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Konstantinos Kavafis
(1863-1933) - Constantine
Cavafy
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Greek poet, who published only about 200 privately printed poems. Constantine P. Cavafy is regarded as the greatest Mediterranean poet of modern times.
Constantine P. Cavafy was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (or Kabaphs) in Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy merchant family. Originally the family came from Constantinople, Turkey, where Cavafy lived from 1880 to 1885. His father, Peter John Cavafy, married the poet's mother Haricleia (1835-1899) in 1849. She was the daughter of a diamond merchant. After
his father's premature death in 1872, Cavafy was taken to
Liverpool, England, for five years. Haricleia and her seven sons never
recovered financially, but had to rely on the generosity of Peter
John's brothers. The family's home was largely destroyed in July 1882,
when the British bombarded Alexandria. During his his stay in England Cavafy acquired a slight
British inflection. Apart from the years in Istanbul
(1882-85), he spent the rest of his life in Alexandria: "however it's
been marred in wars, / however it's been reduced, it stays a wonderful
city," Cavafy said of his cosmopolitan home
town. (from 'Exiles,' in Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, p. 264) Of the ancient Greek city nothing survived the conquering Arabs. Alexandria's Arabic heritage did not affect noteworthy Cavafy's work, which essentially cherished the Greek world of Alexander the Great and his followers, the old, lost civilised world beyond which lived only 'barbarians'. "What is shocking about Cavafy's writing is the absence of Mediterranean or eastern imagery," said Marguerite Yourcenar. "He was cut off from the Arabic and Islamic world, and his eastern side is suspended." (The Atlas of Literature, edited by Malcolm Bradbury, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1996, p. 291) In
his famous poem, 'Waiting for the Barbarians,' Cavafy
commented the role which the arrival of the new rulers – again – was supposedly
to have – they are always coming but the cycle has broken: "So now what
will become of us, without barbarians. / Those men were one sort of
resolution." Is has been noted how the deliberately flat ending resonates with T. S. Eliot's
final words in 'The Hollow Men' (1925):
"This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." The
two poets were not bound together by influence. "Cavafy is always
discovering things, but his discoveries are made only along that lonely
path which he follows himself. So far as my own knowledge of literature
goes, I know of no other poetry so isolated as his." ('Cavafy and Eliot — A Comparison,' in On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism by George Seferis,
translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos, with an introduction
by Rex Warner, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1966, p. 122) When
the family's prosperity declined, Cavafy worked 34 years
intermittently as journalist, broker, and at the Irrigation Office of
the Ministry of Public Works,
from which he retired in 1922. Enjoying his
family's respectable position in the lively society of Alexandria,
Cavafy led an uneventful life. In the evenings he dined with his
mother. Only trips to Athens, France, England, and Italy brought some
changes in his routines. In confessional notes Cavafy recorded his "solitary
erotic
passion" (apparently frequent masturbation), which caused him much
guilt and distress: "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?" (quoted in 'Introduction: The Poet-Historian' by Daniel Mendelsohn, in Collected Poems
by C. P. Cavafy, translated, with an introduction anf commentary by
Daniel Mendelsohn, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. xxii) By 1911, Cavafy saw no need to struggle with his homosexual
impulses any longer, writing in the poem 'Dangerous Thoughs':
"Strengthened by study and reflection / I won't fear my passions like a
coward."
(quoted in Conversing Identities: Encounters Between British, Irish and Greek Poetry, 1922-1952 by Konstantina Georganta, Amsterdam - New York, NY: Rodopi, 2012, p. 41) Little is known about Cavafy's love life which he had to hide, but he had affairs and he
visited most likely the bisexual brothels. For a period he had a room
in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine. His first homosexual
experience Cavafy probably had with a cousin, while living in
Constantinople. Even though Cavafy had been writing poems since his early teens, his first book was published when he was 41. It was reissued five years later with additional seven poems. Cavafy published no further works during his lifetime. At his apartment on Rue Lepsius he had a library, which contained about three hundred volumes of novels by unknown writers, with the exceptions of Marcel Proust and Georges Simenon. Cavafy started his career under the influence of late-Victorian and Decadent European models, but then abandoned attempts to compose poetry in foreign tongues. As a writer Cavafy was perfectionist – he printed his poems by himself and delivered them only to close friends. The poems had sometimes handwritten corrections. Main themes were fate, the conflict between high ideals and reality, homosexual love, art, and politics. Among his confessional poems with homosexual theme is 'The Bandaged Shoulder' (1919), much admired by Lawrence Durrell. "When he left, I found, in front of his chair, / a bloody rag, part of the dressing, / a rag to be thrown straight into the garbage; / and I put it to my lips / and kept it there a long while— / the blood of love against my lips." (Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy, edited by George Savidis, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, rev. ed. 1992, p. 205) Fourteen of Cavafy's poems were published in a pamphlet in 1904. The edition was enlarged in 1910. Several dozens appeared subsequent years in a number of privately printed booklets and broadsheets. These editions contained mostly the same poems, first arranged thematically, and then chronologically. Close to one third of his poems were never printed in any form while he lived. 'One Night' (1907), one of the erotic poems Cavafy wrote during the years in Alexandria, referred to a passing sexual encounter: "And there on the common, the humble bed / I had passion's body, intoxicating joy / from sensual, rose lips— / rose lips of such an ecstasy / that writing now, after so many years, / in my solitary house, I'm drunk that way again." (Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, translated, with an introduction and notes by Theoharis Constantine Theoharis, foreword by Gore Vidal, New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2001, p. 40) In book form Cavafy's poems were first published without dates before World War II and reprinted in 1949. Poiēmata (The Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy), edited by Rika Sengopoulou, appeared posthumously in 1935 in Alexandria. A lifelong smoker, Cavafy was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx in 1932. Following a tracheotomy at the Red Cross Hospital in Athens, he lost his voice. Cavafy died on April 29, 1933, in Alexandria. Nowadays the cafés that the poet frequented on the Rue Misalla (now Safiya Zaghlul) have been largely replaced by shops. Cavafy composed rhymed as well as free verse, but never loose, unstructured, or irregular poems. He used iambic, eleven-syllable measures, including the popular fifteen-syllable verse of the demotic tradition. After giving up experiments with different literary models, Cavafy mixed the demotic and pure Greek called katharevousa, and used his wide knowledge of the history of East Roman and Byzantine empires as the basis of his themes. Between 1893 and 1899 he made notes on Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; the work had had a great impact on his imagination. In 'The God Abandons Anthony' he utilized Shakespeare's play Anthony and Cleopatra and Plutarch's Life of Anthony to describe sense of loss through the fictive voice of an unknown person, who addresses Mark Anthony: As one long prepared, and graced with courage, Like in Oscar Wilde, aestheticism and skepticism marked Cavafy's work. One of his central motifs was regret for old age: "You will not find other places, you will not find other seas. / The city will follow you. All roads you walk / will be these roads. And you will age in these same neighborhoods; / and in these same houses you will go gray." ('The City,' in Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, p. 3) Past and present, East and West, Greek and 'barbarian' were fused into sophisticated commentaries on paganism, Christianity, and decadent modern world, but he did not write nostalgically of the remote past – the irony is that was real then, is no longer real now. Cavafy sketched a rich gallery of historical, semiobscure, or fictitious characters, whom he used as personae acting, or being discussed, in the episodes of his poems. Sometimes his style is dramatic, as in the 'Waiting for the Barbarians' (1898), and printed in 1904. The South-African writer J. M. Coetzee borrowed its title for his novel from 1980. Generally, Cavafy's tone is restrained, that of an impartial observer of history and human nature. Cavafy's poems have been translated into English, French, Italian, and German, and several other languages, among other into Finnish. Despite judging him "the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet," the 1963 Nobel laureate George Seferis was his ardent admirer. E. M. Forster, who met the poet during World War I (their corresponcence, The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle, was published in 2009), persuaded Eliot to publish several Cavafy's lyrics in The Criterion in 1924. 'Ithaca,' translated by G. Valassopoulo, appeared in the journal in July 1924. Other poems followed. A selection of Cavafy's poems was
also published in Forster's Pharos
and Pharillon (1923), but he never managed to bring out a volume of Cavafy's poetry in England –
partly due to his friend's reluctance to promote his own work. However,
Cavafy acknowledged that Forster had a good sense of his poetry. (Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy by Jane Lagoudis Pinchin, 1977, p. 109) In addition, Cavafy became known as the 'poet of the city'
from the many references in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. The English novelist John Fowles
once remarked that Cavafy is for
him the great poet of the Levant. The threshold between popular culture
and Cavafy's sophisticated poetry was crossed in 2017, when the poet
was featured in the Corto Maltese comics titled Equatoria,
written by Juan Díaz Canales and drawn by Rubén Pellejero. In the
story, Corto saves Cavafy by stopping two National party thugs from
beating him up.
Selected works:
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