Constantine Cavafy

[kah-vah-fee]

Cavafy, Constantine, pseud. of Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis, 1863-1933, Greek poet. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he spent most of his life there, but lived for about five years in England. Although he published little, only about 150 poems, he is regarded as one of the foremost modern Greek poets and one of the finest poets of the 20th cent. Cavafy is particularly noted for the rueful, elegiac, and yet utterly unsentimental tone of his verse. In it, he mingles vernacular and literary language, skillfully combining the exalted with the mundane. Skeptical and nonconformist, he was critical of Christian and nationalistic morality and was one of the first to write openly about homosexual love. He also was obsessed with the ancient Greek and Byzantine past, and that history (and characters from it) frequently appear in his poetry. Among his best-known poems are "The City," "Waiting for the Barbarians," and "The God Abandons Antony." Cavafy was introduced to an English readership in 1919 by E. M. Forster, and has since become a favorite of English-language poets. His Collected Poems have been published in a number of English translations.

See translations by R. Dalven (1961), E. Keeley and P. Sherrard (1975, rev. bilingual ed. 2009), and D. Mendelsohn (2009); memoir and translations by M. Kolaitis (1980); biography by R. Liddell (1974, repr. 2002); studies by K. Kapre-Karka (1982), G. Jusdanis (1987), and J. P. Anton (1995).

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Licensed from Columbia University Press

Constantine Cavafy

orig. Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis

Constantine Cavafy.

(born April 17, 1863, Alexandria—died April 29, 1933, Alexandria) Poet of Turkish-Greek ancestry. Born to Greek parents, Cavafy worked as an obscure civil servant in Alexandria his entire adult life. His small body of work, some 200 poems in an intimate, realistic, lyrical style, is written in a strange combination of classically based and modern Greek. Many deal with history, principally the Hellenistic era; many others reflect Cavafy's homosexual life. His poems became popular and influential after his death, and he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest of modern Greek poets.

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Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

Constantine P. Cavafy

Constantine P. Cavafy, also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes (Greek Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης) (April 29, 1863–April 29, 1933) was a major Greek poet who worked as a journalist and civil servant. He has been called a skeptic and a neo-pagan. In his poetry he examines critically some aspects of Christianity, patriotism, and homosexuality, though he was not always comfortable with his role as a nonconformist. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

Biography

Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, and was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church. His father was a prosperous importer-exporter who had lived in England in earlier years and acquired British nationality. After his father died in 1870, Cavafy and his family settled, for a while, in Liverpool, UK. Cavafy moved back to Alexandria in 1877, after the family faced financial problems in the crash of 1876.

Disturbances in Alexandria in 1882 caused the family again temporarily to move, this time to Constantinople. When a revolt against Anglo-French control of Egypt broke out in Alexandria precipating the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War, Alexandria was bombarded by an English fleet and the family apartment at Ramli was burned. In 1885, Cavafy returned to Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life. He worked first as a journalist, then for the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works for thirty years. (Egypt was a British protectorate until 1926.) From 1891 to 1904 he published his poetry in broadsheet form, only for his close friends, receiving whatever acclaim mainly within the Greek community in Alexandria. He was introduced to mainland-Greek literary circles through a favourable review by Xenopoulos in 1903, but got little recognition, his style being very different from then-mainstream Greek poetry. Only 20 years later, after the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), a new generation of almost nihilist poets (e.g. Karyotakis) would find inspiration in Cavafy's work. He died of cancer of the larynx on April 29 1933, his 70th birthday.

A biographical note written by Cavafy reads as follows:

"I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria—at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece. My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian."

It is generally accepted that Cavafy was homosexual and gay themes appear in a number of his poems.

Since his death, Cavafy's reputation has grown. He is now considered one of the finest modern Greek poets. His poetry is now taught at schools in mainland Greece and throughout the world in Universities.

In 1996 Yannis Smaragdis made a movie about his life. Unfortunately this film is only available in Greece in a non subtitled version.

Work

Cavafy has been 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 a role in Greek culture. Uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality, and a fatalistic existential nostalgia are some of the defining themes.

Besides his subjects, unconventional for the time, his poems also exhibit a skilled and versatile craftsmanship, which is almost completely lost in translation. 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 an enormous knowledge of history, especially of the Hellenistic era. Many of his poems are either 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". This work, in the person of a disingenuous Byzantine narrator, cynically explores the view that cultivating fear of an invisible external enemy usually serves internal purposes. Parallels have been drawn between the poem's message and the war on terror. In 1911, he wrote Ithaca, inspired by the Homeric return journey of Odysseus to his home island, as depicted in the Odyssey. The poem's theme is that the enjoyment of the journey of life, and the increasing maturity of the soul as that journey continues, is all the traveler can ask.

Cavafy divides his own work into three categories:

Historical poems

These poems are mainly inspired by the Hellenistic era with Alexandria at primary focus. Other poems originate from Helleno-romaic antiquity and the Byzantine era. Mythological references are also present. The periods chosen are mostly of decline and decadence (eg Trojans); his heroes facing the final end.

Sensual poems

The sensual poems are filled with lyricism and emotion; inspired by recollection and remembrance. The past and former actions, sometimes along with the vision for the future consist the muse of Cavafy in writing these poems.

Philosophical poems

Also called instructive poems they are divided into poems with consultations to poets and poems that deal with other situations such as closure (for example, "The walls"), debt (for example, "Thermopylae"), and human dignity (for example, "The God Abandons Antony").

Bibliography

Selections of Cavafy's poems appeared only in pamphlets, privately printed booklets and broadsheets during his lifetime. The first publication in book form was "Ποιήματα" (Poiēmata, "Poems"), published posthumously in Alexandria, 1935.

Volumes with translations of Cavafy's poetry in English include:

The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, introduction by W. H. Auden (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961)
Poems by C. P. Cavafy, translated by John Mavrogordato (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978, first edition in 1951)
Poems by Constantine Cavafy, translated by George Khairallah (Beirut: privately printed, 1979)
C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, Revised edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis, foreword by Gore Vidal (New York: Harcourt, 2001)
Poems by C. P. Cavafy, translated by J.C. Cavafy (Athens: Ikaros, 2003)
C. P. Cavafy, The Canon, translated by Stratis Haviaras, foreword by Seamus Heaney (Athens: Hermes Publishing, 2004)

Translations of Cavafy's poems are also included in

Modern Greek Poetry, edited by Kimon Friar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973)
Memas Kolaitis, Cavafy as I knew him (Santa Barbara, CA: Kolaitis Dictionaries, 1980)
James Merrill, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

Other works:

Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography (London: Duckworth, 1974). A widely acclaimed biography of Cavafy. This biography has also been translated in Greek (Ikaros, 1980) and Spanish (Ediciones Paidos Iberica, 2004).
Edmund Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). An extensive analysis of Cavafy's works.
Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). Provides a portrait of the city during the first half of the twentieth century and a biographical account of Cavafy and his influence on E.M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell.
Michael Haag, Vintage Alexandria: Photographs of the City 1860-1960 (New York and Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 2008). A photographic record of the cosmopolitan city as it was known to Cavafy. It includes photographs of Cavafy, E M Forster, Lawrence Durrell, and people they knew in Alexandria.

Filmography:

Cavafy, a biographical film was directed by Iannis Smaragdis in 1996 with music by Vangelis. A literary form of the script of the film was also published in book form by Smaragdis.

Other references:

C. P. Cavafy appears as a character in the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell.
The Weddings Parties Anything song 'The Afternoon Sun' is based on the Cavafy poem of the same title.
The American poet Mark Doty's book My Alexandria uses the place and imagery of Cavafy to create a comparable contemporary landscape.
The Canadian poet and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen memorably transformed Cavafy's poem "The God Abandons Antony," about Mark Antony's loss of the city of Alexandria and his empire, into "Alexandra Leaving," a song about a lost love.