Peter Green
Cavafy : The supreme modern poet of nostalgia

Page 8

In a series of vividly etched vignettes, Cavafy gave memorable and public expression to a world of deep but transient passions that had hitherto lacked any true voice, let alone so remarkable a poetic endorsement. Intensely, almost exclusively, physical, fleeing the realities of family or daily life (Cavafy notes one youth's mended underwear without thinking to ask himself who mended it), these phosphorescent mayfly relationships envisage no future beyond the sexual epiphany itself. Loss, separation, and nostalgia follow. Beauty fades, but preferably somewhere else. I cannot see Cavafy's protagonists holding out for same-sex marriage.

Owing to the special circumstances surrounding the development of Cavafy's erotic poems, there has always been a temptation to treat them as an independent phenomenon, something apart from his ironic musings on the vicissitudes of Alexandrian, Byzantine, or classical history. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Edmund Keeley, one of Cavafy's best translators and interpreters, has remarked, Cavafy's whole corpus constitutes "a collection of historical epiphanies in verse." Like Proust, Cavafy set out to capture significant moments from the past. His temps retrouve embraced ancient kings and modern working youths. Beauty, passion, devotion, the perfection of a youthful profile, the incandescent moments of one's early twenties: all were as evanescent--and in the same way--as the crumbling dynasties and historical failures of antiquity. (Cavafy would surely have endorsed Auden's famous, and later repudiated, aphorism: "History to the defeated/may say Alas but cannot help or pardon.") The retrieval of these epiphanies, by recourse to texts, statues, photographs, or treasured personal memories, was the best one could hope for. Even the parting of young lovers forever has its plus side: they will remember each other as the exquisite twenty-somethings they were at the moment of separation.

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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=8