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Poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 - 1933)
Born in Alexandria's Greek community, he attended school in England, and begins writing poetry in Constantinople. He worked as a journalist and a broker, before obtaining a job in the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, a position he held for 30 years.
Cavafy's poetry reflects his homosexuality, his admiration for ordinary people, and the early death of many family members. A fascination for history is reflected in his work. He acquires fame after 1920. E. M. Forster described him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." Arnold J. Toynbee and T. S. Eliot were also admirers of his work.
He died from cancer of the larynx. His Alexandria apartment is now a museum.
Cavafy never uses complicated imagery, his poems are always bare descriptions of events. When successful, this lays open the mystery of daily life. When not, it can feel pedestrian. Many of his poems frankly explore incidents of love from a homosexual perspective.
Cavafy is probably best known for his 1911 poem "Ithaka." In it he presents us all as on the same trip as Odyssesus, trying, through adventures to make it back to our own Ithaka. However, Cavafy directs us to see that it is the adventures, and not the home at the end, that represent the riches we are being offered.
When setting out upon your way to Ithaca,wish always that your course be long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
...
then pray that the road is long.
That summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
....
Better that it should last for many years,
and that, now old, you moor at Ithaca at last,
a man enriched by all you gained upon the way,
and not expecting Ithaca to give you further wealth.
For Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
...
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what these Ithacas mean.
Cavafy used various meters carefully, something that cannot be translated. He also played with the double nature of the Greek at his time, using both demotic and purist Greek, also more or less untranslatable.
Here are excerpts from some of his work I find moving.
An Old Man
Describes a man reading the paper
at a cafe while he regrets the missed opportunities of youth.
And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.
Thermopylae
Honor to those who in their lives
are committed and guard their Thermopylae.
Never stirring from duty;
just and upright in all their deeds,
but with pity and compassion too;
...
And they merit greater honor
when they foresee (and many do foresee)
that Ephialtes will finally appear,
and in the end the Medes will go through.
Waiting
for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the public square?
The barbarians are to arrive today.
(Cavafy describes how all of polite society has organized themselves to await and impress the barbarians, but the barbarians don't appear.)
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come,
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Works
C. P. Cavafy
Collected Poems
1990
(Complete works in Greek)
The Complete Poems of Cavafy: Translated by Rae Dalven with an introduction
by W. H. Auden.
Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1961
(One edition of the complete works in English).