Constantine P. Cavafy
Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy, was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. A major figure of modern Greek literature, he is sometimes considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. His works and consciously individual style earned him a place among the most important contributors not only to Greek poetry, but to Western poetry as a whole.
Cavafy's poetic canon consists of 154 poems, while dozens more that remained incomplete or in sketch form were not published until much later. He consistently refused to publish his work in books, preferring to share it through local newspapers and magazines, or even print it himself on broadsheets and give it away to anyone who might be interested. His most important poems were written after his fortieth birthday and published two years after his death.
Cavafy's work has been translated numerous times into many languages. His friend E. M. Forster, the novelist and literary critic, first introduced his poems to the English-speaking world in 1923; he referred to him as "The Poet", famously describing him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe". His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace".
Biography
Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria where his Greek parents settled in 1855; he was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church and had six older brothers. Originating from the Phanariot Greek community of Constantinople, his father was named Petros Ioannis —hence the Petrou patronymic in his name—and his mother Charicleia. His father was a prosperous merchant who had lived in England in earlier years and held both Greek and British citizenship. Two years after his father's sudden death in 1870, Cavafy and his family settled for a while in England, moving between Liverpool and London. In 1876, the family faced financial problems due to the Long Depression of 1873 and with their business now dissolved they moved back to Alexandria in 1877. Cavafy attended the Greek college "Hermes", where he made his first close friends and at the age of eighteen started drafting his own historical dictionary.In 1882, disturbances in Alexandria caused the family to move, though again temporarily, to Constantinople, where they stayed at the house of his maternal grandfather, Georgakis Photiades. In that year a revolt broke out in Alexandria against the Anglo-French control of Egypt, precipitating the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War. During these events, Alexandria was bombarded, and the family apartment at Ramleh was burned. Upon his arrival in Constantinople, the nineteen-year old Cavafy first came in contact with his many relatives and started researching his ancestry, trying to define himself in the wider Hellenic context. There he started preparing for a career in journalism and politics, and began his first systematic attempts to write poetry.
In 1885, Cavafy returned to Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life, leaving it only for excursions and travels abroad. After his arrival, he reacquired his Greek citizenship and abandoned the British citizenship his father had acquired in the late 1840s. He started working as a news correspondent at the journal Telegraphos and later worked at the stock exchange. He was eventually hired as a temporary, due to his foreign citizenship, clerk in the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. A conscientious worker, Cavafy held this position by renewing it annually for thirty years. During these decades, a series of unexpected deaths of close friends and relatives left their mark on him. He published his poetry from 1891 to 1904 in the form of broadsheets, and only for his close friends. Any acclaim he received came mainly from within the Greek community of Alexandria. In 1903, he was introduced to mainland-Greek literary circles through a favourable review by Gregorios Xenopoulos. He received little recognition because his style differed markedly from mainstream Greek poetry of the period. Twenty years later, after the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, a new generation of almost nihilist poets found inspiration in Cavafy's work.
A biographical note written by Cavafy reads:
In 1922, Cavafy quit his high-ranking position at the department of Public Works, an act that he characterized as liberation, and devoted himself to the completion of his poetic work. In 1926, the Greek state honoured Cavafy for his contribution to Greek letters by awarding him the silver medal of the Order of Phoenix. He died of cancer of the larynx on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday. Since his death, Cavafy's reputation has grown; his poetry is taught in school in Greece and Cyprus, and in universities around the world.
E. M. Forster knew him personally and wrote a memoir of him, contained in his book Alexandria. Forster, Arnold J. Toynbee, and T. S. Eliot were among the earliest promoters of Cavafy in the English-speaking world before the Second World War. In 1966, David Hockney made a series of prints to illustrate a selection of Cavafy's poems, including In the dull village.
Work
Cavafy's complete literary corpus includes the 154 poems that constitute his poetic canon; his 75 unpublished or "hidden" poems, that were found completed in his archive or in the hands of friends, and weren't published until 1968; his 37 rejected poems, which he published but later renounced; his 30 incomplete poems that were found unfinished in his archive; as well as numerous other prose poems, essays, and letters. According to the poet's instructions, his poems are classified into three categories: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual.Cavafy was instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both at home and abroad. His poems are, typically, concise but intimate evocations of real or literary figures and milieux that have played roles in Greek culture. Some of the defining themes are uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality, and a fatalistic existential nostalgia. Besides his subjects, unconventional for the time, his poems also exhibit a skilled and versatile craftsmanship, which is extremely difficult to translate. Cavafy was a perfectionist, obsessively refining every single line of his poetry. His mature style was a free iambic form, free in the sense that verses rarely rhyme and are usually from 10 to 17 syllables. In his poems, the presence of rhyme usually implies irony.
Cavafy drew his themes from personal experience, along with a deep and wide knowledge of history, especially of the Hellenistic era. Many of his poems are pseudo-historical, or seemingly historical, or accurately but quirkily historical.
One of Cavafy's most important works is his 1904 poem "Waiting for the Barbarians". The poem begins by describing a city-state in decline, whose population and legislators are waiting for the arrival of the barbarians. When night falls, the barbarians have not arrived. The poem ends: "What is to become of us without barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort." The poem influenced literary works such as The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati, The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq, and Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee.
In 1911, Cavafy wrote "Ithaca", often considered his best-known poem, inspired by the Homeric return journey of Odysseus to his home island, as depicted in the Odyssey. The poem's theme is the destination which produces the journey of life: "Keep Ithaca always in your mind. / Arriving there is what you're destined for". The traveller should set out with hope, and at the end you may find Ithaca has no more riches to give you, but "Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey".
Almost all of Cavafy's work was in Greek; yet, his poetry remained unrecognized and underestimated in Greece, until after the publication of the first anthology in 1935 by Heracles Apostolidis. His unique style and language had attracted the criticism of Kostis Palamas, the greatest poet of his era in mainland Greece, and his followers, who were in favour of the simplest form of Demotic Greek.
He is known for his prosaic use of metaphors, his brilliant use of historical imagery, and his aesthetic perfectionism. These attributes, amongst others, have assured him an enduring place in the literary pantheon of the Western World.
Historical poems
Cavafy wrote over a dozen historical poems about famous historical figures and regular people. He was mainly inspired by the Hellenistic era with Alexandria at primary focus. Other poems originate from Helleno-Romanistic antiquity and the Byzantine era. Mythological references are also present. The periods chosen are mostly of decline and decadence ; his heroes facing the final end. His historical poems include: "The Glory of the Ptolemies", "In Sparta", "Come, O King of Lacedaemonians", "The First Step", "In the Year 200 B.C.", "If Only They Had Seen to It", "The Displeasure of Seleucid", "Theodotus", "Alexandrian Kings", "In Alexandria, 31 B.C.", "The God Forsakes Antony", "In a Township of Asia Minor", "Caesarion", "The Potentate from Western Libya", "Of the Hebrews ", "Tomb of Eurion", "Tomb of Lanes", "Myres: Alexandrian A.D. 340", "Perilous Things", "From the School of the Renowned Philosopher", "A Priest of the Serapeum", "Kleitos Illness", "If Dead Indeed", "In the Month of Athyr", "Tomb of Ignatius", "From Ammones Who Died Aged 29 in 610", "Aemilianus Monae", "Alexandrian, A.D. 628-655", "In Church", "Morning Sea".Homoerotic poems
Cavafy's sensual poems are filled with the lyricism and emotion of same-sex love, inspired by recollection and remembrance. The past and former actions, sometimes along with the vision for the future underlie the muse of Cavafy in writing these poems. As poet George Kalogeris observes:He is perhaps most popular today for his erotic verse, in which the Alexandrian youth in his poems seem to have stepped right out of the Greek Anthology, and into a less accepting world that makes them vulnerable, and often keeps them in poverty, though the same Hellenic amber immures their beautiful bodies. The subjects of his poems often have a provocative glamour to them even in barest outline: the homoerotic one night stand that is remembered for a lifetime, the oracular pronouncement unheeded, the talented youth prone to self destruction, the offhand remark that indicates a crack in the imperial façade.