C.P. Cavafy: Cosmopolitan Poet

Early of their biography of the Greek poet CP Cavafy (1863-1933), Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys announce that they’ve written a ‘thematic’ biography fairly than a ‘linear’ biography. The info concerning the lifetime of their topic, in line with them, are fairly unobtrusive and clear. “We subsequently selected to start out and finish his life story along with his loss of life after which inform a round story by means of completely different thematic sequences.” They proceed: “The thematic method additionally permits us to attract consideration to the artificiality of biography as a mode of writing.”

They don’t delve into the artificiality of the usual biography, however in recent times it has turn into more and more obvious. The usual biography, beginning with the topic’s ancestors and ending along with his loss of life, not appears as applicable because it was once. The biography that covers that life yr after yr, month after month and has each element at its disposal all too usually permits the essential components of that life to flee it. In biography, longer is just not all the time higher. One thinks of the just lately revealed biography of William F. Buckley Jr. by Sam Tanenhaus, a e book thirty years within the making, over a thousand pages lengthy, that nobody appears to have preferred.

CP Cavafy was a cosmopolitan, a very worldwide determine. He spoke three languages ​​and lived his total life in England, Greece and Turkey, spending a lot of his life within the Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria. He got here from a business household, importers of cotton textiles, whose fortunes took a downward flip in his youth. Cash was a perennial drawback for Cavafy. He labored for thirty years as a clerk within the Alexandria Bureau of Irrigation, a not-so-urgent job, however one from which he wanted the paycheck. He was additionally an lively gay at a time when homosexuality, though broadly practiced, was the supply of social shame, whereas Oscar Wilde’s scandal was nonetheless alive.

Above all, Constantine Cavafy was a poet who labored endlessly on his poems, which have been his personal cause for existence. As Messrs. Jusdanis and Jeffreys write, “Poetry turned his life and he would reside for poetry.” Greek poet and critic George Seferis wrote that “Cavafy doesn’t exist outdoors his poems.”

Jusdanis and Jeffreys’ biography describes in nice element Cavafy’s in depth modifying and transforming of his poems, generally spanning a long time. ‘A poem is rarely completed,’ wrote Paul Valéry, ‘solely deserted.’ Maybe nobody was extra true than Cavafy, who by no means revealed a e book of his poems throughout his lifetime, though occasionally he despatched booklets of his poems to pals or editors. On the identical time, Cavafy was a ruthless self-promoter and supervisor of his personal profession. Jusdanis and Jeffreys do a wonderful job of describing this complicated networking on Cavafy’s half, cultivating friendships with critics and editors who might advance his personal profession, as they put it, “reader by reader.”

Cavafy wrote his poems in trendy Greek, a minority language, however his status quickly turned worldwide; that is as a result of varied translations of his poems into completely different languages. How can this be when poetry, because the previous saying goes, is misplaced in translation?

In his introduction to Rae Dalven’s translation of Cavafy’s poems, WH Auden addresses this query. Auden had no trendy Greek (neither did I), however however discovered Cavafy’s poems fascinating (as did I). He notes: apropos his personal poetry, that “I can consider poems that, if Cavafy had been unknown to me, I ought to have written very otherwise or maybe not written in any respect.” Auden additional asks:

What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives and thrills translation? One thing that I can solely name, very imperfectly, a tone, a private speech. … Once I learn each poem of his, I really feel, “This reveals an individual with a singular perspective on the world.” It appears very unusual to me that the speech on self-disclosure must be translatable, however I’m satisfied that that is the case.

Auden makes no try to explain that tone, which is worldly, aristocratic, realized, and wealthy in allusions.

Cavafy’s poems are impressively unadorned. He avoids metaphors and comparisons. He avoids writing about nature. Politics pursuits him little, besides in a philosophical, Aristotelian sense. A Cavafy poem is often set out in clear descriptive, nearly prosaic language. In contrast to a lot trendy poetry, his poems require no unpacking, evaluation, or rationalization. They’re clearly not on the entrance of the category. “Cavafy,” wrote George Seferis, “stands on the border the place poetry strips bare to turn into prose.”

As his biographers word, Cavafy’s poems “fall into three broad classes: philosophical, historic, and hedonistic.” Cavafy’s personal principle of poetry concerned, as Jusdanis and Jeffreys put it, that “the detachment from the historic gaze was used as a method of talking concerning the self, the space between previous and current was shortened by the emotion of empathy, and antiquity was used to consider the self and the self about antiquity.” Sir Maurice Bowra factors out that Cavafy “was not within the nice classes of historical past, however within the smaller episodes, through which he noticed extra human curiosity than within the triumph of heroes.” In a lot of Cavafy’s poems, to adapt the title of 1 poem, “The Magi see issues which are about to occur.”

The hedonistic Cavafy poems are the truth is poems about his gay life. Jusdanis and Jeffreys word that Cavafy paid for many of his intercourse. The poems are primarily about pick-ups and one-night stands. What’s stunning is the variety of poems dedicated to this topic. Of the 175 poems revealed in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translation, through which I just lately reread Cavafy, no fewer than 66 of the 175 poems within the e book are about his gay adventures, all of which describe what Cavafy himself calls “the identical deadly pleasure.” He writes:

He swears every so often that he’ll begin a greater life.
However when the evening comes with its personal counsel,
its personal compromises and prospects –
when the evening comes with its personal energy
of a physique that wants and calls for,
he goes again misplaced to the identical deadly pleasure.

That is all very properly for the poet, however, as Auden notes, “What, one could ask, would be the way forward for the artist’s companion?”

A poet has solely to put in writing 4 or 5 imperishable poems to ascertain his personal status. On this context, consider TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin. The poems of Cavafy that survive and that guarantee his continued excessive status are primarily his historic poems. Amongst them are ‘Thermopylae’, ‘Ready for the Barbarians’, ‘Trojans’, ‘Ithaka’, ‘The God Leaves Antony’, ‘Alexandrian Kings’, ‘The Glory of the Ptolemies’, ‘Nero’s Deadline’ and ‘Kaisarion’.

“Kaisarion” is concerning the youngster of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, who was executed by Octavian in 30 BC, on the age of 17, as a result of he feared potential rivals in his personal energy, and is a attribute Cavafy efficiency:

And there you have been together with your indefinable allure.
As a result of we all know
so little about you from historical past,
I might type you extra freely in my ideas.
I made you lovely and delicate.
My artwork offers you face
a dreamy, engaging magnificence.
And that is how utterly I imagined you
so late final evening
when my lamp went out – I let it exit on goal –
it appeared such as you entered my room,
it appeared such as you have been standing there in entrance of me, me
as you’ll have carried out
in conquered Alexandria,
pale and weary, very best in your sorrow,
I nonetheless hope they really feel sorry for you,
that scum who whispered, “Too many Caesars.”

Within the poems of CP Cavafy, “destiny is a traitor” and “fortune modifications all of a sudden”. His poems are with out phantasm. The thriller of human nature didn’t frighten him, however supplied him with considered one of his biggest topics. All this, collectively along with his good language manipulation, made CP Cavafy a member of the very unique membership referred to as the Nice Poets.

Constantine Cavafy: a brand new biography
by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 pp., $40

Joseph Epstein is the latest writer of The novel, who needs it? (Encounter books).