Complete Poems Read Free Page B

anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,
    may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw.… It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.
    It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry
quartier,
the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”
    In 1932, Cavafy, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. That summer he traveled to Athens for the tracheotomy thatwould deprive him forever of the famous voice; from that point on, he was forced to communicate in a distorted whisper and, later on, by means of penciled notes. He returned home in the autumn, after declining an invitation from his wealthy friend Antony Benakis, a collector and the brother of Penelope Delta, to stay with him in Athens. (“Mohammed Aly Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh my second. How can I leave them?”) After first refusing and then allowing himself to be visited by the Patriarch of the city, he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant concentricity, a perfect closure, that are nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by authors when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.
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    “I N THE POEMS of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,” Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, “something extraordinary happens.” As will be evident by now, little about the external events of his life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap; in this respect Cavafy resembles, more than a little, his near contemporary Proust, who similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling littérateur into a major artist. Only by tracing the course of Cavafy’s interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to discern the path by which (to paraphrasethat other great Greek poet again) Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great