On Wednesday the16th of November, Susan Southall gave a presentation to Spiritual Reading Group on the poet Constantine Cavafy. Here is Susan’s opening paper.
Cavafy
Paper
Constantinos Petrou Cavafy
was born in 1863 in Alexandria, into a family of merchants, the last of seven
brothers. His father’s death when he was seven brought about a sharp fall from
wealth and prestige in the Greek community in Muslim Egypt, to a penurious
youth between England and Paris; he returned in 1877 to Alexandria at the age
of 14. Although he lived in Constantinople from 1882 to 1885, the rest of his
life was spent in Alexandria, the city that became a theme of his poetry.
His working life was spent
in a clerical position at the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria,
(administered by the British until 1923); his poetry was unpublished, although
from 1891 to 1904 he produced it on broadsheets he distributed to his friends.
From 1903 he became better known as a literary figure in Greece, although
little understood. Not until the 1920s was he appreciated for his particular
style; he died in 1933.
The city of Alexandria was
founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and named for him. It was the site of
his tomb in antiquity where it was seen by several Roman Emperors. Alexandria
suffered many disasters, both military and natural, including an earthquake in
the 4th c. CE that destroyed the famous lighthouse Pharos. Following
the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 CE Alexander’s tomb became lost.
Cavafy is an urban poet. His city is envisaged
as a metaphor, both personal and historical, creating “a self-contained
mythical world that serves to represent both his special view of Greek history
and his image of the perennial human predicament.”[i] He
shares this use of city and country metaphors with contemporaneous poets such
as Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Joyce. His
work provides “a poetic evocation of Alexandria in both its contemporary and
ancient manifestations,” reaching on to other Hellenistic cities such as
Antioch and Beirut and to the empire of Byzantium, and so enabling ‘his tragic
sense of life’ to be projected across eighteen centuries of Greek history and
eventually in his last works to be expressed in universal terms.[ii]
The
Diaspora
Although Cavafy is known as
the poet of the city Alexandria, his attention spans across the Greek diaspora,
whose centre is not Athens but Constantinople. He himself lived in London,
Paris, Liverpool and Constantinople and he spoke three languages. Nearing the
time of his death he refused an invitation to stay with a friend in Athens,
where he had undergone surgery for cancer of the larynx, saying: “Mohammed Aly
Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh
is my second. How can I leave them?”[iii] He returned to Alexandria and died in the
Greek Hospital there. He will treat the Greekness of the diaspora following the
fall of Constantinople in 1453 as a matter of language. It could be added that
the current diaspora is heavily represented in Australia, with Melbourne being
known as the third Greek city of the world, after Athens and Thessaloniki.
The
Language
Among the Greeks to have
migrated to Australia was Manoly Lascaris, a descendent of the Lascaris
emperors of Byzantium and the life partner of Patrick White, whom he met in
Alexandria during the Second World War. Mr. Lascaris expressed the devotion of
Greeks to the Greek language in this way: “What survives is language and Greek
words give me strength. It is like going to church! For all of us immigrants,
our native language is the only church in which we can venerate the absent
deity.”[iv]
Cavafy refers to this soul of the Greek language which is inaccessible to
foreigners in several poems. In “Of the Sixth or Seventh Century” (i.e., before
Arabic has become the standard speech) he says, in Alexandria “she speaks our
language still. Throughout the Greek world it’s destined to fade away… (but we)
have once more borne the sound of Greek speech back to her soil.”[v]The
Samian, now beside the river Ganges (reminding us that Alexander’s conquests
extended as far as Afghanistan and India), reflects on his death with
satisfaction: “There among compatriots I shall be. And forever after I shall
speak Greek.” [vi]
The hegemony of Greek
speech and Hellenic culture is taken for granted in the face of repeated
disasters overtaking the Greek civilization centered upon Constantinople. (Also
called Roman, as the inheritor of the Roman Empire, but never Latin.) The great
wave of displacement called the Catastrophe of Smyrna (now Izmir) occurred in
September 1922, 100 years ago. The Turks did not accept the First World War
provisions of the victorious allies and in the ensuing conflict more than one
million Greeks became refugees in Greece and overseas, while the Christian city
of Smyrna was burned to the ground. When the artist Ai Weiwei interviewed some
of the participants in the present Mediterranean refugee crisis, one Greek
coast guard said:
“Personally, I believe that
one of the reasons our island had to carry this great burden is because it’s a
big island with a population of almost 100,000. The people of the island, our
grandfathers and grandmothers, were themselves refugees in 1922, so we know
what it means to be a refugee. We feel their pain, and we feel empathy for
these people who are now refugees.” (500,000 refugees passed through Lesvos in
2015 alone).[vii]
Cavafy, in 1922, seems to
be writing about events in ancient Commagene, a location now part of modern
Turkey, important to Cavafy as a nominally Greek culture beleaguered by larger,
non-Greek powers: the Romans at the beginning of its history, and the Arabs at
the end.”[viii]
In “Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene” (1923) he says: “The life he lived
was just, and wise, and gallant. The life he lived, still more, was that finest
thing, Hellenic — mankind holds no quality more precious: among the gods alone
does anything surpass it.”[ix]
Here ‘Hellenic’ refers to ‘a person of broad Greek culture… in outlook,
culture, and taste; a state of mind rather than a nationality.”[x]
The
City
Eliot referred to the
‘mythical method’ as “the manipulation of ‘a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity’ through what Joyce called ‘two-planed writing.”
But rather than deal with the parallel in individual poems, Cavafy tended to create
two poems contrasting the ancient and the contemporary city and distributed
them at the same time.[xi]
The contemporary city is experienced, often in memory, as the “Sensual City”
where erotic encounters with young men have inspired the poet to see a kind of
‘purity’ in the grimy surroundings of the brothel quarter, the Quartier
Attarine, where shamed and shabby figures are transformed into ‘beauty and
vitality’ in those ‘shaped for and dedicated to the Hellenic kind of pleasure.”[xii]
Cavafy lived in rented rooms on the outskirts of this quarter for 26 years at
the end of his life, once explaining “Where could I live better…Below, the
brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And
there is the hospital where we die.”[xiii] The contemporary, or modern city, is a
creation of the imagination, “a city of remembered sensations.”[xiv] But the memories, in poems written from 1904
onwards, are not only of ‘fleshly delight and joy’ but inevitably also of
frustration and loss, ‘the unmetamorphosed, transient, and partial world of the
poet’s actual city.’[xv]
“Let me submit to Art” he says in a poem from 1921, “Art knows how to shape
forms of Beauty, almost imperceptibly completing life, blending impressions,
blending day by day.”[xvi]
This contemporary city is
infused and enfolded with Hellenic antiquity, particularly Late Antiquity
(approximately 200-400 C E), the fault line between Christianity and the
ancient religion Peter Brown names as ‘classical paganism’.[xvii]
For example, the Emperor Julian, called the Apostate, (331 to 363 AD; ruled
361-363) who tried to return the state worship to the antique gods, fascinates
Cavafy. Julian, born in Constantinople, a nephew of Constantine the Great,
became Emperor at the age of 30 after a military career and a series of family
murders. Although raised as a Christian, he converted to Neoplatonism
(Plotinus) and was a devotee of Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun). This period
of time was the point of transition between a system of heavenly patronage and
a more secular, in antique terms, approach to divine power through men of
power.[xviii]
So Cavafy does deal with spirituality, but it is spirituality as it fluctuates
across the entire panorama of Greek history.
Cavafy referred to himself
“not as a poet only”, but a “poet-historian”, a stance that “allowed him to see
history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye” which brings
about “the great and moving unity of the poet’s lifelong project.”[xix]
Poems
read during the session:
The God Abandons Antony
But Wise Men Apprehend What is Imminent
Ithaca
In the Church
The Steps
Song of Ionia
Waiting for the Barbarians
Voices
[i] Edmund
Keeley, Cafavy’s Alexandria (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 6.
[ii] Keeley, Cafavy’s Alexandria, 12.
[iii] Daniel
Mendelsohn, Collected Poems/ C.P. Cavafy, translated with introduction and
commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn (New York: Knopf, 2010) xxv.
[iv] Vrasidas Karides, Recollections of Mr. Manoly Lascaris (Blackheath:
Brandle & Schlesinger, 2008) 24-25.
[v] Daniel
Mendelsohn, The Unfinished Poems/ C.P. Cavafy, the first English
translation, with introduction and commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn (New
York: Knopf, 2009) 30.
[vi]“Epitaph (1893)” Collected Poems/ C.P. Cavafy,272.
[vii] Ai Wei Wei,
Human Flow: Stories from the Global Refugee Crisis (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 59.
[viii] Mendelsohn, Collected Poems / C.P. Cavafy, 426.
[ix] Ibid. p.
117
[x] Ibid.434.
[xi] Keeley, Cavafy’s
Alexandria, 46-47.
[xii] Ibid. 51
[xiii]Ibid, 53
[xiv] Ibid, 53
[xv] Ibid, 58-59
[xvi] “I’ve
brought to Art (1921)”. Keeley, 59.
[xvii] Peter
Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1978), 7.
[xviii] Ibid. p.
12.
[xix] Mendelsohn,
Collected Poems/ C. P. Cavafy, xix.
