C. P. Cavafy: The Canon; The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (review)

Cavafy’s complete poems have been translated several times – by John Mavrogordato (1951); Rae Dalven (1961); Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1975, revised 1992); and Aliki Barnstone (2006) – there is a comprehensive list at http://www.cavafy.com/companion/bibliography/select.asp . Now this bilingual edition brings face to face with the Greek the body of translations by Stratis Haviaras first published by Hermes Publishing in Athens (2004). The appeal of Cavafy’s poems for an English readership is well attested, and its strange survival in English translation is well enough known. E. M. Forster praised Cavafy’s poetic use of personal experience, Rex Warner his ‘discovery of what amounts to a personal mythology’; W. H. Auden argued that Cavafy’s unique tone of voice made it ‘as easy, or as difficult, for a person from an alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural groups to which the poet happens to belong’. In a foreword to this volume Seamus Heaney suggests that ‘Cavafy’s poems survive translation better than most’ because their virtues, their quite distinctive tone, belong not to the Greek language but to Cavafy himself. And by that route, the poems come to belong to us all. Forster characterizes Cavafy as a man ‘standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe’. Heaney offers Cavafy’s view of the human predicament as one ‘presented neither as divine comedy nor fully blown tragedy, but . . . seen from a viewpoint located somewhere between Olympus and Gesthemane’. Stratis Haviaras has pondered Cavafy and Cavafy’s subject matter for thirty years, and in 2003, the seventieth anniversary of the poet’s death (the 140th of his birth), was prompted to prepare an English of the complete ‘canon’, the 154 poems approved by Cavafy for publication and published posthumously in 1935. Further ‘unpublished’ or ‘hidden’ poems were published in 1968; ‘unfinished’ poems came out in 1994.

Cavafy himself would have marvelled at his reception. Forster records his gentle disavowal of such possibilities – ‘You could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.’ And then his amazement at Forster’s managing with his ‘public school Greek’ to make a start on ‘The God Abandons Antony’ – ‘Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, this is very good indeed.’ And so, acting as his own first English translator, he led Forster through the poem. ‘It was not my knowledge that touched him but my desire to know and to receive. He had no idea then that he could be widely desired, even in the stumbling North. To be understood in Alexandria and tolerated in Athens was the extent of his ambition.’

Manuel Savidis’ introduction locates the necessity for new translations in the changing nature of poetry readers’ expectations, and their changed perceptions of how past and present relate to each other. Cavafy’s work is an essential part of modern Greek poetic tradition, and also of the Greek tradition as a whole. Haviaras’ translation is the first in English to announce so prominently the ‘canonical’ character of the collection, an expression normal in discussion of Cavafy’s work, and perhaps more resonant in Greek than in English. But as well as indicating simply that Haviaras has included only authorially approved material, the notion of a Cavafy ‘canon’ gives embodiment to Fredric Jameson’s idea that canonicity represents a suspect ‘alliance between the older philologists . . . who have a genuine historical interest in and commitment to the past, and the newer aesthetes who are the true ideologists of some (late) modern’. Cavafy’s modernist aestheticism generously includes historical realities, managed (as Seferis and G. P. Savidis remark) with ‘whirling agility’. Some of these realities are personal: Cavafy’s roots in the Greek communities of Constantinople and Alexandria, his Greek and British citizenship, his life on the margins of mainland Greece. This new book itself, culturally disengaged (Seamus Heaney’s foreword...