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 Greek
poet published only about 200 privately printed poems. Cavafy has
come in recent years to be regarded as the greatest Mediterranean
poet of modern times.
He who longs to strengthen his spirit
must go beyond obedience and respect,
He will continue to honour some laws
but he will mostly violate
both law and custom.
(from Strengthening the Spirit, 1903)
Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, into a wealthy merchant family.
Originally the family came from Constantinople, Turkey, where Cavafy
lived from 1880 to 1885. After his father's death in 1872 he was
taken to Liverpool, England, for five years. Apart from the years
in Istanbul (1882-85), he spent the rest of his life in Alexandria.
When the family's prosperity declined, Cavafy worked intermittently
for 34 years as journalist, broker, and in the Irrigation Service,
from which he retired in 1922.
Enjoying his family's respectable position in the cosmopolitan
society of Alexandria, Cavafy led an uneventful life of routine,
which was interrupted only by short trips to Athens, France, England,
and Italy. His first book was published when he was 41, and reissued
five years later with additional seven poems. He published no further
works during his lifetime.
As a writer Cavafy was a perfectionist - he printed his poems by
himself and delivered them only to close friends. Main themes in
his works were homosexual love, art, and politics. He started writing
poetry under the influence of late-Victorian and Decadent European
models, but then abandoned his attempts to compose in foreign tongues.
Fourteen of Cavafy's poems appeared 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,' written 1907, was
one of the erotic poems Cavafy wrote during the years in Alexandria,
and referred to a passing sexual encounter. It showed the poet's
devotion to a sensual pleasure, free and joyous.
And there on that common, humble bed,
I had love's body, hand those intoxicating lips,
red and sensual,
red lips of such intoxication
that now as I write, after so many years,
in my lonely house, I'm drunk with passion again.
In book form Cavafy's poems were first published without dates
before World War II and reprinted in 1949. PIIMATA (The Poems of
Constantine P. Cavafy) appeared posthumously in 1935 in Alexandria.
Cavafy died on April 29, 1933 in Alexandria.
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. In 'The God Abandon's Anthony'
he used Shakespeare's play Anthony and Cleopatra and Plutarch's
Life of Anthony to describe a sense of loss through the fictive
voice of an unknown person who addresses Mark Anthony:
"As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as it right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing."
Past and present, East and West, Greek and 'barbarian' were fused
into sophisticated commentaries on man's adventure. Cavafy sketched
a rich gallery of historical, semi obscure, or ficticious characters,
whom he used as personae acting, or being discussed, in the episodes
of his poems. Often his style was dramatic, as in the famous Waiting
for the Barbarians. Among his confessional poems with homosexual
theme is The Bandaged Shoulder, much admired by Lawrence
Durrell.
Cavafy's poems have been translated into English, French, Italian,
and German, and several other languages. The 1963 Nobel laureate
George Seferis was his ardent admirer, E.M. Forster persuaded T.S.
Eliot to publish several Cavafy's lyrics in The Criterion
in 1924. The English novelist John Fowles has remarked that Cavafy
is for him the great poet of the Levant.
For further information: Pharos and Pharillon by E.M.
Forster (1923); Cavafy: A Critical Biography by R. Liddell (1974);
Cavafy's Alexandria by E. Keeley (1976); Alexandria Still: Forster,
Durrell, and Cavafy by J.L. Pinchin (1977); The Poetics of Cavafy
by G. Jusdanis (1987); C. P. Cavafy by C. Robinson (1988); C.P.
Cavafy by Christopher Rochelle (1990) - See also: E.M.
Forster - selection of Cavafy's poems was published in Forster's
Pharos and Pharillon (1923) - Note: Cavafy become also
known as the 'poet of the city' from the many references in Lawrence
Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. - Other writers who have depicted
Alexandria: Edwardel-Kharret in City of Saffron (1989) and
Girls of Alexandria (1993); Naguib Mahfouz in the novel Miramar
(1978)).
"What is shocking about Cavafy's writing is the absence of
Mediterranean or eastern imagery... He was cut off from the Arabic
and Islamic world, and his eastern side is suspended."
Margaret Yourcenar in The Atlas of Literature (1996)
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