Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 11

There is also a vague public assumption, first started by Forster, who should have known better, that Cavafy never uses rhyme. This is completely untrue. Many of his poems (including a number of sonnets) have complex, and in a few cases really recherche, rhyme schemes. How many English readers, I wonder, know that so familiar a work as "The City" is constructed, in the Greek, round an ABBCCDDA stanzaic pattern?

We have a great deal to thank Daniel Mendelsohn for. He has provided us--especially through the inclusion of versions of the thirty poems still in draft form--with as complete a Cavafy collection as we are ever likely to get. His notes are full, accurate, and always helpful; and his theoretical understanding of Cavafy's metrics was badly needed, and shows subtle insights. (Who before him ever bothered to point out that the questions in "Waiting for the Barbarians" are all written in the old-fashioned fifteeners popular in Greek demotic songs--and familiar to us from George Chapman's Homer--whereas the answers come in crisp, tight tragic iambics?) In a few illuminating pages Mendelsohn shows how Cavafy used different meters to highlight dejection, disappointment, or frustrated desire: how in a line suggesting Nero's self- indulgent excesses he pads out the five-beat rhythm with five extra syllables. He skillfully traces the cunning juxtapositions of demotic, mandarin, and classical Greek. He has carefully sorted the various stages of composition and circulation that the poet went through (Cavafy never regarded any work, even when published, as absolutely final). He even highlights Cavafy's use of puns to create emotional linkage: the heart of the wretched young man in "The City" is "buried" (thamene), and in the next line his mind "will remain" (tha menei) stuck in its current morass.

Previous Page / First / Next

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=11