Constantine P. Cavafy

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Constantine P. Cavafy, also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes (Greek Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης) (April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933) was a Greek poet. Though relatively little-known in the English-speaking world, he is widely considered an important 20th century literary figure. He also worked as a journalist and civil servant.

Cavafy has been called as a skeptic and a neo-pagan. In his poetry he examines critically some aspects of Christianity, patriotism, and heterosexuality, though he was not always comfortable with his role as a nonconformist. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

1 Biography
2 Work
3 Bibliography
4 Notes
5 External links

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Biography

Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents. His father was a prosperous importer-exporter who had lived in England in earlier years and acquired British nationality. After his father died in 1870, Cavafy and his family settled, for a while, in Liverpool, UK; he moved back to Alexandria in 1882.

Disturbances there in 1885 caused the family again temporarily to move, this time to Constantinople. Later in that year Cavafy returned to Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life. He worked at first as a journalist, then for the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works for thirty years. (Egypt was a British protectorate until 1926.) From 1891 to 1904 he published his poetry in broadsheet form, only for his close friends, receiving whatever acclaim mainly within the Greek community in Alexandria. He was introduced to mainland-Greek literary circles through a favourable review by Xenopoulos in 1903, but got little recognition, his style being very different from then-mainstream Greek poetry. Only 20 years later, after the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War, a new generation of almost nihilist and suicidal poets (e.g. Karyotakis) would find inspiration in Cavafy's work. He died on April 29 1933, his 70th birthday.

Since his death, Cavafy's reputation has grown. He is now considered one of the finest modern Greek poets.

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Work

Cavafy has been instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both at home and abroad. His poems are, typically, concise but intimate evokations of real or literary figures and milieux that have played a role in Greek culture. Uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality and a fatalistic existential nostalgia are some of the defining themes. A recluse, he was virtually unknown until late in life.

Besides his subjects, unconventional for the time, his poems also exhibit a skilled and versatile craftsmanship, which is almost completely lost in translation. Cavafy was a perfectionist, obsessively refining every single line of his poetry. His mature style was a free iambic form, free in the sense that verses rarely rhyme and are usually from 10 to 17 syllables. In his poems, the presence of rhyme usually implies irony.

Cavafy drew his themes from personal experience, along with an enormous knowledge of history, especially of the Hellenistic era. Many of his poems are either pseudo-historical, or seemingly historical, or accurately, but quirkily, historical.

His poetry is now taught at schools in Greece.

Cavafy's poem The God Abandons Antony (1911) was adapted by Leonard Cohen for the latter's song Alexandra Leaving (Ten New Songs, 2002) <ref>Leonard Cohen Files</ref>. But whereas Cavafy's original focus was on the city of Alexandria, Cohen's version concerns a man's loss of a woman named Alexandra.

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Bibliography

Selections of Cavafy's poems appeared only in pamphlets, privately printed booklets and broadsheets during his lifetime. The first publication, in book form, was

Ποιήματα (Piimata, or 'Poems of C.P. Cavafy') in Alexandria, 1935.

The most effective translation of Cavafy into English is by Rae Dalven. Robert Liddell's biography is the best known one in English, and an evocative, minor masterpiece in the genre.

The Complete Poems of Cavafy translated by Rae Dalven
C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis
Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P.Cavafy translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis
Cavafy's Alexandria by Edmund Keeley
Cavafy: A Critical Biography by Robert Liddell