Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933)

A compelling collection of all the poetry of the early 20th-century Greek 'poet-historian' C. P. Cavafy. Whilst that moniker might sound pretentious at first, it is an accurate description of the Alexandrian; his poems draw on Classical history, both well-known and obscure, and his research is meticulous and comprehensive. This can make some of Cavafy's poetry difficult to approach, as one requires the historical background for many of these poems in order to try and understand the main show more thrust of the poem. (To this end, editor Daniel Mendelsohn's excellent and exhaustive Notes – which comprise of approximately half of the entire book – are essential in navigating the poetry, rather than just a boon for more scholarly readers.)

This may deny the pleasure of Cavafy to many prospective readers, but in my opinion it was well-worth the mental effort it required. There's no poet quite like Cavafy; the muse he taps into is quite different from any other poet's, and consequently has an unspoilt richness that indeed makes it seem, to paraphrase his most famous poem 'Ithaca', like first putting into harbours new to your eyes. It's like entering a whole new world, and unfortunately Cavafy's pioneering work forged a path that has not been entirely explored by subsequent poets. Cavafy just gets the romantic undertones inherent in the study of history: the idea that, as Mendelsohn notes, "the backward glance can, in the end, be a glimpse into the future" (pg. lxxii) and, even more significantly, the idea that problems of emotion and of history both require the same remedy: the realisation that our understanding of events whether personal or historical can only come with the passage of time. For, as Mendelsohn further notes, Cavafy's poetry is:

"… richly coloured by a profound sympathy for human striving in the face of impossible obstacles. (Which could be the armies of Octavian or taboos against forbidden desires.)… That appreciation, that sympathy, that understanding are, of course, made possible only by Time – the medium that makes History possible, too… His poetry returns obsessively to a question that is, essentially, a historian's question: how the passage of time affects our understanding of events – whether the time in question is the millennia that have elapsed since 31 B.C., when the Hellenophile Marc Antony's dreams of an Eastern Empire were pulverized by Rome (the subject of seven poems), or the mere years that, in the poem 'Since Nine –', have passed since those long-ago nights that the narrator spent in bustling cafés and crowded city streets: a space of time that has since been filled with the deaths of loved ones whose value he only now appreciates…" (pg. xxxv – xxxvi)

It is this awareness of the immediacy of history, allowing "the blurring of the ancient and the modern" (pg. xx), which gives Cavafy his durability and integrity. I confess that I was drawn to read Cavafy due to my love of Greek mythology (I was already aware of and impressed by 'Ithaca'), but I found a body of work even more satisfying than just an indulgence of my own pet interests.

Favourites include: 'The God Abandons Antony', 'Ithaca', 'Trojans', 'Far Off', 'Gray', 'The Mirror in the Entrance', 'Candles', 'Thermopylae', 'The Windows', 'Walls', 'Oedipus', 'Azure Eyes', 'Hidden', 'The Rest I Shall Tell in Hades to Those Below', 'That's How', 'Half an Hour' and the prose poem 'Ships'. show less

Michael Dirda's Classics for Pleasure put this modern Greek poet on my radar. Luckily, the next day, I got a small bonus on my paycheck and allowed myself to purchase this Harcourt paperback of Cavafy's complete poems, as translated by Rae Dalven. With poetry, I like to dive right in and read poems at random from the beginning, middle, and end of the book. This gives me a sense of the poet's themes, motifs, style, and a view of their development as an artist (typically a book of complete show more poetry is assembled chronologically). Though Cavafy's poems aren't of epic length, they are of many Hesiodic and Homeric topics and figures. (I always imagine that, in the same way Chaucer and Shakespeare loom over modern English poets, Homer and Pindar must loom over modern Greek ones.) His style is clear, forthright, and barbed with longing. I agree with W. H. Auden in his introduction that Cavafy's poetry lacks ornamentation, but I disagree with Auden that "simile and metaphor are devices he never uses"—the first poem in this volume, "Desires," begins with the word "Like" and proceeds to be, in fact, entirely a simile. A sampling of the verses should serve to give the flavor of Cavafy's disposition: "Every lost chance / now mocks his senseless prudence"; "Body, remember..."; "they have built big and high walls around me"; "Shut up in a greenhouse"; "other echos / return from the first poetry of our lives"; "And the morrow ends by not resembling a morrow"; "And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?" The main thread running through the poems is the modernist contradiction of proselytizing carpe diem from a state of ennui. show less

God, if I could write like this, I would -- well, I wouldn't be me, but I would have an awesome amount of knowledge about Classical, Late Antiquity, and Modern Greece and Egypt. And be a far more generous person. This is the book that reminds me that Alexandria was a Hellenistic city for a damn long time, a book that overflows with compassion and empathy, a book which moves seamlessly between paganism and early Christianity. I wish there were more notes, but I can understand why Keeley, show more Sherrard, and Savidis decided to limit the text that wasn't Cavafy.

Every time I pick this up, I discover a new favorite, but among the ones which have stuck with me for years are "The City," "The Satrapy," "One of Their Gods," "On Board Ship," and a bunch of others. show less

So, to be clear, I'm not giving Cavafy's poems 2 stars; my opprobrium is reserved for Daniel Mendelsohn's dishearteningly dead translations. Yes, Cavafy was writing free verse in the modernist vein. Yes, his poetic tone often borders on conversational. But Mendelsohn has decided to ignore the rhythmic torrents of the great poet's work, to select the most mundane word in any situation, to replace the feeling with the cerebral, rather than let the two walk hand in hand. The conversational, show more perhaps, has become colloquial.

It is certainly impressive for Mendelsohn to have translated all of Cavafy's poems (this edition is a "highlights reel" from the full two-volume collection). This should not be taken as a slight on his lifetime of work or his command of Greek! (Who am I to make such judgments?) Yet dedication alone, however admirable, is not achievement. Perhaps it's an American thing - or a generational one! Mendelsohn's collection has been rapturously received by American institutions, and I suspect there is something appealing, to those soaked in the American literary tradition, in the understated ordinariness of this verse.

As one who does not have Greek, it would be folly to discuss the art of translation in this context. So allow me to compare just two lines from Cavafy's most famous poem The City to try and express the intangible something which I find to be missing from DM's translation.

Here is DM:
"You'll always end up in this city. Don't bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else;
they don't exist."

Here Edmund Keeley:
" You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road."

Rae Delven:
"Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other–
There is no ship for you, there is no road."

Theoharis C. Theoharis:
"Always you will end up in this city.
For you there is no boat - abandon hope of that -
no road to other things."

And finally Lawrence Durrell, consciously "transplanting" rather than "translating", in a version from the appendices to his Justine:
"The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself."

Four versions of Cavafy I would enjoy reading. And none of them Mendelsohn's. show less