C.P. Cavafy

 

C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the most influential poet in modern Greek, was the ninth child of rich Constantinople merchants. He was educated in England and Alexandria, but moved back to stay with his grandfather and two brothers in Constantinople when the family business collapsed. Cavafy worked briefly for an Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Cotton Exchange, but at 29 became a clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, a position he held for 30 years. He lived with his unmarried brothers and their mother until the latter's death in 1899, had two brief love affairs with men, and thereafter lived on his own in a furniture-filled flat above a much-frequented male brothel. A dapper but solitary man, Cavafy made few friends or literary contacts. His poems were never sold in book form, but appeared in pamphlets, creating little stir. He was awarded the Order of the Phoenix in 1926, but his reputation is largely posthumous. He became a little seedy towards the end, and died of cancer of the larynx.

Cavafy wrote in modern demotic Greek, in a style not far from prose, and a stripped prose at that. His sparse style avoided rhetoric and metaphor, but conveyed a mythical world of Hellenic exile with irony, erotic hedonism and sometimes humorous acceptance. Cavafy's poetry has an unmistakable tone: realistic, taking life for what it is, small in the dark lens of history but filled with individual moments of happiness, particularly of sensual pleasure. Alexandria is never far away, a city murmurous with past greatness but also mercantile, hardheaded and business-like. The second importance of Cavafy is his style: very simple, unemphatic, almost throwaway. The poetry is created by a finely-honed sensibility and not verbal fireworks. The language does not call attention to itself, but has been carefully constructed from everyday speech so that an individual, almost random event or recollection becomes something significant and worth dwelling on.

The Greek language spread, but Greece itself lost its identity as city states were amalgamated into the Hellenic, Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Greek poetry of the Alexandrian school inspired the great Roman poets, but was somewhat derivative of the classical. Literature specifically Greek survived on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire, particularly areas under Venetian influence, and joined the European mainstream after liberation in 1828. Cavafy's work is modern, in some ways more contemporary than the poetry of Nikos Kazantzakis (1885-1957), Kostas Varnalis (1895-1974) and Takis Papatsonis (1895-1976). Modernism proper began with the Generation of the Thirties movement, two of whom won the Nobel Prize in Literature: George Seferis (1900-71) and Odysseus Elytis (1911-96). Seferis created a language rich in nuance, and Elytis a mythology of images with surrealistic overtones. W.W.II brought somber realism in the work of Takis Sinopoulos, Manolis Anagostakis, Miltos Sachtouris and Nikos Karouzos. Contemporary poetry flourishes, and is much influenced by postwar American figures.

Cavafy translates well into English — his Greek was indeed influenced by the English he spoke well — and online versions of his poems are provided by: George Barbanis, Huck Gutman, Aliki Barnstone, Alicia Ostriker, Rae Dalven, Keeley & Sherrard, thrace,and the other world. What little biography exists for Cavafy is collected in R. Liddell's Cavafy: A Critical Biography (1974), and the following will also be of interest: E. Keeley and P. Sherrard's C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (1992), G. Jusdanis's The Poetics of Cavafy (1987), C.T. Dimaris's A History of Modern Greek Literature (1972) and E. Keeley's Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (1983).

Our suggestion: The Complete Poems of Cavafy: Expanded Edition. Translators Konstantinos Petrou Kabaphes and Rae Dalven. Harvest/HBJ Book. 1976. $11.56.

It's difficult to make recommendations: so many versions of Cavafy have appeared in recent years. This is a fairly old edition, but still very popular. The Introduction is by W. H. Auden.

 

Greek language resources are here.

email us   |   about poetry magic   | siteplan

 

C.P. Cavafy

Greek Poetry Resources

Site Navigation


Poets