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October 14, 2009
CAVAFY: Homoeroticism's pioneer poet
The simultaneous publication by Knopf of two new translations of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy (left) is a literary event of major importance and for queer readers a particular cause for rejoicing, for these twin volumes should help solidify Cavafy’s stature as one of the great poets of the 20th century. It also provides striking confirmation that he wrote some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.
I say “20th century” because, even though Cavafy — who was born in 1863 and died in 1933— spent more than half his life in the 19th century, his finest poems, and those for which he is today best remembered, were all written or revised after 1900; that work represented a remarkable and still somewhat mysterious mid-life transformation of a decent, middling poet into a preeminent one. And because the influential, spare, controlled free verse that flowed from his pen after his reincarnation is so modern, it could have been written yesterday. Even the great W. H. Auden confessed his debt to Cavafy, when he wrote, “I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all.”
“C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems” and “C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems” are both the work of the excellent Daniel Mendelsohn, who translated them and provides extensive introductions and commentaries. A Princeton-trained classicist who teaches at Bard, Mendelsohn is best known to queer readers as the author of the original and stimulating memoir-cum-cultural commentary “An Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” which refracted his own queer experiences through the prism of Greek mythology. Although criticized by some sex-negative hetero reviewers for being replete with accounts of his own erotic adventures, “An Elusive Embrace” was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
Among his other works, last year Mendelsohn published “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken” (Harper), a collection of his scintillating literary and film essays from the New York Review of Books, including his right-on contrarian challenge to the convention that “Brokeback Mountain” was about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn argued that to believe that the “normality” of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal.
With Cavafy’s ”Unfinished Poems,” Mendelsohn brings us the very first English translation of a cache of some 30 poems from Cavafy’s later years that remained hidden for three decades after his death, and includes such gems as the defense of same-sex love in “The Photograph” (1924):
Looking at the photograph of a chum of his,
at his beautiful youthful face
that forever more; — the photograph
was dated ‘Ninety-two,
the sadness of what passes came upon him.
But he draws comfort from the fact that at least
he didn’t let — they didn’t let any foolish shame
get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.
To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles
their sensual sensibility paid no heed.
Constantine Petrou Cavafy (the poet and his family always used the Anglicized spelling of the family name in Greek, Kavafis) was born in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria to a cosmopolitan family of the Greek merchant diaspora, tended by servants and bathed in wealth and social status, and had a peripatetic upbringing in Alexandria, London, and Paris. Cavafy’s mother — left nearly destitute after her incautiously indebted husband’s death — eventually moved 14-year-old Constantine and his two brothers back to Alexandria, where Cavafy (with the exception of a three-year stay with family in Constantinople, after the British bombardment of Alexandria during the repression of Egytian nationalists in 1882 destroyed their home) would live for the remainder of his years.
“The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of 20, with a cousin,” writes Mendelsohn, and thereafter led what he described to a friend as a “double life” — by day as a dutiful son to his doting, corpulent mother (whom he called, in English, “the Fat One”) and as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years, and by night escaping to “the city’s louche quarters,” where he “enjoyed the favors and company of lower-class youths.” As he grew older, most evenings were spent at home, with a book, or entertaining a circle that included the world-famous novelist Nikis Kazantzakis and a constantly renewed assortment of younger writers, admirers, and friends.
Cavafy had been writing poetry in Greek, English, and French since the age of 14, and as a young man began pursuing his poetry in earnest. But he eschewed publication, preferring to have his poems privately printed at his own expense as broadsheets or pamphlets, which he then circulated to friends and devotees. Cavafy’s work was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by the British novelist and pooftah E.M. Forster, who had befriended Cavafy while serving in Alexandria as a conscientious objector assigned to the British Red Cross during World War I. Forster’s famous image of Cavafy as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” captures the quiet, uneventful nature of the Alexandrian poet’s life.
Cavafy’s poetry was informed by a passionate taste for post-Classical Greek history — “from the Hellenic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium,” as Mendelsohn puts it — and, of course, by his homosexual sexuality.
“However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men,” Mendelsohn writes, “Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter of fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wide’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for ‘Hellenic’ civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.”
Thus, the 1911 poem “Dangerous,” Cavafy’s first to situate homoerotic desire in a historic context, is the confession of a fourth-century Syrian student at Alexandria’s famous university, which concludes:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body will I give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
As he neared the end of his life, ended by a laryngeal cancer which for years had reduced his mellifluous voice to a whispered croak, Cavafy’s full embrace of his sexual orientation found increasingly sure-footed assertion, as in the 1927 poem, “Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old”:
Since half past ten he’d waited at the café,
expecting him to appear before too long.
Midnight came and went – and still he waited.
Half past one had come and gone: the café
had emptied out entirely, almost.
He grew bored of reading the newspapers
mechanically. Of his three poor shillings
only one was left: during his long wait
he’d squandered all the rest on coffee and cognac.
He smoked all the cigarettes he had.
All the waiting was exhausting him. Because,
alone as he had been for many hours, he
began to be possessed by irksome thoughts
about the wayward life that he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in — all at once
the weariness, the boredom, the thoughts all fled.
His friend brought some unexpected news:
In the card game he’d won sixty pounds.
Their handsome faces, their exquisite youth,
the sensitive love that they shared between them,
was refreshed, revived, invigorated by
the sixty pounds from the game of cards.
All joy and potency, feeling and beauty,
they went: not to the houses of their upstanding families
(where, at any rate, they were no longer wanted):
to a certain one they knew, and rather special,
to a house of vice they went, and asked for
a bedroom, and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks had all been drained,
and when it was close to four o’clock in the morning,
happy, they gave themselves to love.
Mendelsohn has added immensely to our understanding of these poems and our pleasure in reading them —particularly the historical ones — with extensive explanatory notes on each poem in both collections that make ample use of his own erudition about Hellenic history and literature, previous studies of the poet’s work, and of the wealth of this pack-rat poet’s papers in the Cavafy Archive (which maintains an extensive web site in English at cavafy.com/).
These richly rewarding notes help us enjoy and appreciate the rigor of this poet’s art, for Cavafy was constantly adding to, correcting, and revising his poems before sending them to the printer, sometimes returning to them after putting them aside for years. Mendelsohn’s notes on one jewel from “The Unfinished Poems,” entitled “The Item in the Paper,” about what we would now call homophobia, is a case in point. The translator’s inclusion of earlier drafts in his notes permits us to see how Cavafy crafted the emotional power of the last draft:
A reference had been made, as well, to blackmail.
And here again the newspaper emphasized
its complete and utter contempt for depraved,
for disgraceful, for corrupted morals.
Contempt… And grieving inwardly he
recalled an evening from the year before
which they had spent together, in a room
that was half hotel, half brothel: afterward
they didn’t meet again — not even in the street.
Contempt… And he recalled the sweet lips, the exquisite,
the sublime flesh that he hadn’t kissed enough.
Melancholy, on the train, he read the item.
At eleven at night the corpse was found
on the jetty. It wasn’t certain
that it was a crime. The newspaper
expressed its pity, but, as usual,
it displayed its complete contempt
for the depraved way of life of the victim.
If you do not know the poems of Cavafy, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with this wise and immensely talented queer genius and his “unique voice,” as Auden put it. And if you have some acquaintance with Cavafy’s work, Mendelsohn’s copious, astute, and knowledgeable commentaries on these poems will infinitely enhance your understanding and perception of them, and of their importance. Lovers of literature in general and of poetry in particular owe Mendelsohn a debt of gratitude for these fine new translations and their presentation.
C.P. CAVAFY: COLLECTED POEMS
Translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$35; 547 pages
C.P. CAVAFY:
THE UNFINISHED POEMS
The first English translation, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$30; 121 pages
I say “20th century” because, even though Cavafy — who was born in 1863 and died in 1933— spent more than half his life in the 19th century, his finest poems, and those for which he is today best remembered, were all written or revised after 1900; that work represented a remarkable and still somewhat mysterious mid-life transformation of a decent, middling poet into a preeminent one. And because the influential, spare, controlled free verse that flowed from his pen after his reincarnation is so modern, it could have been written yesterday. Even the great W. H. Auden confessed his debt to Cavafy, when he wrote, “I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all.”
“C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems” and “C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems” are both the work of the excellent Daniel Mendelsohn, who translated them and provides extensive introductions and commentaries. A Princeton-trained classicist who teaches at Bard, Mendelsohn is best known to queer readers as the author of the original and stimulating memoir-cum-cultural commentary “An Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” which refracted his own queer experiences through the prism of Greek mythology. Although criticized by some sex-negative hetero reviewers for being replete with accounts of his own erotic adventures, “An Elusive Embrace” was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
Among his other works, last year Mendelsohn published “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken” (Harper), a collection of his scintillating literary and film essays from the New York Review of Books, including his right-on contrarian challenge to the convention that “Brokeback Mountain” was about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn argued that to believe that the “normality” of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal.
With Cavafy’s ”Unfinished Poems,” Mendelsohn brings us the very first English translation of a cache of some 30 poems from Cavafy’s later years that remained hidden for three decades after his death, and includes such gems as the defense of same-sex love in “The Photograph” (1924):
Looking at the photograph of a chum of his,
at his beautiful youthful face
that forever more; — the photograph
was dated ‘Ninety-two,
the sadness of what passes came upon him.
But he draws comfort from the fact that at least
he didn’t let — they didn’t let any foolish shame
get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.
To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles
their sensual sensibility paid no heed.
Constantine Petrou Cavafy (the poet and his family always used the Anglicized spelling of the family name in Greek, Kavafis) was born in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria to a cosmopolitan family of the Greek merchant diaspora, tended by servants and bathed in wealth and social status, and had a peripatetic upbringing in Alexandria, London, and Paris. Cavafy’s mother — left nearly destitute after her incautiously indebted husband’s death — eventually moved 14-year-old Constantine and his two brothers back to Alexandria, where Cavafy (with the exception of a three-year stay with family in Constantinople, after the British bombardment of Alexandria during the repression of Egytian nationalists in 1882 destroyed their home) would live for the remainder of his years.
“The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of 20, with a cousin,” writes Mendelsohn, and thereafter led what he described to a friend as a “double life” — by day as a dutiful son to his doting, corpulent mother (whom he called, in English, “the Fat One”) and as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years, and by night escaping to “the city’s louche quarters,” where he “enjoyed the favors and company of lower-class youths.” As he grew older, most evenings were spent at home, with a book, or entertaining a circle that included the world-famous novelist Nikis Kazantzakis and a constantly renewed assortment of younger writers, admirers, and friends.
Cavafy had been writing poetry in Greek, English, and French since the age of 14, and as a young man began pursuing his poetry in earnest. But he eschewed publication, preferring to have his poems privately printed at his own expense as broadsheets or pamphlets, which he then circulated to friends and devotees. Cavafy’s work was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by the British novelist and pooftah E.M. Forster, who had befriended Cavafy while serving in Alexandria as a conscientious objector assigned to the British Red Cross during World War I. Forster’s famous image of Cavafy as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” captures the quiet, uneventful nature of the Alexandrian poet’s life.
Cavafy’s poetry was informed by a passionate taste for post-Classical Greek history — “from the Hellenic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium,” as Mendelsohn puts it — and, of course, by his homosexual sexuality.
“However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men,” Mendelsohn writes, “Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter of fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wide’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for ‘Hellenic’ civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.”
Thus, the 1911 poem “Dangerous,” Cavafy’s first to situate homoerotic desire in a historic context, is the confession of a fourth-century Syrian student at Alexandria’s famous university, which concludes:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body will I give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
As he neared the end of his life, ended by a laryngeal cancer which for years had reduced his mellifluous voice to a whispered croak, Cavafy’s full embrace of his sexual orientation found increasingly sure-footed assertion, as in the 1927 poem, “Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old”:
Since half past ten he’d waited at the café,
expecting him to appear before too long.
Midnight came and went – and still he waited.
Half past one had come and gone: the café
had emptied out entirely, almost.
He grew bored of reading the newspapers
mechanically. Of his three poor shillings
only one was left: during his long wait
he’d squandered all the rest on coffee and cognac.
He smoked all the cigarettes he had.
All the waiting was exhausting him. Because,
alone as he had been for many hours, he
began to be possessed by irksome thoughts
about the wayward life that he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in — all at once
the weariness, the boredom, the thoughts all fled.
His friend brought some unexpected news:
In the card game he’d won sixty pounds.
Their handsome faces, their exquisite youth,
the sensitive love that they shared between them,
was refreshed, revived, invigorated by
the sixty pounds from the game of cards.
All joy and potency, feeling and beauty,
they went: not to the houses of their upstanding families
(where, at any rate, they were no longer wanted):
to a certain one they knew, and rather special,
to a house of vice they went, and asked for
a bedroom, and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks had all been drained,
and when it was close to four o’clock in the morning,
happy, they gave themselves to love.
Mendelsohn has added immensely to our understanding of these poems and our pleasure in reading them —particularly the historical ones — with extensive explanatory notes on each poem in both collections that make ample use of his own erudition about Hellenic history and literature, previous studies of the poet’s work, and of the wealth of this pack-rat poet’s papers in the Cavafy Archive (which maintains an extensive web site in English at cavafy.com/).
These richly rewarding notes help us enjoy and appreciate the rigor of this poet’s art, for Cavafy was constantly adding to, correcting, and revising his poems before sending them to the printer, sometimes returning to them after putting them aside for years. Mendelsohn’s notes on one jewel from “The Unfinished Poems,” entitled “The Item in the Paper,” about what we would now call homophobia, is a case in point. The translator’s inclusion of earlier drafts in his notes permits us to see how Cavafy crafted the emotional power of the last draft:
A reference had been made, as well, to blackmail.
And here again the newspaper emphasized
its complete and utter contempt for depraved,
for disgraceful, for corrupted morals.
Contempt… And grieving inwardly he
recalled an evening from the year before
which they had spent together, in a room
that was half hotel, half brothel: afterward
they didn’t meet again — not even in the street.
Contempt… And he recalled the sweet lips, the exquisite,
the sublime flesh that he hadn’t kissed enough.
Melancholy, on the train, he read the item.
At eleven at night the corpse was found
on the jetty. It wasn’t certain
that it was a crime. The newspaper
expressed its pity, but, as usual,
it displayed its complete contempt
for the depraved way of life of the victim.
If you do not know the poems of Cavafy, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with this wise and immensely talented queer genius and his “unique voice,” as Auden put it. And if you have some acquaintance with Cavafy’s work, Mendelsohn’s copious, astute, and knowledgeable commentaries on these poems will infinitely enhance your understanding and perception of them, and of their importance. Lovers of literature in general and of poetry in particular owe Mendelsohn a debt of gratitude for these fine new translations and their presentation.
C.P. CAVAFY: COLLECTED POEMS
Translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$35; 547 pages
C.P. CAVAFY:
THE UNFINISHED POEMS
The first English translation, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$30; 121 pages
The simultaneous publication by Knopf of two new translations of the poetry of Constantine Cavafy is a literary event of major importance and for queer readers a particular cause for rejoicing, for these twin volumes should help solidify Cavafy’s stature as one of the great poets of the 20th century. It also provides striking confirmation that he wrote some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.
I say “20th century” because, even though Cavafy — who was born in 1863 and died in 1933— spent more than half his life in the 19th century, his finest poems, and those for which he is today best remembered, were all written or revised after 1900; that work represented a remarkable and still somewhat mysterious mid-life transformation of a decent, middling poet into a preeminent one. And because the influential, spare, controlled free verse that flowed from his pen after his reincarnation is so modern, it could have been written yesterday. Even the great W. H. Auden confessed his debt to Cavafy, when he wrote, “I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all.”
“C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems” and “C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems” are both the work of the excellent Daniel Mendelsohn, who translated them and provides extensive introductions and commentaries. A Princeton-trained classicist who teaches at Bard, Mendelsohn is best known to queer readers as the author of the original and stimulating memoir-cum-cultural commentary “An Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” which refracted his own queer experiences through the prism of Greek mythology. Although criticized by some sex-negative hetero reviewers for being replete with accounts of his own erotic adventures, “An Elusive Embrace” was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
Among his other works, last year Mendelsohn published “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken” (Harper), a collection of his scintillating literary and film essays from the New York Review of Books, including his right-on contrarian challenge to the convention that “Brokeback Mountain” was about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn argued that to believe that the “normality” of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal.
With Cavafy’s ”Unfinished Poems,” Mendelsohn brings us the very first English translation of a cache of some 30 poems from Cavafy’s later years that remained hidden for three decades after his death, and includes such gems as the defense of same-sex love in “The Photograph” (1924):
Looking at the photograph of a chum of his,
at his beautiful youthful face
that forever more; — the photograph
was dated ‘Ninety-two,
the sadness of what passes came upon him.
But he draws comfort from the fact that at least
he didn’t let — they didn’t let any foolish shame
get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.
To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles
their sensual sensibility paid no heed.
Constantine Petrou Cavafy (the poet and his family always used the Anglicized spelling of the family name in Greek, Kavafis) was born in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria to a cosmopolitan family of the Greek merchant diaspora, tended by servants and bathed in wealth and social status, and had a peripatetic upbringing in Alexandria, London, and Paris. Cavafy’s mother — left nearly destitute after her incautiously indebted husband’s death — eventually moved 14-year-old Constantine and his two brothers back to Alexandria, where Cavafy (with the exception of a three-year stay with family in Constantinople, after the British bombardment of Alexandria during the repression of Egytian nationalists in 1882 destroyed their home) would live for the remainder of his years.
“The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of 20, with a cousin,” writes Mendelsohn, and thereafter led what he described to a friend as a “double life” — by day as a dutiful son to his doting, corpulent mother (whom he called, in English, “the Fat One”) and as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years, and by night escaping to “the city’s louche quarters,” where he “enjoyed the favors and company of lower-class youths.” As he grew older, most evenings were spent at home, with a book, or entertaining a circle that included the world-famous novelist Nikis Kazantzakis and a constantly renewed assortment of younger writers, admirers, and friends.
Cavafy had been writing poetry in Greek, English, and French since the age of 14, and as a young man began pursuing his poetry in earnest. But he eschewed publication, preferring to have his poems privately printed at his own expense as broadsheets or pamphlets, which he then circulated to friends and devotees. Cavafy’s work was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by the British novelist and pooftah E.M. Forster, who had befriended Cavafy while serving in Alexandria as a conscientious objector assigned to the British Red Cross during World War I. Forster’s famous image of Cavafy as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” captures the quiet, uneventful nature of the Alexandrian poet’s life.
Cavafy’s poetry was informed by a passionate taste for post-Classical Greek history — “from the Hellenic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium,” as Mendelsohn puts it — and, of course, by his homosexual sexuality.
“However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men,” Mendelsohn writes, “Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter of fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wide’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for ‘Hellenic’ civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.”
Thus, the 1911 poem “Dangerous,” Cavafy’s first to situate homoerotic desire in a historic context, is the confession of a fourth-century Syrian student at Alexandria’s famous university, which concludes:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body will I give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
As he neared the end of his life, ended by a laryngeal cancer which for years had reduced his mellifluous voice to a whispered croak, Cavafy’s full embrace of his sexual orientation found increasingly sure-footed assertion, as in the 1927 poem, “Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old”:
Since half past ten he’d waited at the café,
expecting him to appear before too long.
Midnight came and went – and still he waited.
Half past one had come and gone: the café
had emptied out entirely, almost.
He grew bored of reading the newspapers
mechanically. Of his three poor shillings
only one was left: during his long wait
he’d squandered all the rest on coffee and cognac.
He smoked all the cigarettes he had.
All the waiting was exhausting him. Because,
alone as he had been for many hours, he
began to be possessed by irksome thoughts
about the wayward life that he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in — all at once
the weariness, the boredom, the thoughts all fled.
His friend brought some unexpected news:
In the card game he’d won sixty pounds.
Their handsome faces, their exquisite youth,
the sensitive love that they shared between them,
was refreshed, revived, invigorated by
the sixty pounds from the game of cards.
All joy and potency, feeling and beauty,
they went: not to the houses of their upstanding families
(where, at any rate, they were no longer wanted):
to a certain one they knew, and rather special,
to a house of vice they went, and asked for
a bedroom, and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks had all been drained,
and when it was close to four o’clock in the morning,
happy, they gave themselves to love.
Mendelsohn has added immensely to our understanding of these poems and our pleasure in reading them —particularly the historical ones — with extensive explanatory notes on each poem in both collections that make ample use of his own erudition about Hellenic history and literature, previous studies of the poet’s work, and of the wealth of this pack-rat poet’s papers in the Cavafy Archive (which maintains an extensive web site in English at cavafy.com/).
These richly rewarding notes help us enjoy and appreciate the rigor of this poet’s art, for Cavafy was constantly adding to, correcting, and revising his poems before sending them to the printer, sometimes returning to them after putting them aside for years. Mendelsohn’s notes on one jewel from “The Unfinished Poems,” entitled “The Item in the Paper,” about what we would now call homophobia, is a case in point. The translator’s inclusion of earlier drafts in his notes permits us to see how Cavafy crafted the emotional power of the last draft:
A reference had been made, as well, to blackmail.
And here again the newspaper emphasized
its complete and utter contempt for depraved,
for disgraceful, for corrupted morals.
Contempt… And grieving inwardly he
recalled an evening from the year before
which they had spent together, in a room
that was half hotel, half brothel: afterward
they didn’t meet again — not even in the street.
Contempt… And he recalled the sweet lips, the exquisite,
the sublime flesh that he hadn’t kissed enough.
Melancholy, on the train, he read the item.
At eleven at night the corpse was found
on the jetty. It wasn’t certain
that it was a crime. The newspaper
expressed its pity, but, as usual,
it displayed its complete contempt
for the depraved way of life of the victim.
If you do not know the poems of Cavafy, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with this wise and immensely talented queer genius and his “unique voice,” as Auden put it. And if you have some acquaintance with Cavafy’s work, Mendelsohn’s copious, astute, and knowledgeable commentaries on these poems will infinitely enhance your understanding and perception of them, and of their importance. Lovers of literature in general and of poetry in particular owe Mendelsohn a debt of gratitude for these fine new translations and their presentation.
C.P. CAVAFY: COLLECTED POEMS
Translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$35; 547 pages
C.P. CAVAFY:
THE UNFINISHED POEMS
The first English translation, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$30; 121 pages
I say “20th century” because, even though Cavafy — who was born in 1863 and died in 1933— spent more than half his life in the 19th century, his finest poems, and those for which he is today best remembered, were all written or revised after 1900; that work represented a remarkable and still somewhat mysterious mid-life transformation of a decent, middling poet into a preeminent one. And because the influential, spare, controlled free verse that flowed from his pen after his reincarnation is so modern, it could have been written yesterday. Even the great W. H. Auden confessed his debt to Cavafy, when he wrote, “I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all.”
“C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems” and “C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems” are both the work of the excellent Daniel Mendelsohn, who translated them and provides extensive introductions and commentaries. A Princeton-trained classicist who teaches at Bard, Mendelsohn is best known to queer readers as the author of the original and stimulating memoir-cum-cultural commentary “An Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity,” which refracted his own queer experiences through the prism of Greek mythology. Although criticized by some sex-negative hetero reviewers for being replete with accounts of his own erotic adventures, “An Elusive Embrace” was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.
Among his other works, last year Mendelsohn published “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken” (Harper), a collection of his scintillating literary and film essays from the New York Review of Books, including his right-on contrarian challenge to the convention that “Brokeback Mountain” was about love in general, and not just gay love. Mendelsohn argued that to believe that the “normality” of the two main characters takes them beyond their gayness is to imply that gayness makes them something other than normal.
With Cavafy’s ”Unfinished Poems,” Mendelsohn brings us the very first English translation of a cache of some 30 poems from Cavafy’s later years that remained hidden for three decades after his death, and includes such gems as the defense of same-sex love in “The Photograph” (1924):
Looking at the photograph of a chum of his,
at his beautiful youthful face
that forever more; — the photograph
was dated ‘Ninety-two,
the sadness of what passes came upon him.
But he draws comfort from the fact that at least
he didn’t let — they didn’t let any foolish shame
get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.
To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles
their sensual sensibility paid no heed.
Constantine Petrou Cavafy (the poet and his family always used the Anglicized spelling of the family name in Greek, Kavafis) was born in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria to a cosmopolitan family of the Greek merchant diaspora, tended by servants and bathed in wealth and social status, and had a peripatetic upbringing in Alexandria, London, and Paris. Cavafy’s mother — left nearly destitute after her incautiously indebted husband’s death — eventually moved 14-year-old Constantine and his two brothers back to Alexandria, where Cavafy (with the exception of a three-year stay with family in Constantinople, after the British bombardment of Alexandria during the repression of Egytian nationalists in 1882 destroyed their home) would live for the remainder of his years.
“The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of 20, with a cousin,” writes Mendelsohn, and thereafter led what he described to a friend as a “double life” — by day as a dutiful son to his doting, corpulent mother (whom he called, in English, “the Fat One”) and as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years, and by night escaping to “the city’s louche quarters,” where he “enjoyed the favors and company of lower-class youths.” As he grew older, most evenings were spent at home, with a book, or entertaining a circle that included the world-famous novelist Nikis Kazantzakis and a constantly renewed assortment of younger writers, admirers, and friends.
Cavafy had been writing poetry in Greek, English, and French since the age of 14, and as a young man began pursuing his poetry in earnest. But he eschewed publication, preferring to have his poems privately printed at his own expense as broadsheets or pamphlets, which he then circulated to friends and devotees. Cavafy’s work was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by the British novelist and pooftah E.M. Forster, who had befriended Cavafy while serving in Alexandria as a conscientious objector assigned to the British Red Cross during World War I. Forster’s famous image of Cavafy as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe,” captures the quiet, uneventful nature of the Alexandrian poet’s life.
Cavafy’s poetry was informed by a passionate taste for post-Classical Greek history — “from the Hellenic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium,” as Mendelsohn puts it — and, of course, by his homosexual sexuality.
“However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men,” Mendelsohn writes, “Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter of fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wide’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for ‘Hellenic’ civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.”
Thus, the 1911 poem “Dangerous,” Cavafy’s first to situate homoerotic desire in a historic context, is the confession of a fourth-century Syrian student at Alexandria’s famous university, which concludes:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body will I give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
As he neared the end of his life, ended by a laryngeal cancer which for years had reduced his mellifluous voice to a whispered croak, Cavafy’s full embrace of his sexual orientation found increasingly sure-footed assertion, as in the 1927 poem, “Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old”:
Since half past ten he’d waited at the café,
expecting him to appear before too long.
Midnight came and went – and still he waited.
Half past one had come and gone: the café
had emptied out entirely, almost.
He grew bored of reading the newspapers
mechanically. Of his three poor shillings
only one was left: during his long wait
he’d squandered all the rest on coffee and cognac.
He smoked all the cigarettes he had.
All the waiting was exhausting him. Because,
alone as he had been for many hours, he
began to be possessed by irksome thoughts
about the wayward life that he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in — all at once
the weariness, the boredom, the thoughts all fled.
His friend brought some unexpected news:
In the card game he’d won sixty pounds.
Their handsome faces, their exquisite youth,
the sensitive love that they shared between them,
was refreshed, revived, invigorated by
the sixty pounds from the game of cards.
All joy and potency, feeling and beauty,
they went: not to the houses of their upstanding families
(where, at any rate, they were no longer wanted):
to a certain one they knew, and rather special,
to a house of vice they went, and asked for
a bedroom, and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks had all been drained,
and when it was close to four o’clock in the morning,
happy, they gave themselves to love.
Mendelsohn has added immensely to our understanding of these poems and our pleasure in reading them —particularly the historical ones — with extensive explanatory notes on each poem in both collections that make ample use of his own erudition about Hellenic history and literature, previous studies of the poet’s work, and of the wealth of this pack-rat poet’s papers in the Cavafy Archive (which maintains an extensive web site in English at cavafy.com/).
These richly rewarding notes help us enjoy and appreciate the rigor of this poet’s art, for Cavafy was constantly adding to, correcting, and revising his poems before sending them to the printer, sometimes returning to them after putting them aside for years. Mendelsohn’s notes on one jewel from “The Unfinished Poems,” entitled “The Item in the Paper,” about what we would now call homophobia, is a case in point. The translator’s inclusion of earlier drafts in his notes permits us to see how Cavafy crafted the emotional power of the last draft:
A reference had been made, as well, to blackmail.
And here again the newspaper emphasized
its complete and utter contempt for depraved,
for disgraceful, for corrupted morals.
Contempt… And grieving inwardly he
recalled an evening from the year before
which they had spent together, in a room
that was half hotel, half brothel: afterward
they didn’t meet again — not even in the street.
Contempt… And he recalled the sweet lips, the exquisite,
the sublime flesh that he hadn’t kissed enough.
Melancholy, on the train, he read the item.
At eleven at night the corpse was found
on the jetty. It wasn’t certain
that it was a crime. The newspaper
expressed its pity, but, as usual,
it displayed its complete contempt
for the depraved way of life of the victim.
If you do not know the poems of Cavafy, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with this wise and immensely talented queer genius and his “unique voice,” as Auden put it. And if you have some acquaintance with Cavafy’s work, Mendelsohn’s copious, astute, and knowledgeable commentaries on these poems will infinitely enhance your understanding and perception of them, and of their importance. Lovers of literature in general and of poetry in particular owe Mendelsohn a debt of gratitude for these fine new translations and their presentation.
C.P. CAVAFY: COLLECTED POEMS
Translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$35; 547 pages
C.P. CAVAFY:
THE UNFINISHED POEMS
The first English translation, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn
Knopf
$30; 121 pages
Posted by Direland at 07:06 PM | Permalink
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Many institutions limit access to their online information. Making this information available will be an asset to all.
Posted by: Research Paper Help | Dec 15, 2009 5:57:44 AM
Cavafy was born in Constatinoiple,not in Alexandria.His family later emigrated to Egypt.He never visited Paris or Rome,or London.The westernmost city he visited was Athens where he spent three months at the end of his life for cancer therapy at the expense of the Greek government.
I certainly prefer the Rae Delvin translation of his poems to the samplings offered above of the Mendelsohn version.
In his travel diaries Kazantzakis mentions his visit to Cavafy at the latter's home in Alexandria.He admits his jealousy of Cavafy's talent ,adding some homophobic remarks on Cavafy's manner of speech.
Posted by: jack said | Oct 22, 2009 7:35:16 AM
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