Constantine Cavafy Research Articles

The Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History

This full-length theoretical examination of Constantine Cavafy breaks the study of this great Greek poet free from the narrow context of traditional scholarship and introduces the latest critical developments into the study of Greek poetry.Originally published in 1987.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Memory, Pleasure and Poetry: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy

Memory, Pleasure and Poetry: The Grammar of the Self in the Writing of Cavafy* Alexander Nehamas A striking fact about Cavafy's "Walls" (1896/ZcW)1 is the extent to which this short, seemingly insignificant poem continues to fascinate, and to be discussed by, critics who judge it negatively: WALLS With no consideration, no pity, no shame, they've built walls around me, thick and high. And now I sit here feeling hopeless. I can't think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind— because I had so much to do outside. When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed! But I never heard a sound, a noise of builders. Imperceptibly they've closed me off from the outside world.2 * Edmund Keeley has kindly and generously discussed Cavafy's poetry with me over the years, and made perceptive comments on this essay: I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. His book, Cavafy's Alexandria: Study of a Myth in Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), provides an unsurpassed overall picture of Cavafy's work, and what disagreements I register with it in what follows cannot obscure my heavy dependence on it. Another debt is owed and hereby acknowledged to Carolyn Anderson. Paul Bové and David Carrier discussed this paper with me and made me improve it in a number of ways. II give both the date of composition (when known) and the date of publication for each poem; if only a date of composition appears, the poem in question was not published by Cavafy. The definitive chronology of Cavafy's work appears in the tables provided by George Savidis in his edition, K. P. Kaváfi: Anékdota piimata, 1882-1923 (Athens, 1968). The information is summarized in the notes to C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis (Princeton, NJ. 1975). 2The Greek text follows George Savidis, K. P. Kaváfi: Piimata (Athens, 1963) and Anékdota Piimata. The translations are from Keeley and Sherrard, though I occasionally alter their version in the direction of greater literalness in order to make the grammatical points I need. Thus, in the seventh line of "Walls", I have avoided construing "builders" as the direct object of "heard" as Keeley and Sherrard do in translating Allá den ákusa poté króton ktistón i Ã-hon as "But I never heard the builders, not a sound". 295 296 Alexander Nehamas ΤΕΙΧΗ Χωϕίςπεϕίσκεψιν,χωϕίςλϕπην,χωϕίςαιδώ μεγάλακ'υψηλάτϕιγϕϕωμουÎ-κτισαντείχη. Καίκάθομαικαίαπελπίζομαιτώϕαεδώ. "Αλλο δεν σκÎ-πτομαι: τόν νουν μου τϕώγει αυτή ή τϕχη; διότιπϕάγματαπολλάÎ-ξωνάκάμωείχον. :ΑότανÎ-κτιζαντάτείχηπώςνάμήνπϕοσÎ-ξω. ΆλλαδενάκουσαποτÎ-κϕότονκτιστώνήήχον. 'Ανεπαισθήτωςμ'Î-κλεισανάπότόνκόσμονÎ-ξω. Though Xenopoulos and Michaletos as well as Papanoutsos have admired this poem,3 recent criticism has been considerably more hostile. Peter Bien, not without some justice, describes the walls as "vague and shopworn symbols."4 Edmund Keeley finds the analogy on which the poem depends to be "so uncomplicated and two dimensional that it provides little nourishment for the imagination. And the agents of (the) poet's predicament—an unspecified 'they' posing as builders— are so ill-defined that his complaint sounds rather paranoid."3 Yet the poem's attractiveness lingers on, and in trying to locate it within the text's thematic features, Keeley joins Malanos, Papanoutsos and Liddell6 in finding one "subtle effect": the growing sense that the walls are self-imposed, that the poet "himself has become the unspecified 'they' that oppress him, the mason of his own confinement."7 James Merrill, similarly ambivalent, writes that "They", other people, unnoticed by him, have immured the poet—so he says. Yet [the poem's homophonic rhymes], stifling, narcissistic, arro- 'Gregory Xenopoulos, "Enas piitÃ-s," Panathinea (30 November 1903), reprinted in Néa Estia (15 July 1933): 753-754; John Michaletos, I piisi tu Kaváfi (Athens, 1952), 42, 44; E. P. Papanoutsos, Potamos, Kaváfis, Sikelianós (Athens, 1955; third edition, 1966), pp. 151ff. More recently C. Capri-Karka has praised the poem, not very helpfully , on the ground that it expresses a "universal situation of isolation and oppression" in her Love and the Symbolic Journey in the Poetry of Cavafy, Eliot, and Seferis (New York, 1982), 30. 4Peter Bien, Constantine Cavafy (New York, 1964), 40. 5Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria, 27-28. Timos Malanos, O Kaváfis (Athens, 1957), 69; Papanoutsos, 159; Robert Liddell, Cavafy: A Critical Biography (London...

Cavafy, Tennyson and the Overcoming of Influence

One of the striking features of Constantine Cavafy’s poetry is his apparent and pronounced originality. It seems to have an existence independent of poetry preceding it. Thus when studying Cavafy one has difficulties in detecting influences of earlier poetry. Indeed, in his mature years Cavafy was often able to appropriate his inherited tradition in such a revisionary manner that the old texts were transformed in his poetry almost beyond recognition and thus beyond the authority of their authors. The new poems proclaimed their originality and denied any indebtedness to their possible precursors.

Originality and Eroticism: Constantine Cavafy and the Alexandrian Epigram

Although it has become generally accepted by critics that Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) was influenced greatly by the Hellenistic epigram ‘in attitude, subject matter, and technique’, a close comparison of that poetic tradition and Cavafy’s poems reveals interesting differences as well as similarities. We know that Cavafy was familiar with Hellenistic literature and that he had a copy of J. W. Mackail’s Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology in his personal library. His reading, however, ‘was much more extensive than his library’. More significant than this is the evidence to be found in his poems, which range from an actual mention of ancient epigrams to obvious imitations of them. Cavafy’s poems for the most part, however, are quite original in their tone and erotic stance when compared directly to the Alexandrian epigrams.

Real and Imaginary History in Borges and Cavafy

ORGE LUIS BORGES and Constantine Cavafy are from major cities on the periphery of western letters-Buenos Aires and Alexandria. It is the periphery for us in Europe and America, and they, aware of their outsiders' vantage, waken us-for they are writing for the world and not only their own nationals-to the life of the Argentine and of Alexandria. But in addressing the world, they also sweep back through history, and through intrahistori as Unamuno terms it,' to the everyday weaknesses and glittering moral exempla of smaller monarchs, to Rio de la Plata outlaws, to deviates in taverns on the Nile. They follow adventurers into Byzantium and travel in the Greek satellite kingdoms of Hellenistic and Roman Greece, to the cities of India, to the terror and virile beauty of the frontier pampas, to Arabian Africa of the thousand tales. Though they manipulate their personages with constant sleight-of-hand, with irony, humor, and the most intricately balanced paradoxes, their historical figures have the same verisimilitude as the characters they place in modern suburbs of Buenos Aires or Alexandria. As solitary outsiders they use widespread historical and imaginary geographies to obliterate the dividing lines of past time and national boundaries. Borges (1899-) and Cavafy (1863-1933) are poets, and Borges is also a short-story writer (though he is the first to dispute the difference

Brecht and Cavafy

The poem's title hints, of course, at a literary model stemming from a poet of the third or second century B.C. Yet one searches in vain through the extant poetry of that period for a source for Brecht's short poem, because the late Greek poet that Brecht had in mind was his near contemporary Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933). The question that immediately comes to mind is, why then does Brecht use the adjective spatgriechisch rather than the expected neugriechisch? Was it perhaps to befuddle some would-be literary historian or to throw a pack of copyright holders off his trail? Though either possibility may well have amused Brecht-he was taken to court in the 1920s for plagiarizing a translation of Rimbaud-the solution to the riddle lies elsewhere. At a superficial level at least, Brecht simply took