The archival documentation

Literary archives are always different, as are the circumstances that created them, as are the authors themselves. The completeness of the Cavafy archive is a very special case, because the poet himself collected and arranged his work with great care. The material he left us is solid, coherent and consistent. In order to describe, classify and present this material, we created different document groups. Cavafy’s archive brings us closer to the poet, as it saves forms of his work which are not contained in books. It allows us to study the birth of the poems, observe every stage from the first drafts to the final manuscripts. At the same time, we learn about the circumstances, in which the poems were created, as well as about the poet’s private, even intimate life: the documents speak about his personal relationships, his life journey, his contacts with other artists and scholars of his time. All this supplements the poet’s physiognomy, and shows him within the frame of his age.

Besides the primary information we get from the documents, a second story is told by the different types of paper, watermarks and ink Cavafy used, as well as by his inventive, hand-made bookbinding. The various versions of the poems, and verses the poet crossed out, can also be quite revealing.

In the archive we always work with respect for every scholar who worked on Cavafy before. As G. P. Savvidis puts it in his essay “The C.P. Cavafy Archive, a first report” (Nea Estia 872, 1963, p.1539), it is the archivist’s "privilege" to process the archive, his "joy" to discover it, his "duty" to present and describe it, and his "honour" to "recognise the achievements of elder colleagues".