On the twenty-ninth of April 1933, Constantine Cavafy died on his seventieth birthday. A few days before, he had jotted down for a friend to read—cancer of the throat had deprived the poet of the ability to speak—“And I had twenty-five more poems to write!”

In 1963 Greece, the world, celebrated the centennial of Cavafy's birth and the thirtieth anniversary of his death. A tasteful new edition of his poems, by G. P. Savidis, has marked the occasion.¹ This new edition follows (for the first time) the scheme set out by the poet himself for an arrangement of his poems in a thematic rather than in a chronological order.² Apart from this fine tribute, the most exciting landmark of the Cavafy Year was the release—by the poet's heir—of the rich collection of Cavafy papers, which up to now had been closed to the public. The collection, containing approximately five thousand papers—personal and family papers, essays, notes, as well as unpublished poems—was entrusted to Mr. Savidis for eventual editing and publication.

I had the good fortune to be in Athens during the summer of 1963, where Mr. Savidis very kindly allowed me to look at the Cavafy material. I suppose every lover of literature who has ever had the chance to find himself among long-hidden and unexplored papers of his favorite author has experienced the awe I felt that summer afternoon when for the first time I was able to touch and examine the yellowish pictures and manuscripts of Cavafy. There they were, neatly filed—first the family pictures, where one could only guess which of the grave-looking boys was Constantine; then the pictures of the young man, dressed and combed with extreme care, with the features of an unmistakable personality and a deep somewhat troubled look in his dark eyes; and the more recent pictures of the poet's maturity, most startling pictures of an intellectual who had been through agony of body and spirit and who had not come out unscathed. Then there were the pictures of the house on Rue Lepsius, half-lit rooms with oriental furnishings, heavy draperies, low sofas, carved furniture, tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl, elaborately wrought brass chandeliers, huge mirrors in heavy gilt frames, old-fashioned china lamps. And suddenly I could see the figure of the tragically isolated old man walking once more in those empty rooms where he had lived alone for so many years, working over those exquisite verses of utter lucidity, which have the power to evoke a world.

Half past twelve. Time has passed quickly
since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp,
and sat down here. I have been sitting without reading,
and without talking. With whom could I talk
all alone in this house.(3)

It was here, in Alexandria—the old capital of the Ptolemies, the crossing-path of East and West, the melting-pot of races, cultures, and religious—that the scholar spent his nights studying ancient documents until the past was present and alive and those troubled, confused, tragic figures of history were caught once again in the whirlwind of our passions and came back to repeat the pathos of their lives among us.

Ah, here, you came with your undefinable
fascination. In history few
lines only are found about you,
and so more freely I molded you in my mind.
I molded you handsome and emotional.
My art gives to your face
a dreamlike attractive beauty.
And so fully did I vision you,
that late last night, as my lamp
was going out—I deliberately let it go out—
I thought you came into my room,
you seemed to stand before me as you must have been
in conquered Alexandria,
pale and weary, ideal in your grief,
still hoping they would take pity on you
the foul ones—who were whispering, “Too many Caesars.”(4)

There is magic in those lines in Greek, and only he who has attempted to translate poetry—that part of the meaning which lies in the suggestive quality that words have acquired through the centuries—will understand the frustration that is involved in the task.

To an international audience Cavafy is accessible only through translation, because he had the disadvantage to be writing in a language which, of however, glorious a past, is little known today outside Greece. This is especially unfortunate because one of the most important features of Cavafy's originality lies in his unique use of words and in effects achieved through elements intrinsic to the Greek language. A great many of Cavafy's stylistic innovations are due to the fact that he was writing at a period when Greece was creating a new language out of a confused and divided past. In English there is nothing comparable to the conflict between purist and demotic Greek. Purist Greek at the time Cavafy began to write was the official language of the state; yet it was mostly a written language, which had lost contact with the mass of the people and the life of the nation and consequently had become artificial and dead. However, it was a language with a vast tradition; through ages of theological controversies it had developed if not a power for lyrical expression of feeling—except perhaps in church hymns—yet a remarkable synthetic power, subtlety, precision, concreteness, density of expression, and a certain austere beauty. Demotic Greek, on the other hand, was the language of the people, mostly a spoken language, with practically no pretentions of erudition or sophistication, yet with a rare freshness and inventiveness which had already found expression in folk literature in the mainland of Greece during the long years of Turkish occupation, and which had proved its potentialities by achieving excellence in more sophisticated treatment in some of the Greek islands which were free of Turkish rule and able to follow the European literary trends of the time.

In the second half of the nineteenth century and in the beginnings of the twentieth, the poets of the newly freed Greece were ambitious to establish demotic Greek as the language of literature, the only language fit to express the spirit of the new nation. The poetic movements of the time were discovering and exploiting popular and folk materials, especially folk songs, and they were exhibiting a dominant lyrical tone. Although he adopted the cause of demotic Greek, Cavafy's loyalties in language were divided. As a son of a well-to-do family of merchants related to the tradition-minded Phanariot circles on his mother's side, he was brought up and educated in the formal purist tradition. Moreover, since early youth he was an avid scholar showing great interest and erudition in Greek history and language. His early poems, which he later abandoned and which are not usually included in the collections of his verse, are written in the stiff, formal, purist Greek of the “Romantic” tradition in vogue at that time in Greece. However, in Alexandria he became involved with a group of young demoticists and came to be an enthusiastic supporter of the demotic movements of his time in poetry. He embraced the movement, but not its narrow-minded fanaticism. Cavafy, by temperament and upbringing, was a traditionalist. Although capable of expressing strong lyrical sentiment, as seen in some of his most evocative erotic poems, Cavafy was the heir of the long-forgotten art of austere economy and perfect balance of the ancient Greek epigrammatists and of the precision and meticulousness of the Byzantine theologians and scholars. However, these were qualities which could not be abstracted from the language in which they had been achieved; Cavafy was mature enough not to reject the past but to try to preserve it, build upon it, and make it a part of the present life of the nation. Four hundred years had created a dividing gap in the Greek sensibility and letters—I do not mean a loss of national feeling or of a sense of identity—and Cavafy knew that unless Greece bridged it, the literature, the history, and the great civilization of its ancestors would become those of a foreign people. “I am not a Greek, I am Hellenic,” he used to say, trying to encompass the totality of the physical and intellectual expansion of the race through the ages.

Cavafy knew, of course, that language changes and that the conditions of our life change too. He had no illusions about restoring ancient Greek or something close to it, as some of the most fanatical purists seemed to have. But he knew also that a nation which denounces its past has no hope for the future. Taking his cue perhaps from the idiom spoken in Alexandria, which was something of a mixture of purist and demotic elements, Cavafy developed his own personal style—a perfect amalgamation of the life and emotive power inherent in demotic Greek and of the dignity, density, and suggestive and illusory possibilities of purist Greek. His language is full of turns of expression and words borrowed from the entire Greek linguistic tradition since classical times. And so perfectly could he integrate his diverse material that in poems like “In the Month of Athyr,” or in “Come, O King of the Lacedaemonians,” he achieves the perfect tour de force by integrating whole ancient Greek passages in the modern Greek context while being not only perfectly clear and intelligible, but absolutely natural too. He did not employ or try to bring back to use archaic expressions long forgotten or belonging to the province of the literary historian or the linguist. Although comparable to Joyce's and other modern writers' attempts to break down the linguistic frontiers, Cavafy's experiment—although equally bold—was, I believe, more successful, for every archaic or unusual word in his poems is within the modern Greek linguistic consciousness and is perfectly clear to the average educated Greek.

It took a vast knowledge of the language and an unusual sensitivity and power over words to perform the task; for, as I said, Cavafy's language is not demotic Greek sprinkled with purist or archaic expressions, or vice versa, but an ideal fusion. “I have tried to blend the spoken with the written language,” he wrote to his friend Pericles Anastasiades; “I have called to my help in the process of mixture all my experience plus as much artistic insight as I possess in the matter—trembling, so to speak, over every word. …” The result was a style of deliberately prosaic quality, simple, concentrated, almost dry, economical, unadorned, divested of every element which would cause it to deviate from the strictest austerity—at its best, inevitable. Cavafy's poetry is highly intellectual; yet it is deeply suggestive and characterized by strong emotive power. “A more elaborate style and a less controlled imagination would have destroyed Cavafy's subtle and special charm,” remarks C. M. Bowra.⁵

Since they can hardly be rendered in translation, these features are necessarily restricted to the appreciation of the people of the poet's own race and language. What is it then that survives translation in Cavafy? Eliot said that great poets are more translatable than minor writers because, although just as much of the original significance is lost as is lost when we translate lesser poets, “there is also more saved—for more was there.”⁶ Obviously much is saved in Cavafy's case. His poetry does not appeal to the wider public; except for a few lyrical pieces, it is a difficult kind of poetry, demanding a certain degree of erudition, sophistication, and ability for abstract thought if it is to be fully appreciated. Yet Cavafy's reputation abroad has been steadily growing. His complete poems have been translated into French and twice into English, not to mention several translations of individual poems in various languages. There is something in Cavafy, apparently, which is capable of transcending national limits. Auden, who doesn't know one word of modern Greek, defines this element as Cavafy's unique tone of voice. He has read translations of Cavafy made by different hands, he says, but every one of them was immediately recognized as a poem by Cavafy. Nobody else could have written it; it revealed a person with a unique perspective on the world.

Discussing Great Europeans, Eliot said that in figures like Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, the quality which survives translation and which “is capable of arousing a direct response as of man to man, in readers of any place and any time,” is wisdom.⁷ I am not going to plead Cavafy's greatness or wisdom here, for both have to be tested by time. The point I want to make is that for a poet to appeal to a wider audience than that of his place and time, and for that appeal to be not the transient one of a passing fashion but a deeper and more permanent relationship between himself and his readers, he should share in some degree in the qualities which make a poet transcend the limits of his country and become, if not a Great European—at least a European poet. He should have, if not the wisdom of the great sages—for those are few—the relative wisdom of the serious artist who has something significant to tell to his fellow men. In this respect I believe that Cavafy is not only a Greek poet but a European poet too, for even in translation his poetry remains highly relevant and significant to the European reader, arousing that “direct response as of man to man” that Eliot was talking about.

By “European” audience I do not mean an audience strictly confined within the limits of Europe, but one which emotionally and culturally is within the European, or Western, tradition. A part of this essay will be devoted to the examination of the qualities which are essential for a poet to be called European, and the way these criteria can be applied to Cavafy. Eliot, in his discussion of what is a classic, what is a universal classic, and what is a Great European, has given us a set of values by which the greatness of a poet can be established. The criteria in this discussion will in part be an adaptation and combination of Eliot's values as they apply to Cavafy as a European poet.

My first criterion is a quality which can best be termed as maturity. As Eliot has said, maturity cannot be defined. We cannot make its meaning apprehensible to the immature; if we are mature we will recognize maturity when we encounter it, either in a civilization, or in a literature, or in a personality. However, in order to make my point clear, I shall distinguish four qualities which a poet should exhibit in order to be recognized as properly mature; or rather, since these qualities do not exist independently from each other, I shall call them four aspects under which maturity is revealed in poetry. These aspects are a sense of history, maturity of mind, maturity of manners, and maturity of language.

There is no doubt that one of Cavafy's most important features is his use of history. “I am a historical poet,” Cavafy used to say. By that he did not mean his erudition in classical, Hellenistic, and Byzantine history; he did not mean that he used those eras as settings for many of his poems either; nor did he mean that a great many of the characters in his poems are personalities we read about in history books. What he meant was that he felt in himself that particular consciousness which makes us aware that we are not living in an isolated present in a vacuum of time; that the past is not the special domain only of museums, historiographers, or antiquarians; and that our present experience would be a succession of meaningless facts unless seen in relation to parallel human experiences in the past.

It is the European poet especially who cannot turn his back upon the past and hope to bring order in the present experience or find a meaning in it. It is not only because European history has been too long and too complex, or because too many countries and civilizations rose and fell, that we cannot ignore the destiny they have traced for us; other civilizations besides the European have had a long and bloody history. But it is that the experience of all these ages of our history has been made meaningful to us through a body of historical knowledge and literature which we cannot afford to pass over. The fact that Mark Antony and Cleopatra have existed, loved, lost a kingdom of half the world, and died for that love; and the fact that Shakespeare has created through them his immortal symbols of great romantic love in the name of which a man has been able to say,—“Let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall! Here is my space”—have forever changed our concept of love. No man will sacrifice the world for the love of a woman again, no poet will immortalize the sacrifice or bewail the death of the capacity for it, but the line or the work of art will bear a relation to the myth of Antony and Cleopatra. At the present time, when modern man is confused and lost in a chaotic universe because he feels that his life and his experience are so radically different from those of his forefathers that the wisdom he has gained through the ages cannot help him to find order and meaning and catharsis in his existence—at the present time it is incumbent on the artist to rejoin the broken threads of human experience and assert once again the common destiny of man.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not a lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered(8)

said Eliot, who in so many ways has stressed the importance of the historical consciousness in modern literature.

In that still very significant article of his on Joyce in 1923, Eliot made the statement, “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. … It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious.”⁹ At the time Eliot was writing those words I do not believe he knew of the existence of Cavafy. As far as I know, the first time Eliot came across Cavafy's poetry was through E. M. Forster about 1928, which resulted in Eliot's publishing two of Cavafy's poems in the Criterion. I do not know whether Eliot would have modified that statement about Yeats had he had a chance to be earlier or more intimately acquainted with Cavafy's poetry; Eliot's and Cavafy's personalities were too different for a liking at first glance, and we must not forget that it took Eliot many years to find an interest in Yeats. But my point is that it was not Yeats only who was the first contemporary to feel the need for the mythical method. Although probably at that time not aware of each other's existence, Yeats and Cavafy started developing the mythic method almost simultaneously—Cavafy some years earlier, as a matter of fact. The two poets were almost exactly contemporaries—Yeats being two years younger and dying six years later than Cavafy. Both belonged to small but proud countries engaged at the time in strong nationalistic movements, a fact which might partly account for both poets' strong sense of the past. Both had an aristocratic attitude towards life and their art, being perhaps the last patrician poets of our times. Both started publishing poetry in the late eighties—in neither case considered their most representative work. Both were poets of middle age, achieving their major work in their fifties and later. It was only when they saw experience in retrospect that its manifold significance was revealed to them; it was only in later maturity that they both attained the impersonality that Eliot sought in art—the impersonality of the poet “Who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of it a general symbol.”¹⁰ And it was at the time of their full maturity that they started using the historical past in its cyclic recurrence or in its timeless presence as their major theme and method of symbolism. The fact that two poets of distant and different backgrounds have followed parallel courses of artistic development points perhaps to the most significant fact that the development of the mythic method was not generated by happy coincidence but by something deeper in the need of the times.

Even in poems written around 1904-1906, like “Expecting the Barbarians,” “Trojans,” or “King Demetrius,” Cavafy has shown a conscious and mature use of history. By 1911 he had reached an advanced enough stage of development to produce a poem like “The God Forsakes Antony,” which apart from its being a very good poem in itself, is the poem where Cavafy's myth of Alexandria found its first distinct formulation.

When suddenly at the midnight hour is heard
an invisible company passing
with exquisite music, with voices—
your fortune that is now yielding, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not mourn uselessly.
As one prepared long since, as one courageous,
say farewell to her, to Alexandria who is leaving.
Above all do not deceive yourself, do not say that it was
a dream, that your hearing has been mistaken;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As one prepared long since, as one courageous,
as it befits you who have been worthy of such a city,
firmly approach the window,
and listen with emotion, but not
with the coward's entreaties and complaints,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
to the exquisite instruments of the mystic company,
and say farewell to her, to Alexandria you are leaving.(11)

The characterization is mature. The poem is an address to Antony, yet the speaker's voice is not overbearing. Although he utters no word, Antony emerges from the poem a distinct personality, three-dimensional, effortlessly carrying on his shoulders the tremendous burden of Plutarch and Shakespeare—not refuting them, not ignoring them, not even trying to supersede them, but silently acknowledging his debt to them while being himself, an Antony whom only Cavafy could have created. What remains when we read the poem is Antony—no, it is ourselves whom we see sadly but firmly approaching the window in doomed Alexandria to hear the voices of the invisible followers of the god who are abandoning us alone to face the destiny we ourselves have shaped. The image of Alexandria we get from the poem is enriched and partly modified by the idea and myth of Alexandria developed more fully in Cavafy's later poetry. In a body of work with rare unity like Cavafy's this is to be expected. Yet “The God Forsakes Antony” can stand perfectly on its own. Even if we had never read poems like “Alexandrian Kings,” “Tomb of Ignatius,” “Myres: Alexandria, A.D. 340,” still we could not fail to understand what Alexandria stands for. For Alexandria does not exist in the far past; Alexandria is here around us—our greatest, most exquisite, and most destructive destiny.

In “Theodotus” the point can perhaps be made clearer. The first stanza is addressed to Julius Caesar and it refers to the incident described in Plutarch where Theodotus, King Ptolemy's teacher of rhetoric, advised the Egyptians to kill Pompey when he landed and present his head to Caesar. The second stanza is addressed directly to the reader and constitutes one of the most earnest and powerful admonitions one could find in poetry.

If you are one of the truly elect,
watch how you obtain your dominance.
However much you are renowned, your achievements
in Italy and in Thessaly
however much the cities do acclaim,
however many honorary decrees
your admirers have issued for you in Rome,
neither your joy, nor your triumph will last,
nor superior—superior in what way?—person will you feel,
when, in Alexandria, Theodotus brings to you,
on a bloody platter,
wretched Pompey's head.
And do not trust that in your life
limited, regulated, and prosaic,
such spectacular and dreadful things do not take place.
Perhaps this very hour into some neighbor's
orderly house he is entering—
invisible, incorporeal—Theodotus,
bringing such a frightful head.(12)

There is a strong didactic element in this kind of poetry; as a matter of fact one could argue the point that Cavafy is basically a didactic poet.¹³ But so are Milton and Dante and Eliot, yet the fact does not detract from the greatness of their poetry. Not many poems can claim a more sustained level of poetic feeling. Not only the didactic intention, but the same admonitory address to the reader that Cavafy uses in “Theodotus” can be seen in the following three lines in “Death by Water”:

                                                                                          Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.(14)

These lines always bring into my mind the last lines from Cavafy's “Tomb of Iases,” a dead youth's last appeal to the living through his epitaph,

                                                                                          Traveler,
if you are an Alexandrian, you will not condemn. You know
                                                                                                    the passionate force
of our life; what ardor it has; what supreme pleasure.(15)

“As you,” “if you are an Alexandrian”—these are the connecting links which make the lives of the Phoenician sailor and the young Alexandrian youth, both dead so long ago, relevant to us and to our destiny. There is a strong similarity of tone in the two apostrophes—the same pathos of the voices of the dead trying to reach us from the underworld and speak to us, explain to us, warn us. There are so many dead in Cavafy's poems that even a collection of titles is impressive: “Tomb of Lysias Grammaticus,” “Tomb of Eurion,” “Tomb of Iases,” “For Ammones who died 29 years old, in 610,” “Tomb of Ignatius,” “Tomb of Lanes,” “Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Commagene,” and many others. I do not believe that there exists elsewhere a congregation of dead so very alive.

There is one more poem of Cavafy's which I would like to discuss in connection with his sense of history. The poem has the title “Those Who Fought for the Achaean League,” and it is an epigram in the best tradition of Simonides and the other famous epigrammatists of the Greek Anthology.

Valiant you who fought and fell in glory;
fearless of those everywhere victorious.
Blameless you, if Diaeus and Critolaus have erred.
Whenever the Greeks want to pride themselves,
“Such men our nation brings forth” will they say
about you. So wonderful your praise will be.
Written in Alexandria by an Achaean;
the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyros.(16)

Although it was easy to perceive the purity of style and the excellence of structure—unfortunately lost in the translation of such a tightly wrought form as an epigram—I always felt there was something eluding me in the meaning and the significance of the poem, especially of the last two lines. They did not seem to add anything; yet I refused to believe that a poet like Cavafy, who constructed his poems with such care and accuracy and who cultivated such an economy of style, could ever allow two insignificant lines—which sounded like a poor device for “antiquing” the poem—to bring an anticlimax to a brilliantly constructed epigram. I had let the matter rest at that, until a very acute suggestion by Mr. Seferis came to illuminate the subject for me and transform the poem into one of Cavafy's most significant achievements.¹⁷

The epigram refers to the battle near Corinth in 146 b.c., the last desperate effort of the Achaeans before they succumbed to the “everywhere victorious” Romans. In that battle, the fate of Hellenistic civilization was decided; all hope was lost. In order to find the key to the particular emotional situation which prompted this tribute to those who fought for the Achaean League, we must turn, as Mr. Seferis has suggested, to the date of its composition, 1922. That was the year of the destruction of the Greek army in Asia Minor. One should be a Greek to realize the full emotional significance of the destruction to Greece. It meant the irrevocable loss of all hope for recovering from the Turks the old Greek colonies in Asia and for recreating the old glory that was the Byzantine Empire; it was the destruction of the dream of the “Great Idea,” as it was called, which had been nourished for four hundred years in the breasts of the Turkish-occupied Greeks and bequeathed from generation to generation in the folk songs and the tales about the last emperor of Byzantium, who would wake up from his long sleep and restore Constantinople and St. Sophia and all they represented to their rightful heirs. But the offensive launched in Asia in 1921 was a failure. The leaders had erred in their ambition, in their inner conflicts, and in their judgments about the help of the Allied forces and especially England, just as Diaeus and Critolaus, the leaders of the Achaean League, had erred in their ambition, in their conflicts, and in their judgments about Rome. The task of the poet was to pay the tribute which is thought meet for heroic sacrifice—an epigram to the valiant and blameless ones who fought and fell in glory. The tribute was paid by an Achaean in Alexandria, the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyros. That was a time of trouble, political corruption, and degradation in the kingdom of the Lagides. Cavafy's time also was a time of gradual decay and disintegration in the Greek settlement of Alexandria, which since the advent of the English had fallen from an economically, politically, and socially flourishing and ruling class to the pitiable state of fight for survival. Alexandria could not last long after Corinth—after Asia Minor. The anonymous Achaean, Cavafy, knew it. The modest identification, the bitterness and despair hidden in the last line about the destiny of his people, yet the quiet resignation to fate which is felt as an undertone to the whole poem, are almost insurpassable in their simplicity.

Written in Alexandria by an Achaean;
the seventh year of Ptolemy Lathyros.

Transcending the personal and the local, the poet's tribute in its almost classical dignity and controlled emotion attains universal significance to all those who fight a lost battle in order to maintain an ancient ideal.

This awareness of history is indispensable, says Eliot, in order to attain maturity of mind. “There must be the knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilized people, and of a people whose civilization is sufficiently cognate to have influenced and entered into our own.”¹⁸ Such was the case with Cavafy and the Hellenistic and Byzantine civlizations, which although of his own people, were sufficiently removed in time to be distinct from the one he was part of. It is only through the recognition of the relation between two cultures, between the past and the present, that we can hope to develop that particular sense of value which makes us able to distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral, the universal from the local. This all-important consciousness of history Cavafy had, and it enabled him to condense all human experience in a single statement:

                                                                      Traveler,
if you are an Alexandrian, you will not condemn.

This is what I mean by maturity.

The third way maturity is exhibited by a poet is in maturity of manners. By maturity of manners I do not mean only those ways in which Eliot says that Congreve's society was more mature than Shakespeare's—not only the elegance, the refinement, the sophistication of life, the wit and beauty of Cavafy's Hellenistic world, an over-refined civilization towards its end.¹⁹ By maturity of manners I also mean that refinement of manners which springs from a mature conscience, an awareness of values in life, a delicate sensibility. In his discussion of maturity of manners, Eliot refers to the story of Aeneas and Dido, and especially to that scene in Book VI of the Aeneid in which Aeneas cannot forgive himself for his behavior towards Dido although he is aware that his destiny is governed by powers beyond himself, as a locus classicus of maturity of manners in European society. It is this maturity of manners which I believe Cavafy does not lack.

Cavafy's myth of the Hellenistic world with its culture, sophistication, hedonism, and exquisite aesthetic sense, is one of the best expressions in modern literature of the over-refined society of a civilization towards its end. Cavafy portrays not only the elegance of life, the refinement of pleasure, or the enchantment of the soft perfumed nights of Ionia; nor only the vanity, the corruption, the vice, the impotence, and the weakness of an aging civilization. What impresses us most, what finally the reader carries within him, is that from amidst this corruption, this impotence, and this weakness, man does not emerge a failure. I believe that paragraphs like the following describing Cavafy's world are rather misleading, not because they misinterpret it, but because they miss some of its most important aspects.

It was in this Hellenistic Alexandrian world, then, that Cavafy found the “landscape” through which he could express himself with pertinence and urbanity. Out of it he was to build his “myth” of a personal and at the same time perennial human condition, that of the tired, rapacious, over-refined man who is the generic hero of his poems, homo Europaeus, as we might call him, of our not so late humanist period. For that after all is the principal figure that emerges from behind the many masks which Cavafy gives him: the sick guest of an aesthetic city, of a Greco-Roman asylum, full of selfish desires and absurd vanities, ageing into impotence and ugliness, purified by every longing, sapped by every depravity, all sentiment and all fatigue, devoted to fate and pain as the morphinist to his drug, lonely, hollowed out, old as the ages, all nostalgia, animal and sage, all bare, with no ambitions, gnawed by the dread of death, by the relentless dance of time that sweeps all that he loves into oblivion, and finding relief only in his art where he can watch with something approaching a detached irony the spectacle of a life of pleasure, folly, misfortune, vice, and sybaritic elegance which he now can never again enjoy.²⁰

The picture we get here is of a world wholly negative and decadent, with a sensibility if not completely dead, then certainly very restricted. This is one aspect of Cavafy's world, but not the whole story. Among the things the critic missed are the lyrical feeling of the perfection of beauty, the strength of sensual pleasure, the fight between asceticism and self-indulgence, the conflict of races and religions, the clash of values of different cultures. Cavafy's man is certainly the homo Europaeus, but the homo Europaeus is of a more complex nature and of a grander stature than the critic would have us believe. Cavafy's world is not a heroic world; nor is it a peaceful or healthy world either. Failure, misfortune, and an overpowering destiny of inevitable doom constitute the scene in which his figures move. We cannot expect them to exhibit heroic virtues. However, there is a grandeur in the way the Cavafy man accepts his destiny and bears his fate. In the fact that the man who created Alexandria for himself is able firmly to approach the window and say farewell to her, we see a maturity of manners which, in the frame of its world and situation, can be compared to that of Aeneas. As an instance of that quality by which man surpasses self-pity and asserts his dignity even in failure, I would quote the thoughts of Demetrius, son of Seleucus, when he heard that Ptolemy had arrived in Rome poorly dressed and on foot so that he might beg with greater success:

                                                  That in fact they have become
some sort of servants to the Romans
the son of Seleucus knows; that those are who give to them
and those who take from them their thrones
arbitrarily, as they please, he knows.
But at least in their appearance
let them maintain some majesty;
let them not forget that they are kings still,
that they are still called (alas!) kings.(21)

That is why Demetrius sent to Ptolemy purple robes, jewels, a diadem, and many servants and horses, so that he might go to Rome “like an Alexandrian Greek monarch” and not like a beggar. It is the spirit of this thought and gesture that counts, not the fact that Ptolemy refused the presents and chose to beg. King Demetrius of Macedonia showed something of the same spirit when, having lost his throne, he took off his golden robes and purple shoes, dressed simply, and left.

Doing like an actor
who when the performance is over,
changes his clothes and departs.(22)

Plutarch, whom Cavafy is quoting in an epigraph to the poem, found the action beneath a king. Cavafy, a child of the age in which Demetrius had lived, knew better—he knew the kind of courage it required.

In discussing the aspects under which maturity is reflected in a poet's work, we have examined so far a sense of history, maturity of mind, and maturity of manners, and we have seen how these criteria apply to Cavafy's poetry. The fourth aspect under which maturity is exhibited is maturity of language. We have already discussed Cavafy's innovations and contributions to the Greek language. We have seen how he has been able to use creatively a language old and seemingly exhausted—purist Greek—though uniting it to the present by the most powerful coalescence of two idioms, asserting the essential continuity of the Greek language from the past to the present just as he asserted the continuity of life and experience. Ancient and purist Greek were not dead languages for Cavafy, no more than Alexandria and Antioch and Byzantium were a dead experience.

Maturity of language cannot exist except as a vehicle for the expression of the mature mind. It was in order to attain the precision necessary for the expression of a more complex reality and the subtler feelings that it involved that Cavafy resorted to the synthetic powers of purist Greek. Demotic Greek had not yet developed those terms of abstract thought and of a more sophisticated set of emotions—terms indispensable to the intellectual trend of Cavafy's nature—nor a more complex sentence and period structure, all of which are characteristics of a mature language. A single poet, however great, cannot create a mature language overnight; it takes the gradual enrichment of thought and emotion that marks the growth of a people and a culture—which gradually finds its expression in language—to accomplish the task and prepare the ground for the poet who will absorb the achievements of his predecessors and give them forth together with his own contribution as the perfect expression of the full potentialities of the language at that time. No poet writing in an immature language—and no poet unless in his full maturity of thought and art too—could have written the stanzas:

And from the wondrous panhellenic expedition,
the victorious, the all-illustrious,
the all-celebrated, the glorious
as none has been glorious before,
the incomparable: we emerged;
a Greek world new, great.
We, the Alexandrians, the Antiochians,
the Seleucians, and the numerous
other Greeks of Egypt and of Syria,
and those in Media and those in Persia, and all the rest.
With the extensive dominations,
with the various action of reflective adaptations.
And the Common Greek Language
as far as the heart of Bactria we brought, as far as the
Indians.(23)

Here the line, “with the various action of reflective adaptations,” seems to sum up and contain all his other work, all the problems of the Hellenistic world with its racial, religious, and cultural conflicts that the burden of continuing the heritage of the Greek civilization in Asia and Africa involved, especially in view of the added complications that the two tremendous new powers of Rome and Christianity presented. It was through “the various action of reflective adaptations” that the small Greek group managed to absorb all forces and counterforces without losing its essential identity. The “various action” of adaptations of thought, of feeling—Julian, and Myres, and that Christian convert mourning his dead pagan father, who was priest in the Serapium, and all those other confused and torn figures of the Greco-Roman world can be seen in their inner struggle of compromises, of reconciliations, of adaptations in a complex world of conflicting ideals and values. And one is led to think of the “various action of reflective adaptations” of our time.

It took maturity of mind and the genius of Cavafy to reach a line of such tremendous force and comprehensiveness. But it certainly did take also that maturity of language that we can get only through tradition. Cavafy had behind him one of the richest traditions a poet could hope for. Perhaps its very richness would have intimidated a lesser poet in the use of a language which seemed to have realized all its potentialities, run its full course, and finally reached a dead end. Yet Cavafy succeeded in attaining a perfect balance between individuality and uniqueness on the one hand and tradition on the other. He comes as the last and one of the best poets of a great period of the Greek language, yet as an innovator too, uniting the past with the present and opening the road for the future poetic generations of Greece to a more mature and fruitful exploitation of all the resources of one of the richest languages in the world.

The first criterion in calling a poet “European” has been maturity, and we have discussed the four aspects under which it is revealed in a poet. The second criterion will be comprehensiveness. When I call a poet comprehensive, I mean that he does not restrict himself to one aspect of man's nature or to one phase of his life; to be comprehensive a body of art need contain, within the limits of its dominant theme or themes, a variety of human interests and emotions, and cover a wide range of sensibility. Cavafy's myth of the aesthetic city of Alexandria has misled some critics into placing too much emphasis on the theme of corruption and decadence and sensual pleasure in Cavafy to the exclusion of some of the most important aspects of his world—aspects which transcend the narrow limits of the sensibility of the “aesthete” and make his world significant in a larger sense. Although influenced, especially in his earlier years, by the aesthetic movement of the late nineteenth century in France and in England, Cavafy's aestheticism has a distinct quality of its own. It has neither the morbidity of Baudelaire, nor the dilettantism of Wilde. If there is a similarity, it is with Pater, because in both Cavafy and Pater the idealization of beauty has something of the classical spirit in it. In refuting the view of a critic of Cavafy, I used above the expression “lyrical feeling of the perfection of beauty.” What I meant was that in the corruption and weakness and degradation of Cavafy's world, beauty retains an undefiled purity which somehow atones for all the ugliness which surrounds it. What remains from the weakness, and the greed, and the miserable failure of the life of Orophernes is a tetradrachm on which he has left

a charm of his lovely youth,
of his poetic beauty a light,
an aesthetic memory of an Ionian boy. …(24)

Despite all her vices, I think that Cavafy's Alexandria has something of the same quality that Cavafy ascribes to the youth of the following poem:

It was this in him that was distinctive,
that in all his dissoluteness
and his great experience in love,
despite the usual
harmonious accord of attitude and age in him,
there happened to be moments—of course
very rare ones—when he gave the impression
of a flesh almost untouched.
The beauty of his twenty-nine years
so tested by pleasure,
at moments strangely recalled
a youth who—somewhat clumsily—to love
for the first time his pure body surrenders.(25)

Throughout Cavafy's work we can sense those ambivalent feelings that the speaker of his poems has towards the Alexandrian world—admiration for the perfection of its beauty, pride and exultation in its daring, deep nostalgia for its sensual pleasure, enjoyment of its wit, its elegance, and its artistic skills, pity for its degradation and weakness, irony towards its petty vanities and lack of ideals and political corruption—and above all we can feel the sense of identification with it, of belonging to it, yet of being able to view it with artistic detachment.

It is because of his comprehensiveness that Cavafy is able to give this variety of tone and evoke this multiplicity of emotions. For Cavafy's world is not simple or one-dimensional; it is rich and manifold, and it encompasses a whole panorama of humanity. Within the narrow limits of one hundred fifty-four short poems, Cavafy succeeded in giving to us the picture not only of the decadence of a European civilization, but also its religious problems, its politics, its philosophy and art, its aspirations and failures, the tragic doom of its existence. His poems span a period of more than two thousand years, from Homeric times to the present; yet while each poem is historically true and representative of the spirit of its time and place, Cavafy's world has a rare unity of tone and spirit. While each historical period is distinctly delineated, and the characters in it, whether actual or fictitious, are alive not only as individuals but also as representatives of their races, cultures, social levels, and times; while the problems they confront are as diverse as life itself and as various as the people who face them; and while the people themselves range from artists and clerks and perfume sellers to politicians and Emperors and gods, we have the feeling that they all belong to the same world, and that in a strange way they breathe the same air and share the same destiny. In its variety, then, Cavafy's work is unified—each poem not only contributing to the understanding and enjoyment of the rest, but modifying and enriching them, adding new dimensions and depth to every word. Most of the poems are deceptively simple, small vignettes related in a dry, matter-of-fact voice. But the more times you read them, the more audible that voice becomes, haunting you with the faces of youths of exquisite beauty and the subdued voices coming from the epitaphs and the eyes of Byzantine queens and the old men forgotten in lonely houses and the white flowers on the graves of dead lovers—haunting you until you too seem to be walking the streets of the city:

New lands you shall not find, nor shall you find another sea.
The city shall be following you. The streets you will be roaming
the same. And in the same neighborhoods you will be growing old;
and in these same houses you will be growing white.
You shall always be reaching this city. As for another—abandon hope—
there is no ship for you, there is no road.(26)

This point leads us to our next criterion in calling a poet “European,” and that is universality. When we read lines like the ones quoted above, our appreciation and enjoyment of them do not depend on whether they are written by a Greek or an Englishman or a Frenchman: besides their significance to the people of the poet's own country and language, their relevance is universal. Not that a poet should renounce his national characteristics and become an abstract “European”; “to be human is to belong to a particular region of the earth, and men of such genius are more conscious than other human beings. The European who belonged to no one country would be an abstract man—a blank face speaking every language with neither a native nor a foreign accent.”²⁷ But to be “European” a poet should be free of provinciality of thought and temperament; he should have that sensibility which, while being part of the particular sensibility of his country, would also be representative of that wider sensibility and culture which we have termed “European.” And of this sensibility Cavafy is representative in the same way that Eliot himself is: his poetry reflects the emotions, the spiritual agony, not only of his own place but of the whole world his place is part of. By being most local, Cavafy has given us a myth not of Greece, but of the whole Western world—an Alexandria which is personal yet universal, temporal yet timeless.

II

Since the first translations into English of isolated poems, Cavafy has had an increasingly wide audience, which includes E. M. Forster, C. M. Bowra, Robert Lidell, Kimon Friar, Philip Sherrard, and other distinguished writers and critics. “Ever since I was first introduced to his poetry by the late Professor R. M. Dawkins over thirty years ago,” says W. H. Auden, “C. P. Cavafy has remained an influence on my own writing; that is to say, I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or perhaps not written at all. Yet I do not know a word of Modern Greek, so that my only access to Cavafy's poetry has been through English and French translations.”²⁸ I do not know if I am right in finding in the turn of the sentence in Auden's “Musée des Beaux Arts,” and especially in the opening lines, something which reminds me of Cavafy's use of language and situation. In a poetic work so very unlike his own, whatever influence Cavafy had on Auden is bound to be fully assimilated and not easily detectible. However, the testimony of a poet of Auden's caliber proves that Cavafy can not only be read and enjoyed outside Greece, but also exert an influence on non-Greek writers. The latest example of Cavafy's influence on a non-Greek work of literature can be seen in the fiction of Lawrence Durrell. Although assimilated not in a work of poetry but in a novel—which might be one of the reasons why the assimilation has been more perfect and fruitful—Cavafy is a great shaping force behind Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet.

Alexandria is the setting of a good number of Cavafy's poems and of the series of the four novels which constitute The Alexandria Quartet. In both cases Alexandria is a mythical city, hovering “between illusion and reality, between the substance and the poetic images” which its name arouses.²⁹ This mythical city is the main symbol of both Cavafy's and Durrell's worlds, the symbol of the inescapable human predicament.

Although Durrell's Alexandria is not a replica or imitation of Cavafy's capital of the Hellenistic world, it could not have existed without it. What Durrell developed from Cavafy is the basic idea of Alexandria—the “evocative outlines” of his Big City Poem, the outlines of a city which stands for and contains all the big cities of the world.³⁰ In Durrell's twentieth-century Alexandria, we find Cavafy's Hellenistic Alexandria with its glitter and luxury and materialism, with its sensuality and its explorations of the byways of sexual passion; here is again the combination of races, religions and philosophies in “the only city left where every extreme of race and habit can meet and marry, where inner destinies intersect,”³¹ and whose child is Justine—“neither Greek, Syrian nor Egyptian, but a hybrid: a joint.”³² Durrell's characters are given to the exploration and enjoyment of sexual relationship—whatever its nature—naturally, without self-consciousness and without shame, just as that youth in Cavafy's poem had given himself to sensual gratification, “without any ridiculous shame for the kind of pleasure. …”³³ Love in Cavafy is obsessive and corrosive; so is love in Durrell. Cavafy's sovereigns of the Hellenistic kingdoms are thirsty for power; so are Justine and Nessim. And above the whole scene reigns the sense of doom, the “deracination and failure”—the inescapable destiny that the city imposes on its inhabitants.³⁴ For Durrell, as for Cavafy, Alexandria is not a mere setting for the action of the human will, but the true creator and protagonist of the drama of its world, a living organism with a will of its own, a will “too powerful and too deliberate to be human—the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars. …”³⁵

“Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria?” the narrator asks in the first page of Justine.³⁶ The idea of the city is explored all through the four books that form The Alexandria Quartet. It is the city that should be judged although her inhabitants—her children—must pay the price, says the speaker in Justine, reminding us of Cavafy in “Tomb of Iases.” Nessim asks whether the disorder of their lives is not “a measure of the anxiety which they had inherited from the city or the age.”³⁷ Finally, the idea is summed up in Clea:

It is not hard, writing at this remove in time, to realise that it had all already happened, had been ordained in such a way and in no other. This was, so to speak, only its “coming to pass”—its stage of manifestation. But the scenario had already been devised somewhere, the actors chosen, the time rehearsed down to the last detail in the mind of that invisible author—which perhaps would prove to be only the city itself: the Alexandria of the human estate. The seeds of future events are carried within ourselves. They are implicit in us and unfold according to the laws of their own nature.³⁸

All the citizens of Alexandria, at some point of their lives, feel the urge to leave the city and escape the bondage of their destiny. “I will go to another land, I will go to another sea,” said the speaker in Cavafy's “The City.”³⁹ The same despair makes Darley accept a new post in Upper Egypt and makes Nessim tell Justine that they should “seek an atmosphere less impregnated with the sense of deracination and failure.”⁴⁰ But there is no escaping from one's own self; into Nessim's mind came Cavafy's answer, “pressed down like the pedal of a piano, to boil and reverberate around the frail hope which the thought had raised from its dark sleep.”⁴¹

New lands you shall not find, nor shall you find another
sea. The city shall be following you.(42)

Finally, the children of Alexandria realize that there is no choice for them, that the city begins and ends in themselves, and that their qualities and values are determined by the city, of which they themselves are an integral part. They finally see “their history and the city's as one and the same phenomenon,”⁴³ and although their feeling toward her is ambivalent—a sense of bond with the place of one's most painful experiences despite the hate for the pain it inflicts—at last they surpass “despairing self-pity” and they attain the “desire to be claimed by the city, enrolled among its trivial or tragic memories—if it so wished.”⁴⁴ This is the final assertion of identification with the city—an assertion of belonging which so often comes out in references to Alexandria as “our city” and to Alexandrians as “we.” It is this feeling of supreme identity that is expressed in the last stanza of that Cavafy poem in which an Alexandrian is asking a poet called Raphael for an epitaph for the young poet Ammones.

Raphael, your verses let them be written so
that they have, you know, of our life in them,
that both the rhythm and each sentence may tell
that of an Alexandrian an Alexandrian is writing.(45)

The same unmistakable pride that we detect in the last line of the stanza—the pride of recognition of the separate identity of Alexandrians and of the unparalleled quality of their life—can be found throughout The Alexandria Quartet, from the first question, “What is this city of ours?” to the strong assertion in Balthazar: “I see all of us not as men and women any longer, identities swollen with their acts of forgetfulness, follies, and deceits—but as beings unconsciously made part of place, buried to the waist among the ruins of a single city, steeped in its values. … All members of a city whose actions lay just outside the scope of the plotting or conniving spirit: Alexandrians.”⁴⁶

In Durrell, as in Cavafy, man is seen as “an extension of the spirit of the place,” as a “responsive subject” through which the city expresses “the collective desires, the collective wishes, which informed its culture.”⁴⁷ And since the spirit of the city is unified and eternal, man is not seen from the perspective of historical time, but from a timeless point of view; the past is not really past, and the dead are not really dead, and reality becomes like Nessim's historical dreams, in which his friends and acquaintances walked among the ruins of classical Alexandria, existing in an “amazing historical space-time as living personages.”⁴⁸ The living are at ease among the dead, like Darley and Clea peacefully swimming among the familiar and friendly figures of the dead sailors standing upright under the waters of the bay as “appropriate symbols of the place.”⁴⁹ It was in that same place that Clea thought she had discovered the very islet to which Antony was said to have retreated after his defeat in Actium. The music Antony hears in Cavafy's poem bidding him say farewell to Alexandria becomes a dominant theme throughout the book, returning in the song of a whore at night, merging with the wild music of the festival of Sitna Mariam, or serving as an Eliotesque ironic parallel to another recurrent musical motif in the novel, the popular hit of the time in Alexandria, “Jamais de la vie,” to which Melissa dances clumsily at the cabaret and to which her dying middle-aged former lover listens in his death-bed as his last music bidding him to say farewell to life.

But foremost among the dead in Durrell's Alexandria is Cavafy himself, the poet of the city—close enough in time to be Balthazar's friend and to frequent the small cafes of the city with him, yet already a legend, one of Alexandria's great “exemplars” in whom the spirit of the city has found its most powerful expression. His poems are quoted throughout the four books of The Alexandria Quartet, paralleling the action of the characters and investing the most casual gestures and words with a deeper emotional significance and symbolic meaning. For the reader who has been moved by Cavafy, there is a strong evocative feeling in the part where Justine recites Cavafy's verses—“touching every syllable of the thoughtful ironic Greek with tenderness”; when she reaches the place where the poet—presuming the first person in the poem stands for the poet's own voice—goes sadly to the balcony to find relief by looking at the beloved city, she herself repeats the old motion and pushes back the shutters and stands on the dark balcony above the lighted city.⁵⁰

In Justine, Darley gives a lecture on Cavafy. “But it was painful to me,” he says to himself, “feeling the old man all around me, so to speak, impregnating the gloomy streets around the lecture-room with the odour of those verses distilled from the shabby but rewarding loves he had experienced—loves perhaps bought with money, and lasting a few moments, yet living on now in his verse—so deliberately and tenderly had he captured the adventive minute and made all its colours fast. What an impertinence to lecture upon an ironist who so naturally, and with such finesse of instinct took his subject-matter from the streets and brothels of Alexandria! … I remember saying only that I was haunted by his face—the horrifyingly sad gentle face of the last photograph.”⁵¹ Not only the poems, but the personality of the old poet himself echoes in the memory and consciousness of Durrell's Alexandria. He lives in the words of his fellow-student and close friend Balthazar—“I sometimes think I learned more from studying him than from studying philosophy. His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man”; his verses return in old recordings, in Pursewarden's reciting “The City” in a bar, or in Darley's trying to recapture a lost afternoon with Melissa.

Durrell, like Cavafy, is haunted by the past. Through Darley in Justine he says that he is “a poet of the historic consciousness.”⁵² All four parts of The Alexandria Quartet are permeated and obsessed with the idea of Alexandria and the destiny it represents and imposes. No character, no action, is seen as an independent and separate phenomenon. Everything is part of the life of the city in her timeless existence, which encompasses the past, the present, and the future. The dead dominate the scene, impregnating life with the sense that everything has been experienced “… the dead are everywhere. They cannot be so simply evaded. One feels them pressing their sad blind fingers in deprivation upon the panels of our secret lives, asking to be remembered and re-enacted once more in the life of the flesh. … The simplest of these kisses we exchanged had a pedigree of death. In them we once more befriended forgotten loves which struggled to be reborn.”⁵³

Although the similarities between Cavafy's and Durrell's Alexandrias are significant, their differences should not be overlooked. The means the authors employ in the creation of their respective mythical cities, as well as the final effects they achieve, are widely different. Some of those differences are due to the use of different genres, but most are not.

Their use of language is diametrically opposed. Durrell uses rich and luxurious and colorful words with a profligacy which we would expect to find in poetry rather than in prose, especially after a steady diet of Hemingway; Cavafy, on the other hand, employs a medium of almost Doric simplicity and restraint which we would ordinarily call prosaic.

Within the wide range of material and the expansive possibilities that his medium offers, Durrell has created a world which is both rich and alive. Yet, as George Steiner noticed, The Alexandria Quartet leaves one “with a suspicion of triviality” and the sense that “at the center of this magnificently wrought fable of life” there is “a certain undeniable hollowness.”⁵⁴ Steiner attributes this mainly to the privateness of Durrell's vision. Although Durrell's characters exhibit a wide range of sensibility, they are keyed to a higher pitch of awareness than the ordinary man. Their vision is introverted and esoteric, and despite the close and multiple view of them that the reader gets through the complex technique of narration and of space-time relationship that Durrell has devised, they remain distant and strange. There is no sense of identification and sympathy between Durrell's characters and the reader. Although highly interesting, Durrell's Alexandria is a foreign and exotic city whose citizens we shall never become. There is an hysteric brittleness in her love and a harshness in her beauty which we do not recognize as ours. Her wars, her politics, are not real; they do not concern us, they do not touch us, they are not our own. Although undeniably alive, Durrell's world has not achieved the timeless relevance and finality which is the mark of the great work of art. We are allowed to gain a view of the multiplied reflections of Alexandria in a complicated system of mirrors; but when we try to come closer to them—Justine, Nessim, Mountolive, Pursewarden, Darley, Melissa, and all the other fascinating figures of Durrell's world—they retreat further and further from us, and their voices which we had heard so many times now become inaudible and confused and indistinguishable, and their features we thought were so familiar to us become dim and distant. And in their place, the figures of another Alexandria approach and merge with us; although we have seldom heard them talk, their voices sound familiar in our ears, and although we have never seen them or had them described in detail to us, we recognize them at once. Myres, Ignatius, Cleon, Leukius, Demetrius Soter—the timeless figures of ourselves return among us more real than ever. They whisper to our ears their grievances and their failures and their wars and loves and disappointments, and as we listen to the tale of our lives, suddenly there is a universal pattern and order brought on the world, and we are able to feel the supreme catharsis that true art can achieve.

Notes

1. C. P. Cavafy, Poems (1896-1918), G. P. Savidis, ed. (Athens, 1963). The edition is in two volumes, but the second volume had not appeared at the time these lines were written.

2. Cavafy used to publish and distribute each poem in a separate pamphlet; in his own records, he would pin every new pamphlet published to the previous ones in chronological order. Every few years, however, he would bind the pamphlets in slim booklets, in which the order of poems instead of being chronological would be such as to reveal the movement of his creative process. Such booklets Cavafy formed by combining and adding poems successively of the years 1909-11, 1908-14, 1907-17. During the last years of his life he was distributing two booklets containing poems of the years 1905-15 and 1916-18. These booklets Mr. Savidis faithfully reprints in the first volume of his edition, and he follows them with all the older poems of the 1904 and 1910 collections (the only collections in book form proper that Cavafy published during his lifetime). The order of these poems is also thematic. A chronological table is given at the end of the book, as well as a glossary and various historical and interpretative information. The second volume has been planned to contain the remaining seventy poems from 1919 until 1933 in chronological order, with the addition of his last poem, which the poet did not live to publish. Cavafy did not provide us with the thematic order of these last poems of the second volume, nor with the general thematic order of his whole work.

   Mr. Savidis has also announced the forthcoming edition of the Complete Published Works of Cavafy, in two volumes, one for poetry and one for prose. This edition will include all the material published by Cavafy himself during his lifetime; special appendices will contain whatever pieces were published posthumously, as well as some pieces which were published during his lifetime and which are attributed to him in part or in whole. This edition will eventually become part of the Complete Works, which will include also all the existing unpublished poems, essays, notes, and much biographical material. The edition of the Complete Works involves many problems, the most serious of which is the collection of the existing Cavafy papers. A short history of the Cavafy records will elucidate my point.

   Cavafy was a very methodical, meticulous man who kept his files in perfect order. He kept copies not only of his own forty letters to E. M. Forster but of the envelopes too, and he left to us the most detailed catalogs of all the poems he has written, complete with dates and all other pertinent information, plus biographical material, notes, essays, etc., all carefully pinned together and classified. Following the poet's death, all this material was moved from the upper to the ground floor of the Cavafy house in Rue Lepsius and subsequently to the house of Mr. Sengopoulos, the poet's heir. The first person to disclose to us the existence of this rich material was Mr. Peridis, who gained access to a small part of the papers and used a number of them in his book on Cavafy. About ten years ago, a part of these papers was entrusted by Mr. Sengopoulos to Mr. Papoutsakis, who has kept them since. The remaining and by far the richest and most valuable part of the material has recently been entrusted to the hands of Mr. Savidis, an enthusiastic scholar who undoubtedly will use it with all the care and respect and attention it demands.

   The material in Mr. Savidis' hands comprises approximately five thousand papers, which include some seventy unpublished poems, fifteen to twenty unfinished poems, a number of essays, a great mass of notes on every conceivable topic, from language and metrics to household chores or matters of the poet's private life, biographical material, letters, newspaper clippings, family mementoes, and finally the complete catalogs of his poems mentioned above. Mr. Savidis believes that editing all the material will require approximately five years' work. Of course, the whole matter will finally depend upon the willingness of all people in possession of such papers to cooperate for a common purpose—to restore Cavafy's legacy to its rightful heir, the public.

3. C. P. Cavafy, “Since Nine O'clock,” in Poems (Athens, 1952), 97. All quotations from the poems are translations by myself.

4. Cavafy, “Caesarion,” 89.

5. C. M. Bowra, “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past,” The Creative Experiment (London, 1949), 59.

6. T. S. Eliot, “Goethe as the Sage,” On Poetry and Poets (London, 1962), 216.

7. Ibid., 219.

8. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker,” Four Quartets (New York, 1943), 17.

9. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, Seon Givens, ed. (New York, 1948), 201-202.

10. T. S. Eliot, “Yeats,” On Poetry and Poets (London, 1962), 255.

11. Cavafy, “The God Forsakes Antony,” 35.

12. Cavafy, “Theodotus,” 58.

13. E. P. Papanoutsos, Palamas-Cavafy-Sikelianos (Athens, 1955).

14. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-1935 (London, 1936), 73.

15. Cavafy, “Tomb of Iases,” 78.

16. Cavafy, “Those Who Fought for the Achaean League,” 129.

17. George Seferis, Dokimes (Athens, 1962), 254-59.

18. T. S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” On Poetry and Poets (London, 1962), 61.

19. Ibid., 56.

20. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Six Poets of Modern Greece (London and Southampton, 1960), 14-15.

21. Cavafy, “The Displeasure of the Son of Seleucus,” 70-71.

22. Cavafy, “King Demetrius,” 31.

23. Cavafy, “In the Year 200 B.C.,” 189.

24. Cavafy, “Orophernes,” 64.

25. Cavafy, “Days of 1901,” 157.

26. Cavafy, “The City,” 32.

27. Eliot, “Goethe as the Sage,” 216.

28. W. H. Auden, introduction to The Complete Poems of Cavafy, Rae Dalven, trans. (New York, 1961), vii.

29. Lawrence Durrell, Clea (New York, 1961), 11.

30. Durrell, Balthazar (New York, 1961), 184.

31. Ibid., 22.

32. Durrell, Justine (New York, 1961), 27.

33. Cavafy, “He Came To Read,” 140.

34. Durrell, Justine, 180.

35. Ibid., 18-19.

36. Ibid., 13.

37. Ibid., 180.

38. Durrell, Clea, 223.

39. Cavafy, 32.

40. Durrell, Justine, 180.

41. Ibid.

42. Cavafy, “The City,” 32.

43. Durrell, Justine, 114.

44. Ibid., 191.

45. Cavafy, “For Ammones who died 29 years old, in 610,” 81.

46. Durrell, Balthazar, 225.

47. Durrell, Justine, 175.

48. Ibid., 176.

49. Durrell, Clea, 231.

50. Durrell, Justine, 27.

51. Ibid., 30.

52. Ibid., 112.

53. Durrell, Clea, 229-30.

54. George Steiner, “Lawrence Durrell: the Baroque Novel,” The World of Lawrence Durrell, Harry T. Moore, ed. (Carbondale, 1962), 20.