I bought A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece at Blackwell's, Oxford, at 13.46 on 11 February 1995, my receipt/bookmark tells me. My purchase, a moment in time, was given significance by its sequel, my introduction to Cavafy. Shortly afterwards, I read for the first time CP Cavafy's poem Ithaca. Cavafy could have made a poem from that moment, a purchase and its outcome. His poetry is unified by a focus on time and its significance, and in the first of his poems that I encountered the poet uses Odysseus' journey back to his homeland of Ithaca, from the Trojan War, to reflect that it is the experiences of the journey that will be enriching, rather than the destination. 'You must always have Ithaca in your mind, Arrival there is your predestination.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better that it should last many years; … Wise as you will have become, with all your experience, You will have understood the meaning of an Ithaca.’ I fell in love with the poem’s evocation of travelling in Greece, recalling my own visits to Greek islands, and the lovely experience of arriving somewhere new and wandering along the harbour in search of a kafeneon. ‘Many be the summer mornings When with what pleasure, with what delight You enter harbours never seen before …’ Sofia has often printed stories of readers’ personal faith journeys (or more likely journeys questioning and reshaping faith or its successor) which sometimes, but rarely, lead in a circle back to the church or chapel of their youth. For the Odysseus of Greek myth, however, return to Ithaca brought no lasting satisfaction in the familiar world of home. Another of Cavafy’s poems, Second Odyssey, sees him setting out once again, bored by the familiar: ‘Far from every Achaean sea He felt that he lived once again … And his heart, adventuress, Exalted coldly, empty of love.’ Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the youngest of the nine children of a wealthy Greek businessman. His father died in 1870 and, in financial difficulties, the family went to live in Liverpool and then in London, with the business collapsing in 1876. After a brief return to Alexandria, the family moved to Constantinople for three years.
On his return to Alexandria, Cavafy tried various jobs, eventually becoming a part-time clerk in the Irrigation Department, a post he kept until his retirement. His mother’s death in 1898 gave to him the freedom to explore his own homosexuality in his poetry. In 1901 and 1903, he visited Athens and began to be noticed by Greek intellectuals. He lived quietly in Alexandria until his death from throat cancer on his seventieth birthday in 1933.
He was, said EM Forster who met him in Alexandria, ‘a very wise, very civilised man’, familiar with the poetry and history of the ancient world, of the Hellenic Mediterranean, and with contemporary European writing in English and French: Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire, for example. He read widely, making disdainful notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, influenced strongly by a Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, who promulgated a view of an unbroken Greek history from ancient Greece, through Byzantine times to the modern era. His poetry was circulated to friends, and each poem and its associated notes kept safely in a little paper folder, allowing scholars to trace his careful redrafting over the years.
If ever I want to read poetry, it is to Cavafy I turn.
I recommend him to readers of Sofia, ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, absolutely motionless, at a slight angle to the universe’, as his friend EM Forster described him. It is this ‘slight angle to the universe’ that led me to seek out further poems by Cavafy. I acquired two books of his collected works, one with a parallel Greek text and the other with excellent notes.
I find that his is the voice of a kindred spirit, different though our circumstances may be.
As a historian myself, I appreciate Cavafy’s stance as a historian poet, looking for the significance of events from a distance. A commentator rather than a participant, I love to sit in a café in a foreign city pemptousia.com where no one knows me, observing and analysing.
Cavafy’s work appeals strongly to this side of me. He presents a mixture of situations, some taken from deep in the historical or mythological past, others drawn from parallels to the poet’s own life experience, and others imagined. He has been described as a poet of the margins, writing about people, time periods, and geographical locations which are tangential to the mainstream. I believe that his work also challenges us to accept how we really are, delicately stripping away a false facade, before gently replacing it along with a perceptive comment. He is thus also, and most importantly, a poet of the margin of truth.
Sofia readers may, for example, empathise with his approach to ecclesiastical matters. Cavafy’s poem In the Church describes the glorious externals of a Greek Orthodox Church: the incense, icons and vestments. ‘I love the church,’ he comments, but rather than making some anodyne theological affirmation, he explains why: ‘My thoughts turn to the great glories of our race, To our Byzantium, illustrious.’ Remaining in ecclesiastical territory, Manuel Comnenus deals with the death in 1180 of a Byzantine emperor, who sensing death’s approach ‘recalls neglected habits of piety’. He sends not for a priest to hear his confession, but for ecclesiastical vestments to be brought for him to wear, ‘… and is delighted/To present the decorous mien of a priest or friar.’ The poem ends with the delightfully ironic comment: ‘Happy are all who believe, And who like the emperor Lord Manuel, expire Outfitted most decorously in their faith.’ Most of Cavafy’s poems have a dark side, figuring candle light, decaying buildings, failed lives and the approach of death, a taste perhaps of the occult. I feel very much at home in this environment. Five of Cavafy’s poems are entitled The Tomb of… Elsewhere, in Candles, Cavafy compares our swiftly passing lives to a line of candles, ‘golden, warm and vibrant little candles’ , which are snuffed out as each year passes: ‘I don’t want to turn around lest I see and tremble at how quickly the darkened line is growing.’ The subject of The City surveys the rubble of his life and learns that there are no second chances: ‘Do not bother to hope For a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you have destroyed your life, here in this Small corner, so you have wasted it through the world.’ A poem entitled The Eumenides Footfall combines other characteristics of Cavafy’s work with his interest in the last things. The Roman Emperor Nero lies ‘calm, unconscious and content’, sleeping in his palace. However, his household gods, the little Lares, are awake and anxious, a good example of Cavafy selecting a narrator from the margins of the historical situation, for they hear the crash of the approach of the Eumenides, the Furies of mythology, approaching to presage the fall of Nero and his suicide in 68 CE.
In Hunc Deorum Templis, an old woman calls out, as he arrives in her city, that Julian the Apostate (a favourite of Cavafy) will restore the old gods, but we are not told if she rejoices as a pagan, or mourns as a Christian, raising interesting questions for the poem’s interpretation. In Myres: Alexandria AD 340, a Christian youth, who socialised with a fast pagan set, dies and his close friend, a young pagan, visits Myres’ family home. Alienated by the presence of priests, he wonders if Myres was ever totally his, or was his Christianity always a barrier to their intimacy. He leaves quickly so as not to damage the image he has of Myres. When Cavafy writes about relationships, these are long-finished love affairs, remembered because a location or a dark evening recalls what happened. ‘Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write powerful lines that had here their beginning.’ Location plays an important role in Cavafy poems, whether the focus is on the Hellenic world generally, or on specific spots, typically urban: a street, tavern, cemetery, church, or theatre. Cavafy felt the loss of Smyrna to the Turks in 1922 as a personal sorrow, and weeping exclaimed ‘Smyrna is lost! Ionia is lost!
The gods are lost!’ The failure of the ‘Megali idea’, the restoration of a Greater Greece with Constantinople as its capital, resulted in the tragic exchange of populations, but not, so far as I am aware, in any Cavafy poetry. Perhaps it was too recent and too tender a subject, and he could only produce his history poems when an uninvolved outsider.
Maybe I should select some Cavafy poems to be read at my funeral? Meanwhile, if I were ever to be asked whom I would select as the guests at an imaginary dinner party with figures from the past, I should certainly save a seat for CP Cavafy. *** Bibliography CP Cavafy, tr. E. Sachperoglou, The Collected Poems. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008.
CP Cavafy, tr. D Mendelsohn, Complete Poems. London:
Harper Press, 2013.
R Stoneman (ed), A Literary Companion to Travel in Greece.
Malibu, CA: GeDy, 1994.
Margaret Connolly read History at Reading University. Now retired, she was headmistress of Hollygirt School, Nottingham.