Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 7

These poems have a significant feature in common, which, considering the aspect of Cavafy's work that is currently most emphasized, should be of particular interest today. In 1927, he identified three main thematic areas in his poetry: the historical, the philosophical (in which he clearly included the didactic), and the sensuous, of which by far the largest sub-division was the erotic. These categories regularly overlapped. Of the poems listed above, five qualify as didactic, and four as historical--but unless we count the "voluptuous perfumes" of "Ithaca" ("heady," in Mendelsohn's version), not one of them, by any stretch of the imagination, could be categorized as sensuous, let alone erotic. The clear conclusion would appear to be that his "metamorphosis" was closely bound up with Cavafy's remarkable emergence, in the last two decades of his life, as a brilliant pioneer in the poetic portrayal--precise, often matter-of-fact, always psychologically acute--of homoerotic passion.

Yet a close inspection of the published corpus of the "canon" shows that this emergence turns out to have been cautious to a degree--not surprisingly, given the hostility of the Palamas clique, and the still stringent laws against homosexuality. The unidentified longings (epithymies) in the poem of that name, in 1904, go unfulfilled. The student Myrtias declares in "Dangerous" (1911): "My body I will give to pleasures,/to diversions that I've dreamed of,/to the most daring erotic desires,/to the lustful impulses of my blood"--but we are not told what they are. When we do begin to get unmistakably erotic scenes, in a series of poems from 1914 onward (many protected by their historical setting), Cavafy's Greek again and again cunningly leaves the gender of his characters indeterminate, in a way that English, which is ineluctably gender-specific, cannot replicate. As a result, Anglo-American translations tend to give the false impression that Cavafy's open references to homosexuality are considerably more frequent than was in fact the case.

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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=7