work stands in striking contrast to the relative uneventfulness of the life. (Emily Dickinson, say.) Constantine Petrou Cavafy—the Anglicized spelling of the Greek Kavafis was one that Cavafy and his family invariably used—was born in Alexandria in 1863, the youngest of seven surviving sons of parents whose families were not at all untypical of the far-flung Greek diaspora, with its hints of vanished empire. Their roots could be traced not only to the Phanar, the Greek community clustered around the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and to Nichori (Turkish Yeniköy) in the Upper Bosporus, but also to Caesarea, Antioch, and to Jassy, in present-day Moldavia. His father, Peter John Cavafy, was a partner in a flourishing family business devoted to corn and cotton export that eventually had offices in London and Liverpool as well as in several cities in Egypt; after moving from Constantinople to London, he finally settled in Alexandria, which was ruled at the time by the Muslim Khedive but had a large population of Europeans. There he would be considered one of the most important merchants in the mid-1850s—not coincidentally, a time when the Crimean War resulted in a steep rise in the price of grain. The poet’s mother, Haricleia Photiades, the daughter of a diamond merchant from Constantinople, counted an archbishop of Caesarea and a Prince of Samos among her relations. At the height of their wealth and social success in Alexandrian society, the parents of the future poet had, in addition to their other servants, an Italian coachman and an Egyptian groom. Said Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, paid attentions to Haricleia that were, if we are to judge from the photographs of her, purely a matter of politeness; Peter John received a decoration from the Khedive at the opening of the Suez Canal.

What effect the memory of such glory and prestige—carefully tended and endlessly polished by his mother long after she’d become a widow living in not very genteel poverty—might have had on her impressionable and imaginative youngest son, we can only guess at; but it is surely no accident that so much of Cavafy’s poetry is torn between deep sentiment about the lost riches of the past and the intelligent child’s rueful, sharp-eyed appreciation for the dangers of glib nostalgia. For his father’s premature death, when Constantine was only seven, would bring hard times to Haricleia and her seven sons, from which the family fortunes would never really recover: Peter John had lived well but not wisely. For several years the widow Cavafy and her three younger sons ambled back and forth between Paris and London and Liverpool, relying on the generosity of her husband’s brothers. They stayed in England for five years, where Cavafy acquired the slight British inflection that, we are told, accented his Greek. When it became clear that the surviving brothers had hopelessly bungled their own affairs, Haricleia returned to Alexandria in 1877, when Cavafy was fourteen. With the exception of a three-year sojourn in Constantinople, from 1882 to 1885, following the British bombardment of Alexandria (a response to Egyptian nationalist violence against some of the city’s European inhabitants; the bombardment largely destroyed the family home), Cavafy would never live anywhere else again.

For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:

And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.

At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called Constantinopoliad: An Epic, which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation; he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose Le Côté de Guermantes he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.

At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:

Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian étagères holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry to be delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a koré from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)

The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.

Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos, known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,

may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. … It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.

It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry quartier, the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”