Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 6

What are we to make of this? It would seem that the idea of Cavafy as a mysterious late bloomer is greatly exaggerated. True, much of what he wrote early on was poor stuff; the same is true of many great poets. Yet he also produced, while still in his thirties, at least three of the great poems by which he first won wide recognition. They heralded the appearance of a new and unique voice in European literature: quiet, reflective, philosophical, but at the same time disconcertingly subversive of age-old conventional wisdom. For two millennia the West had seen Rome as the bastion of civilization against encroaching barbarism. In "Waiting for the Barbarians"--a title that has passed into the language as a euphemism for a kind of enervated acceptance of defeat--we instead see emperor, consuls, praetors, orators, all in their finest attire, passively, indeed eagerly, expecting the arrival of these crude but energetic outsiders. Nothing could better symbolize the played-out and decadent quality of an ancien regime. When the rumor of their coming proves to be false, the news is greeted not with jubilation, but with despair: "And now what's to become of us without barbarians?/These people were a solution of a sort."

"Ithaca" looks, at first sight, to be less disruptive of accepted ideas, a haunting discourse on the old proverb that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. The addressee in the poem is famously exhorted to make the trip a lifelong one, in summer mornings to "put in to harbors new to your eyes," to buy exotic goods, to gain wisdom from Egyptian sages. But look again. The original, iconic traveler to Ithaca was Odysseus, and his goal was return to his kingdom, to reunite with his wife Penelope. He wanted home. When he stretched the journey out, it was mostly in the arms of other women. He had trouble with the Cyclops, with the Laestrygonians, with Poseidon. But for Cavafy, the Ithaca-bound traveler will avoid all these "so long as your thoughts remain lofty." This cannot be said of Odysseus's thoughts. And when Cavafy's traveler finally makes it to Ithaca, the little island "has nothing left to give you." Penelope and home have been silently written out of the picture. "Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey" is the poem's most unforgettable and plangent line. We forget that, for Cavafy, Ithaca can give you nothing else. "Ithaca" gained a certain sort of worldwide fame when, in 1994, Maurice Tempelsman read it, very movingly, at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. I have always wondered which of its multiple implications he had in mind.

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=6