Ayantika Nath
UG3
Roll number 07
E. M. Forster, in the year 1915, came to Alexandria as a Red Cross functionary whose job it was to interview wounded soldiers about those still missing. It was here that he made an unexpected friend. The friend he made was the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy. In his introduction to Alexandria: A History and A Guide (1961) Forster describes Cavafy as a poet who stood “at a slight angle to the universe.” W. H. Auden agrees on Forster’s view of Cavafy’s unique tone of voice. He remarks Cavafy’s work has the capacity to survive translation so well that the reader who has no knowledge of Greek still feels on reading a poem by Cavafy that “nobody else could possibly have written it.”
There is something distinctively endearing about the image of a man who worked for thirty years as a provisional clerk in the (wonderfully named, very Dante) Third Circle of Irrigation of the Ministry of Public Works by the day, and wrote poetry dedicated to a room, or to a window and walls, or to a night, or to a face half-perceived in the crowd, to a salesclerk, or to the days (and nights) of 1903, of 1908, or of 1909 to see how regret eats away at every instance of remembered bliss by the night. Maybe so much of his poetry is about recollection because he started writing what now composes his major body of work at 40. He lived on the second floor in an apartment in Rue Lepsius in Alexandria. Cavafy cheekily remarked: “Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.” Cavafy did not write to gain commercial success as a poet. His poems were circulated in hand-stitched booklets among a close circle of readers. He never published a collected volume of his poetry during his lifetime, and constantly revised the ones he had written or reshuffled the order in which he wanted them to be read.
Consantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Eygpt, then under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. At nine, Cavafy moved to England but after their family firm Cavafy & Co. was dissolved he moved back to Alexandria in 1876. Except for the three years (1882-1885) when Cavafy and his family lived in Constantinople due to local unrest in Alexandria (culminating to British bombardment of the city), he lived his life in Alexandria, rarely travelling outside his native city.
Like the Greek population of Byzantium before the Turkish invasion, or like Alexandria’s citizens before the Arabs invaded in Late Antiquity, or like Greek exiles who are abandoning their sense of Hellenism in new, transitional stations that turn out to be permanent homes, Cavafy’s men in his poetry (and dare I say Cavafy himself) have nothing to look forward to and everything to look back on. Cavafy’s poems are filled with characters of old men, either wallowing in sorrow in the poem ‘Old Men’s Souls’, or sitting deep inside a cafe bitterly recounting how Prudence cheated them by promising them that they had enough time, in the poem ‘An Old Man’. If there is a single unifying theme to which the totality of C.P. Cavafy’s oeuvre can be reduced, it is the theme of looking back at what has already occurred through the lens of present time. Cavafy thought of himself as a “poet-historian,” which meant that he viewed all human conduct, his own included, in the light of recorded time. Cavafy transforms Alexandria into a “central historical myth”, as Edmund Keeley writes in “An Introduction” in The Essential Cavafy, 1995. It is this phenomenon that I plan to examine in this paper.
Cavafy’s personal attitude to the city of Alexandria can be best understood in his poem ‘The City’, published in his collected works, Part II (1905-1915). Cavafy was very fussy and meticulous about the order in which his poetry should be published. Keeping that in mind, it is important to note the thematic implications of ‘The City’ being the first poem in his collection. “By now I’ve gotten used to Alexandria,” he writes in a note to himself, “and its very likely that even if I were rich I’d stay here. But in spite of this, how the place disturbs me. What trouble, what a burden small cities are―what lack of freedom. I’d stay here (then again I’m not entirely certain that I’d stay) because it is like a native country for me, because it is related to my life’s memories. But how much a man like me―so different―needs a large city. London, let’s say.”
Here is the poem:
“The City” by C. P. Cavafy (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”
You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.
At first reading the poem seems to be a half-hearted dejection against the city of Alexandria. No matter where one goes, their native city shall haunt them forever. Orhan Pamuk, in an article in The New York Times, 2013 writes, “I think of him as an old man wandering the familiar streets of an aging city. I think of him as a lover of books living as a member of a minority within a minority. I think of him as a lonely, provincial man who is fully aware of his provinciality, and who turns that knowledge into a kind of wisdom.” Precisely this is what Cavafy does in the poem ‘The City’, with careful restraint and introspection. On closer reading, the poem is not a rejection of provincial life; it is a meditation on the nature of life itself. The quality that leads to a monotonous life is not the fact that one lives in a small corner of the world; it is the characteristic of human conduct.
This is very similar to his poem ‘The Satrapy’. Most likely the poem was based on Cavafy’s reading of Themistocles’ life in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, who after being ostracized from Athens was made the governor of Magnesia by the new Persian King, Artaxerxes, in the year 465. Cavafy addresses Themistocles and asks
“the Assembly, the Theatre, the Crown of Laurel.
How can Artaxerxes give you these?
Where will you find such things in your satrapy?
And without them, what kind of life will you have?”
(lines 18-21)
This form of address is special trait in Cavafy. Cavafy’s poetic rhetoric is immediate and passionate. He describes historical events which have occurred and concluded long ago with urgency as the scene unfolds in front of his eyes in present time. His voice, to me, seems to be similar to voice of the chorus in the Greek tragedy, representing the time that is here and now. Cavafy’s poetic voice, just like the chorus, is moved by sentiments but unable to ward off fate. Cavafy is always a witness of what happens before him- he can never alter the outcome, but he provides a testimony by narrating the incident.
“ In its songs, the chorus for its part, is less concerned to glorify the exemplary virtues of the hero, as in the tradition of lyric in Simonides or Pindar, than to express anxiety and uncertainties about him”, Jean Pierre-Vernant writes in Chapter One of Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.
“I’d rather watch than write” Cavafy writes in his poem ‘Painted Things’. It is this attitude that he observes while he writes the poetry inspired by Plutarch, Ovid, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides , Philostratus and other major Greek historians and authors.
To illustrate this, the poems to be looked at are ‘The Funeral of Sarpedon’, published in 1898 under the title ‘Ancient Days’, based upon a passage from Homer’s Iliad book 16, II.663-83. The poem recounts Zeus consenting to his son Sarpedon’s death in the hands of Patroclus. Homer’s account pays no attention to the feelings of Zeus. In Homer’s account, Zeus gives a detailed step by step instruction to Apollo, ordering that Sarpedon should be anointed with ambrosia and given to the swift messengers “Sleep and Death” who will lay him in the rich countryside of Lykia for his brothers and countrymen to honour his tomb. If one goes strictly by what is told to us in terms of information, Cavafy provides no additional detail. What Cavafy is elaborate on the emotional repercussions Zeus faces at the death of his son. Herein lies the distinguishing quality of Cavafy’s historical narratives. Cavafy writes as the scene occurs in front of him
“Zeus is heavy with grief….
He had left his beloved child alone
And now he’s lost – for such the Law demanded.
But at least he will honour him in death.” (lines 1-8)
He adopts a similar poetic technique in his poem ‘Lies’ where he describes how Thetis demands an explanation for Achilles’ death, as he was blessed to be free from illness all his life by Apollo. In an ironic twist it is revealed that it was indeed Apollo who had slain Achilles in Troy.
“Thetis tore her purple robes;
She pulled off her bracelets and jewels
And hurled them to the ground.”
Cavafy often transforms his sources and provides a narrative more suited to his poetic sensibility. His project of creating a historical myth of Alexandria often results in deification of the city. In another one of his famous poems, ‘The God Abandoning Antony’, Cavafy substitutes the city of Alexandria in place of the gods Dionysus and Hercules, altering the narratives of Plutarch in Parallel Lives and Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra. Cavafy elaborates on what Mark Antony’s stance should be while hearing the invisible procession of a troupe of players. Antony should not mourn his failing luck, but bid goodbye to Alexandria with grace and courage. He advises Antony to
“go firmly to the window
And listen with deep emotion, but not
With the whining, the pleases 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.” (lines 14-19)
In Plutarch, Bacchus or Dionysus was the ‘God’ who abandons him. Plutarch writes “Those who sought the meaning of the sign were of the opinion that the god to whom Antony always most likened and attached himself was now deserting him.”
In Shakespeare “ ‘Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him.”
Cavafy transforms the god into the actual city of Alexandria, which now abandons Antony.
Cavafy’s most widely read poem, Ithaka is a perfect example to highlight his reworking of classical narratives by looking at the same incident, but focusing on it using a different philosophical and moral outlook. Cavafy, unlike Homer in The Odyssey or Alfred Lord Tennyson in ‘Ulysses’ , addresses Odysseus directly as “You”:
“As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.” (lines 1-3)
In Tennyson’s Ulysses his protagonist boasts of travelling and being enriched by experiences of people he has met and places he has visited.
“I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.” (lines 11-17)
In Cavafy’s Ithaka, the tone is cynical and filled with dejection. The poet writes from the vantage point of the present. He is a God-like figure, aware of what is about to befall on Ulysses, and advises in a detached tone. It has absolutely none of the pride or ambition present in Tennyson’s Ulysses.
Contrast Cavafy’s
“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.”
with Tennyson’s
“As tho’ to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”
Homer’s Odysseus is a nostalgic hero obsessed with his idea of ‘nostos’ or homecoming, and Tennyson’s Ulysses is power-hungry, hankering for adventure and almost incapable of inaction. In contrast to them, Cavafy’s Odysseus is advised to understand the significance of Ithaka is in the ten year voyage that it inspired. Tennyson and Homer’s Odysseus, as we know, will not be satisfied upon reaching Ithaka and soon make plans for another voyage. Cavafy’s Odysseus will know
“Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t 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’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”
This unhurried devotion towards life and knowledge is an
essentially Cavafian theme, found in many of his poems. His diasporic bias is evident in ‘Ithaka’. In
his poem titled ‘Going back home from Greece’ his philosopher protagonist
writes that those Greeks who come from the waters of Cyprus, Syria and Eygpt
may contain feelings that are out of place in Hellenism, but they should be
honoured as a cause for pride.
Cavafy’s Alexandrian myth which was created in
the year 1910 was expanded in the years 1910-1933, where Cavafy wrote poems
covering a broad world of Hellenism and a stretch of time that included
Alexander’s days to the fall of the Byzantine Empire. In his mythical world,
Cavafy teaches one, above all, to experience the joy of beauty, diversity, and
the human experience. He places a high premium on various mixed cultures and
overlapping timelines, writing about Roman rules, Pagan gods and Christian
devotees alike. In a dramatic monologue titled “Ionic”, a 8th or 9th
century Christian speaker recounts how ancient gods endure destruction in spite
of the iconoclast edict promulgated by Leo III in 730. In this poem Cavafy celebrates
the value of historical perspicacity which teaches one about the moral and
tragic sense of life.
“ That we’ve broken their
statues,
that we’ve driven them
out of their temples,
doesn’t mean at all that
the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they’re
still in love with you,
their souls still keep
your memory.
When an August dawn
wakes over you,
your atmosphere is
potent with their life,
And sometimes a young
etherial figure,
indistinct, in rapid
flight,
wings across your hills.”
Cavafy’s mythical world presents us with an image of the good life which is acutely aware of its prospect of death but constantly striving for peace nonetheless. If Cavafy’s perspective seems detached, it is born out of his ambivalent stance towards his city, a place he has the longest, most tumultuous love affair with. He uses dramatic irony and mocks the self-delusional Pagan Gods and tragic heroes, but is rarely empathetic. His skepticism, honest self awareness, and innate ability to strive for creation of a vast mythical universe spanning centuries by picking out especially evocative moments from ancient works of history is what makes his vision so unique.
On Cavafy’s walk home from work he passed St. Saba’s, erected on the site of an ancient Byzantine church, and, nearby, the Greek Hospital, where Hadrian was said to have built his Egyptian palace. A few steps from Cavafy’s apartment was where Alexander the Great’s body had once lain on display, encased in a gold sarcophagus.In his poem ‘The Church’ Cavafy writes
“When I enter a Greek Church…
My thoughts return to the glory of our race:
The grandeur of our Byzantine past”. Cavafy was acutely aware of the rich heritage of Alexandria and this is what led to him obsessively creating a mythical world of Alexandria in the past. In this process, he became a connoisseur of history’s castaways and one of the most important voices emerging out of 20th century Greece.
CITATIONS:
Dan Chiasson, ‘The Man with A Past’, The New York Times, 2009https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/23/man-with-a-past
Orhan Pamuk, ‘Other Countries, Other Shores’, The New York Review of Books, online article, 2013.https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/books/review/other-countries-other-shores.html
Edmund Keeley, “An Introduction”. In The Essential Cavafy. Selected and with an Introduction by Edmund Keeley. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Notes by George Savidis. The Ecco Press, 1995
C.P Cavafy:Selected Poems,Penguin Classics,Translated
by Avi Sharon 2008.
A historical guide to Cavafy’s Alexandria : 331 BCE – 641 CE / Kyriakos Savvopoulos ;translation by Evangelos Sachperoglou. – Alexandria, Egypt : Bibliotheca Alexandrina,2013.
Alexandria in the Time of Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) Kato, Hiroshi; Iwasaki, Erina. Hitoshubashi University Repository Journal Article,. 2017.
Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece. Jean-Pierre Vernant , Pierre Vidal-Naquet, New York:Zone Books. 1988.
History, Literature, Criticism 