Cavafy: The Greatest Poet to Come From Egypt

With Egypt much on our minds lately, it is a good time -- frankly, it is always a good time -- to go back to the 154 poems of Constantine P. Cavafy (better known as C. P. Cavafy), one of the greatest poets to come from Egypt.

That may be an unusual way to refer to him, but although he was born in Egypt and lived most of his life there, he was the son of Greek parents and wrote his poems in Greek. But, again, since he was born in Egypt, we cannot really call him a Greek poet. He also spent some years of his youth in England and spoke English so well that, reportedly, he spoke his native Greek with a bit of English accent. He even had but later renounced British citizenship. By the way, he barely spoke Arabic, the language of Egypt (source).

Cavafy and Alexandria

This confusion is very typical of Alexandria, where he was born on April 29, 1863, lived most of his life, and died, on his birthday, in 1933 of cancer. As a major port city on the Mediterranean, Alexandria has always been a cultural crossroads, from the time of its founding by Alexander the Great. It was home to the great library of Alexandria and the lighthouse of Alexandria, symbols of its importance as a center of learning as well as of trade.

Cavafy was a member of the Greek Orthodox Church in a city with a rich, varied religious tradition. In the early years of Christianity, the Patriarch of Alexandria was second only to the Pope of Rome, and provided sometimes rival leadership in the Church (more). Jews have had a place in Alexandria, almost since its beginning. The Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue, now almost deserted, was built over a century ago with seating for seven hundred. The few remaining members say that they have good relations with the Muslim majority in Alexandria (more), although there are probably not two hundred Egyptian Jews left in the country. Cavafy, by the way, wrote a poem "Of the Jews," which you can read here.

From all accounts, Cavafy led a life of outer mediocrity, working as a civil servant in an office with the off-putting name, Third Circle of Irrigation (source), living with his mother until her death, and trying to maintain in secret his gay desires and experiences. As the Greek poet George Seferis said, "Outside his poems Cavafy does not exist" (source) Perhaps that is why some people do not realize that he was a real person and think of him as just a character in The Alexandria Quartet, the magnificent series of novels set in Alexandria, written by Lawrence Durrell.

Fortunately, Cavafy's poetry is available online in the original Greek (here) as well as, even more fortunately for me at least, in English translation (here). I recommend these poems to begin with, if you are not familiar with Cavafy's poetry, some good ones to go back to, if you do know his work.

"Dangerous Thoughts"

(Read it here.) Although Cavafy's homosexuality, as well as his writing about it, was shocking at the time, 1911, a century later, his treatment of the topic seems rather tame:

I won't fear my passions like a coward;
I'll give my body to sensual pleasures,

But, there is more. Cavafy (or at least Myrtias, the character he is quoting) balances his Dionysian passions with Apollinian restraint:

When I wish, at critical moments I'll recover
my ascetic spirit as it was before.

"Waiting for the Barbarians"

(Read it here.) We probably cannot read this (the first poem by Cavafy I ever read, still my favorite), as he might have expected it to be read. Of course, we probably cannot read his poems on gay themes as he might have expected them to be read. They no longer have the shock value. But "Waiting for the Barbarians" can still shock.

The barbarians are coming today.
What's the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Yes, these words came to my mind this week, as I watched the situation in Egypt. But, in this poem, from 1904, Cavafy gives those of us who lived through the Cold War a pause:

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

After our "barbarians" of the Cold War era faded in threat, many leaders did not know what to do with themselves, their weapons, and their rhetoric. We need our barbarians. Have we found some new "barbarians"? That is not for me to say. I am just writing about poetry.

"Ithaka"

(Read it here. Listen to it here.) First, in English we would usually spell the title "Ithaca." Written in 1911, this is no poem for young readers. It is a rich, carefully thought out reflection on the Odyssey. This is no impetuous youngster speaking here (ah, youth is wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw told us):

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.

For an interesting comparison, read the poem "Ulysses" (the Latin name for Odysseus) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson here, and be prepared for a test tomorrow. (Sorry, that is just a flashback to my days of teaching English.)

"Days of 1908" (or 2011)

(Read it here.) My parenthetical comment on the title suggests that this poem from 1932, one of Cavafy's last poems, has some connection with the events in Egypt today. I'll leave that connection, if there is one, for you to discover yourself.

Sources

"ITHAKA: A Tribute to Constantine P. Cavafy" (bilingual website) - here. (The links to the poems are to this website.) Few authors have such an information-packed website memorializing them.

'As Good as Great Poetry Gets' by Daniel Mendelsohn (originally published in The New York Review of Books) - here.

Other sources linked in the text.

Questions

This article has stimulated some great questions, and I have added the answers into the body of the article. LB Woodgate (index) asked about the origin of the name Cavafy. His family and his name are pure Greek, Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης (source). Michelle Starkey (index) asked about the cause of his death (on his birthday). It was cancer. And someone else asked about the pronunciation of his name. If you listen to the recording of "Ithaka" (here), you can hear that it is "kah-VAH-fi."