Constantine P. Cavafy: A True Hellenistic Poet
When Constantine Peter Cavafy died, on his 70th birthday on April 29th, 1933, his fame as a poet was limited to a few close friends and members of the Alexandrian literati. E.M Forster, a close friend, rated him so highly he said ‘I did a little to spread his fame. It was about the best thing I ever did.’ Cavafy’s poetry, often classical in nature, is truly wonderful and he fits into the Hellenistic tradition as much as any Greek poet.
Having been born into an affluent middle-class family and experiencing a cosmopolitan upbringing, moving from Alexandria to Liverpool, alongside spells living in London and Constantinople, Cavafy experienced his families declining fortunes first hand. His father’s company dissolved and his family’s Alexandrian flat burnt down during the Anglo-Egyptian War of 1882 caused by a British bombardment of the city. It was only the prescient thinking of his mother, whom had removed the family a mere two weeks earlier from Alexandria to Constantinople, that secured the young Cavafy’s safety, alongside that of his 7 brothers.
The subsequent 3-year spell (1882–85) in Constantinople was transformative to Cavafy’s idea of who, in effect, he was. One could say that he “found himself” in Constantinople. His three years in the “Queen City of the Greeks” (“Βασιλεουσα”) was formative for him as it allowed him to study the history of the Greeks as his own people, something being schooled in England did not afford him. In an essay about Cavafy’s poetry, Forster highlights both Cavafy as the historian and the difference in his perspective from our classics:
“The historian comes to the front now, and it is interesting to note how different is his history from an Englishman’s. He even looks back upon a different Greece. Athens and Sparta, so drubbed into us at school, are to him two quarrelsome little slave states, ephemeral beside the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed them, just as these are ephemeral beside the secular empire of Constantinople…Alexandria, his birthplace, came into being just when Public School Greece decayed; kings, emperors, patriarchs have trodden the ground between his office and his flat; his literary ancestor if he has one is Callimachus, and his poems… are prefaced by quotations from Philostratus or Lucian.” — E.M Forster, ‘Pharos and Pharillon’ (1923)
Returning from Constantinople having given up British citizenship, which condemned him to a temporary clerk job in the Third Circle of Irrigation at the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt, which was renewed annually for the thirty years from 1892 onwards. It was at that time Cavafy started writing poetry properly and pursuing men for sex; or, as W.H Auden put it in his introduction to translation of ‘The Complete Poems’, “the erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs”. The nature of Cavafy’s homosexuality, alongside the erotic nature of many poems (‘Come back’, or ‘One night’ for example), adds a dynamic to Cavafy’s poems in a time not used to such openness. Moreover, Cavafy seems to use the poem as a way of remembering specific erotic encounters, which draws us towards the thrust of Cavafy’s work: his apparent loneliness. He is, to steal from Forster again “at a slight angle to the universe”, wherein everything he writes or does is done meticulously yet almost impersonally; he is as at much ease when encountering young Caesarion in a book of Ptolemaic inscriptions (subject of the poem Kaisarion) as when he bumps into you in the street.
His poetry has the aura of loneliness in the same way a blues standard does: it is a reticence in mood, displayed by the language of artist; the blues player in his demure use of melody and tune etc., and in the language of the poet. Love affairs are brief and ephemeral, they “must fade” or “must age” as he tells us in ‘Come Back’, all of which contributes to an essential image of loneliness. Cavafy, whilst wonderfully playing on the magnificent ideas of the Hellenistic tradition, conjures an abject isolation — an individualistic isolation. However, due to his use of history, the isolation Cavafy conjures draws us in also, it is the idea that no matter how alone one is there is a reassurance in the past, a kind of poignancy mixed with the obscurity and distance that time’s passing brings. As Forester says:
‘Which is better the world or seclusion? Cavafy, who has tried both, can’t say.’
Cavafy then is a majestic poet. A poet who meshes the traditions of Hellenistic poetry with the isolation of being a modern urbanite and, moreover, one who so transgresses the norms of the society in which he lives. He remains relevant to this day due to this, and his works on urban loneliness and life’s meaning, such as Ithaka or The City are a reminder of this. Cavafy occupied an ancient aristocratic position towards poetry, insofar as:
‘His poets do not think of themselves as persons of great public importance and entitled to universal homage, but, rather, as citizens of a small republic in which one is judged by one’s peers and the standard of judgment is strict.’ — W. H. Auden
As such, all that remains is for us to judge him for ourselves.
Ithaka — Constantine P. Cavafy, (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard):
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon — don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon — you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind —
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Read more of his work at http://www.cavafy.com/index.asp.
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