Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 10

Every autodidact, someone once claimed, can be guaranteed to have a bee in his bonnet somewhere, and this was certainly true of Cavafy, whose bee (pursued in no less than a dozen poems, five of them unfinished) was the improbable figure of Julian the Apostate. It might be thought that a poet who glimpsed the old gods winging it over Ionia would welcome an emperor who aimed to put them back officially on their pedestals; but in fact Cavafy reveals a visceral distaste and contempt for Julian. G.W. Bowersock, in two characteristically erudite and incisive essays in his wonderful new collection From Gibbon To Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition, pinpoints exactly why. The poet was at some pains, on accepting his homosexuality, to reconcile it with his Christianity by assuming a tolerant world where "pagans and Christians could associate easily with one another in unhindered pursuit of the sensual life. It was the avowed aim of Julian, the ascetic pagan, to put an end to all that." Exactly. Julian is skewered as humorless, pompous, hypocritical, and ridiculous. But Cavafy is also, in an erotic sense, Sir Toby Belch confronting Malvolio: "Dost think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" It is enjoyable to see this professional ironist, for once, shaken out of his ironic detachment and going for the jugular.

Discussing the problems facing him as Cavafy's translator, Mendelsohn remarks in his introduction, quite correctly, that "it is by now a commonplace that Cavafy's language, because it generally shuns common poetic devices--image, simile, metaphor, specialized diction--is tantamount to prose." This notion (like so much else) goes back to Seferis and has encouraged more than one translator in the belief that turning it into English would therefore be comparatively simple. In fact, Cavafy's language is something rich and strange. It was brilliantly described by Patrick Leigh Fermor as "a unique and cunning alloy in which the fragments of legal diction and ancient Greek and inscriptions on tombs and old chronicles ... are closely haunted by the Anthology and the Septuagint; it is contained in a medium demotic perversely stiffened with mandarin and beaten at last into an instrument of expression which is austere and frugal in the extreme." Much of this intricate complexity has been ignored, not only by largely Greekless critics such as Auden, but also, unfortunately, by more than one translator.

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Cf. Cavafy's poems - Bilingual versions, Mendelsohn, Cavafy - Life of a Poet, Cavafy resources

More about New Hellenism / Constantinople

The Greek Word Library

Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/modern/cavafy-green.asp?pg=10