Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. Their inexperience caused the ruin of the family fortunes, so they returned to a life of genteel poverty in Alexandria. The seven years that Constantine Cavafy spent in England—from age nine to sixteen—were important to the shaping of his poetic sensibility: he became so comfortable with English that he wrote his first verse in his second language.
After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers.
Although living in great poverty and discomfort, Cavafy wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years. Much of his ambition during these years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.
Cavafy had an unusually small social circle. He lived with his mother until her death in , and then with his unmarried brothers. For most of his mature years Cavafy lived alone. Influential literary relationships included a twenty-year acquaintance with E.
The poet himself identified only two love affairs, both apparently brief. His one intimate, long-standing friendship was with Alexander Singopoulos, whom Cavafy designated as his heir and literary executor when he was sixty years old, ten years before his death. Cavafy remained virtually unrecognized in Greece until late in his career. He never offered a volume of his poems for sale during his lifetime, instead distributing privately printed pamphlets to friends and relatives.
Fourteen of Cavafy's poems appeared in a pamphlet in ; the edition was enlarged in He described Cavafy as standing "at a slight angle to the universe. Eliot, T. Lawrence, Arnold Toynbee, and others who in turn inspired new readers to discover Cavafy's work.
Yet Europe and America did not come to know Cavafy until the s. Once his work was translated, Cavafy posthumously emerged as an enormously influential poet.
Cavafy's work has many different threads. One can be found in Cavafy's posthumously published poem, "The Enemies. Cavafy was a modern Plutarch, who read not just lives but historical moments past, present, and future in parallel. He understood that hindsight sees clearly history's unforeseen ironic turns, but the same eyes are blind to history's repetitions.
He set his art to dramatizing the emotions, desires, and reflections, however grand or mundane, that propel people to act unwisely, then to console themselves by reliving the past as they would have liked to play it out.
Cavafy's sources of inspiration were human dramas that had "aged. The impression has got to age, has got to falsify itself with time, without my having to falsify it," Cavafy wrote. He found evidence of "aged" and "falsified" human drama all around him in Alexandria, Egypt, a city that had risen to power and declined more than once in its long history.
Cavafy's sources of "aged" impressions also contain memories from his lifetime. Cavafy's was an immensely rich family of the Greek diaspora with allegedly aristocratic, Byzantine roots. His family's precipitous fall from to near poverty, vacillations in the financial fortunes of the once thriving modern Greek colony in Alexandria, and breaks in relations between Muslim and Christian, colonial and colonized populations in Egypt are the contemporary events that shaped the modern end of Cavafy's historical sense.
Cavafy's archives-his passport, photographs, family genealogy, letters and, most dramatically, Cavafy's death mask-bring this life into view. One can follow the dramatic change from the Cavafy family's presence in cosmopolitan upper class London and Constantinopolitan societies to his life as an impoverished civil servant in the British colony of Alexandria. But Cavafy channeled energy from his family's "fall" into reflections on time's passing. Cavafy's family story does not enter his poetry directly.
Instead it appears in his thinking about transition, change, decline, and passage from one world order to another. A book Cavafy read diligently is Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which Cavafy filled with fervent notes of violent disagreement and occasional assent.
Here Cavafy reveals the development of his ideas about decline. In published and unpublished manuscripts, too, one finds his highly sophisticated dramatization of historical and imaginary personae facing sudden and disastrous change in various states of preparedness. It was particularly famous for the Mouseion in effect a research university and associated library, which may have had as many as , rolls including Aristotle's library , the largest in the world.
Euclid, Aristarchus of Samothrace, and Callimachus were among the great scholars who worked there. In Alexandria differences of opinion were not only tolerated but encouraged. Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Judaism, and Christianity all had followers here—traditionally St. Mark founded Christianity in Alexandria—and the population was an eclectic mixture, as it was again in Cavafy's day, of Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and others. An indication of the curious blend of cultures and ideas in Alexandria was the local worship of Serapis mentioned by Cavafy in his poems , a god whose characteristics showed traces of both Greek and Egyptian influences.
The complex, always changing culture of Alexandria gave its citizens little sense of stability or permanence, and for that they turned to art, to the well crafted artifice of a poem. For Cavafy, as for the ancient Alexandrians, permanence was principally the property of art, not civilization or nature.
Cavafy's poems are often self-consciously antiquarian, dealing with obscure corners of history, and this trait he also shares with famous Alexandrian predecessors. Furthermore, like his predecessors, he created his own highly artificial poetic language, a mixture of demotic and purist Greek, deliberately employing archaisms and colloquialisms. Also like the poetry of the ancient Alexandrians, Cavafy's is less the result of sudden inspiration than the result of the most scrupulous craftsmanship.
It is the poetry of a very learned, very intelligent man. Most modernist poets did their greatest work in lyric poetry, but Cavafy turned to the elegiac epigram, which had been perfected by Callimachus and his contemporaries. The elegiac epigram was originally intended for inscriptions on funerary monuments, but the Alexandrians developed it into an objective, cool, and often ironic poetic form.
Robert Browning achieved similar poetic effects in his dramatic monologues, and these certainly had their effect on Cavafy, but the primary influence seems, as always, to have been Alexandrian. One persistent theme in ancient elegiac epigrams, particularly in the highly regarded work of Strato, is homosexuality, and this is also a principal theme for Cavafy. Most of his best poems, in fact, which do not deal with episodes, real or imagined, from the Hellenistic world deal with homosexuality.
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