He predicted the modern world
By Gregory Jusdanis, Professor of Modern Greek, Humanities Distinguished Professor, Department of Greek and Latin, The Ohio State University
Renowned academics share with us their perspective on the impact of C. P. Cavafy's work.
How C.P. Cavafy transcended Alexandria and Athens, discovering a new form of poetic expression that makes him a universal poet
Even Cavafy himself, with his unshaken self-confidence, could not have foreseen his global stardom today. Although always convinced of his genius, he could not have imagined the countless translations of his work in many languages, the numerous critical studies, celebrations, conferences, and workshops organized around the world.
His international appeal now is all the more spectacular given the barriers he faced in his own time – the indifference to poetry in mercantile Alexandria, the limited geographical range of Greek, the marginalization of Egypt from the cultural centers of Greece and Europe, as well as hostility to his homoerotic verse, to his inventive poetics, and to his penchant for unfashionable periods.
Despite these headwinds, however, Cavafy maintained his faith in poetry and, after some unimpressive beginnings, found the courage to steer away from what he read, what he had published, and what he had been towards new horizons. His new poetic compositions found some resonance in Alexandria and Athens. During his trips to the Greek capital in 1901 and 1903 Cavafy met key critics, poets, and intellectuals who recognized his matchless originality.These initial encounters reinforced his aspirations to become a world poet. In the first decade of the twentieth century, well into middle age when most people would have scaled back their dreams, he risked it all for literature, even sacrificing love. He renounced most of what he had published and embarked on changing poetry, language, and personal identity.
Critics have sought the reasons for this transformation in his family’s financial ruin, the passing of his friends, the deaths of all his brothers, his homosexuality, and his acceptance of provincial Alexandria as his home. Important as these factors might have been, it was his overriding goal to free himself from poetic routine (while at the same time living a circumscribed life) that made him reach out to the world. He understood that to attain the influence and international audience he desired, he had to fashion new forms of perception and understanding.
The young Cavafy saw himself as the rival to Tennyson and Baudelaire
Somehow, he must have known he would triumph. As a youth, he had written essays and comments, never published, where he saw himself as a rival to Tennyson and Baudelaire and even capable of starting a sentence that Homer had ended. These drafts and notes from the 1890’s indicate a man with a recklessly grand vision, a young writer thinking himself capable of magnificence.
For us today his greatness lies in his talent to predict our own world one hundred years ago. Cavafy is one of the few figures in history who provide us with new words for expressing ourselves and novel ways of comprehending reality. On his fifteen-minute saunter home from work at the Third Circle of Irrigation and late at night after his guests had left his apartment, Cavafy crafted this new direction for us: to recognize divergent desire, to embrace ethnic and racial mixing, to accept the reality of transnational interdependence, and to celebrate marginal figures and forgotten ages. That he imagined this objective without leaving the confines of his city for over twenty-five years is short of remarkable.
