Daniel Mendelsohn
Cavafy : The Life of a Poet

Page 9

Cavafy, by contrast, may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him. Not for nothing are a striking number of his poems about nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In "Caesarion," for instance, a poem written in 1914 and published in 1918—the intervening years, the years of the Great War, saw the publication of a number of poems on alluring dead youths—the beautiful (as he imagines) teenage son of Caesar and Cleopatra materializes one night in the poet's apartment:

Ah, there: you came with your indefinite charm... ... And I imagined you so fully that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp went out—I deliberately let it go out— I dared to think you came into my room, it seemed to me you stood before me...

Such apparitions do not always belong to the distant past. In "Since Nine—," published in 1918 and written the year before, an "apparition" of the poet's own "youthful body" suddenly materializes in front of him one evening as he sits alone in a darkened room; in an unfinished poem of the same period, "It Must Have Been the Spirits," the poet's own soul, together with the image of a louche youth he'd encountered years ago in Marseille, takes form before his eyes, replacing a décor that is itself a suggestive mélange of past and present (a commonplace settee, a piece of archaic Greek statuary). Although in the latter poem the narrator attributes his supernatural vision to the excess of wine he'd drunk the previous night—hence the title—such apparitions are, therefore, hardly anomalous in his creative life, and symbolize a crucial theme of the entire body of work: the presence of the past in our own present.

To Cavafy, figures such as that of the dead princeling and the long-forgotten French boy all inhabit the same era—the vastly arcing past that his own imagination inhabited so fully—and were therefore as alive and present to him as the whores who lived in the brothel below his apartment on the Rue Lepsius. ("Where could I better live?" he once remarked, in the mondain tone we recognize from his verse. "Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.") It is the responsibility of the reader to inhabit that past as fully as possible, too, if only during the brief space during which he or she explores these poems. Otherwise, the meaning of many of these poems will be obscure, if not opaque. The reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems is missing the point of Cavafy's work—is, like so many of his characters, tragically mistaking the clouded part for the clear and brilliant whole.

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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=9