Daniel Mendelsohn
Cavafy : The Life of a Poet

Page 7

The painfully achieved reconciliation of Gibbon's eighteenth-century, Enlightenment view of history and Paparrigopoulos's nineteenth-century feeling, coupled with a startlingly prescient twentieth-century willingness to write frankly about homosexual experience, made possible the "unique tone of voice," as the admiring Auden described it, that is the unmistakable and inimitable hallmark of Cavafy's work. Ironic yet never cruel, unsurprised by human frailty, including his own ("Cavafy appreciates cowardice also," Forster wrote, "and likes the little men who can't be consistent or maintain their ideals"), yet infinitely forgiving of it, that tone takes its darker notes from the historian's shrewd appreciation for the ironies of human action (which inevitably result, as did the life-altering business misfortunes of his father and uncles, from imperfect knowledge, bad timing, missed opportunities, or simply bad luck); yet at the same time is richly colored by a profound sympathy for human striving in the face of impossible obstacles. (Which could be the armies of Octavian or taboos against forbidden desires.) And it is inflected, too, by the connoisseur's unsparing and unsentimental grasp of both the pleasures and the pain to which desire makes us vulnerable.

That appreciation, that sympathy, that understanding are, of course, made possible only by Time—the medium that makes History possible, too. For many readers, even sophisticated ones, Cavafy is a poet who wrote essentially two kinds of poems: daringly exposed verses about desire whose frank treatment of homoerotic themes put them decades ahead of their time, and make them gratifyingly accessible; and rather abstruse historical poems, filled with obscure references to little-known and confusingly homonymous Hellenistic or Byzantine monarchs, and set in epochs one was never held responsible for learning and places that fringed the shadowier margins of the Mediterranean map.

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Cf. Cavafy's poems - Bilingual versions, Green, Cavafy - The supreme modern poet of nostalgia, Cavafy in print, Cavafy resources

More about New Hellenism / Constantinople

The Greek Word Library

Reference address : https://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/modern/cavafy-mendelsohn.asp?pg=7