Complete Poems (2 page)

“O
UTSIDE 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
N 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.