‘Constantine Cavafy' Review: A Poet's Odyssey Within

Wall Street Journal

4 days ago

The Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) never published a book, yet today no anthology of world poetry can afford to neglect him. He was great poet of history, psychology and erotic yearning. His meticulous verses of beauty and folly, delusion and disillusioned wryness, were forged from his reading and his private life as a homosexual—experiences he rendered with a jaded power. His friend E.M. Forster once described him as 'a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.'
Cavafy, who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, remains the most influential of all modern Greek poets. Yet it is a miracle we know his work at all. He self-published individual poems in broadsides distributed to friends and family, occasionally binding small collections in limited editions. The first Greek edition of his poems appeared in 1935, two years after Cavafy's death. His work was composed exclusively in Greek, a language he spoke with an English accent (he was a subject of both the Ottoman and British empires). He was not a nationalist, but a poet of singular vision.
It was a vision with global appeal. In the 1920s, T.S. Eliot published early translations of Cavafy in his literary magazine the Criterion, which deeply influenced younger writers such as W.H. Auden. Finally, in 1951, the Hogarth Press would bring out a collected edition of Cavafy's poems rendered in English. The canon grew through new editions and translations, until Cavafy became, as Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys assert in 'Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography,' a 'world poet.' His most beloved poem, 'Ithaca' (1911), which revises the voyage of Odysseus as a parable of life's journey, can be found everywhere on the internet: