C.P. Cavafy Historical Poems: A Verse Translation with Commentaries

By J. Phillipson

Cavafy's Historical Poems is the first volume of a four-book set constituting a study of the life and opus of this fascinating poet.

The second volume is an anecdotal life detailing Cavafys home and its atmosphere: the man, the poet, and his lifestyle; the odes of his compatriot partisans; the praises of his foreign admirers; the barbs and insults of his critics and revilers; the poet as a critical ironist; and the last part of his life. More than one hundred commentators are quoted, and just as many of his poems are used where it seemed appropriate.

A third volume consists of erratic commentaries containing the authors evaluation and criticism of the main contributions to Cavafys poetry. That is these of George Seferis, Sir Maurice Bowra, Robert Liddel, Edmund Keeley, Grigorios Xenopoulos, Timos Malanos, Stratis Tsirkas, John Sareyiannis, and others. These follow an opening chapter on Hellenization and a second chapter on the controversial subject of the dates of composition of Cavafys poems.

The fourth volume, The Canon, is a verse translation of the 150 poems Cavafy accepted as his mature opus, including the original Greek verses, accompanied by detailed examination of the poets craft and style. That is to say the meter, length of verse, wedging, rhyme, enjambment, titles, organization, punctuation, the absences, lyricism, periphrasis, description, narrative, suggestive image, abstractions, transmission, maturity, content, language, irony, intellectuality, etc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481788625

J. Phillipson

John Phillipson has been an incorrigible Cavafy reader for over half a century. The punishment for this misdeed is the book in hand and a few more to come (see the back cover).

Book preview

© 2013 by J. Phillipson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/31/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8861-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8867-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-8862-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013906317

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: THIS COLLECTION OF HISTORICAL POEMS

Skimping on quotation marks

History as a revolving stage

Cavafy the historical poet

Cavafy the critic

Precious fakes and gentle frauds

PART TWO: THE COMMENTARIES

A largely historical poetic myth

Aims and expectations—nothing accidental

A brief on language

A question of distinction

Attention and the role of the visual arts

Concreteness, rationality and economy

PART THREE: REASONS AND RATIONALE

The sources

Differences in translation

The use of emphasis

The poet’s preferences

Irony in much of the poetry

Traps in both poetry and prose

Arrangement and continuity

Challenge and response

A conflict of chronologies and the unity of a myth

The incongruities of the usual arrangement

A measure of bewilderment

PART FOUR: DIFFICULTIES AND BOUNDARIES

Gaps and niches

Semantic difficulties

Cavafy’s poetic collections

The spelling of ancient names

A note on references

What this inquiry does not do

ANCIENT SOURCES

REFERENCES

INDEX OF HISTORICAL POEMS

1. Ionic

2. Demaratus

3. Thermopylae

4. The Satrapy

5. In An Osroene Town

6. The Suite Of Bacchus

7. In The Year 200 B.C.

8. King Demetrius

9. The Glory Of The Ptolemies

10. Priest At The Temple Of Serapis

11. The First Step

12. Before The Statue Of Endymion

13. Eurion’s Tomb

14. In Sparta

15. Come, Oh King Of The Lacedaemonians

16. The Battle Of Magnesia

17. To Antiochus Epiphanes

18. The Displeasure Of The Selefkid

19. Orophernes

20. Wine-Bowl Artisan

21. Of Demetrius Soter (162-150 B.C.)

22. Envoys From Alexandria

23. The Favor Of Alexander Balas

24. They Should Have Cared

25. Those Who Fought For The Achaean League

26. On An Italian Shore

27. On The March Towards Sinope

28. Darius

29. Alexander Jannaeus And Alexandra

30. Theodotus

31. The Ides Of March

32. 31 B.C. In Alexandria

33. In An Asia Minor Township

34. The God Abandons Antony

35. Alexandrian Kings

36. Caesarion

37. Epitaph Of Antiochus, King Of Commagene

38. Aristobulus

39. Philhellene

40. Of The Jews (A.D. 50)

41. Nero’s Time-Span

42. The Footsteps

43. One Of Their Gods

44. If Dead Indeed

45. And The Wise,

The Things Near At Hand

46. Apollonius Of Tyana In Rhodes

47. This Is The Man

48. Herod Atticus

49. From The School Of The Renowned Philosopher

50. In The Month Of Athyr

51. Dangerous Things

52. Julian In Nicomedia

53. Julian, Seeing Indifference

54. Julian And The Antiochenes

55. You Didn’t Understand

56. In The Outskirts Of Antioch

57. A Great Procession Of Priests And Laymen

58. Myres; Alexandria Of A.D. 340

59. Temethos Of Antioch; A.D. 400

60. Theater Of Sidon (A.D. 400)

61. Young Men Of Sidon (A.D. 400)

62. Waiting For The Barbarians

63. For Ammonis, Who Died At 29, In 610

64. Emilianus Monae, Alexandrian, A.D. 628-655

65. Imenos

66. An Exiled Byzantine Nobleman, Writing Verses

67. Anna Dalassena

68. Anna Comnena

69. Manuel Comnenus

70. Che Fece… Il Gran Rifiuto

71. John Cantacuzenus Prevails

72. Of Colored Glass

N.B. The titles of the historical poems are written in italics and the beginnings of all words are capitalized, including articles and pronouns, so they can be readily distinguished as poem-titles in the body of this narrative.

At the last moment and because of the bulk of this book, it was decided not to include the Greek version of the poems, since they will be part of the forthcoming Canon (see back cover).

Nulla placere diu nec vivere carmina possunt

quae scribuntur aquae potoribus

No poems can live or please for long,

written by water-drinkers

Horace Epistles I.xix.33

To

Christos Korovessis, Harry Sarr

and

Kimon Friar

In Memoriam

Λέληθεν ουδέν τώνδε μ’ων συ νουθετείς

γνώμην δ’έχοντα μ’η φύσις βιάζεται.

Nothing I forget of your counsels,

but nature compels me to consider.

Aeschylus Fr. 262 (Ll-Jones)

ad Clement of Alexandria Miscell. II.15

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

When a study has taken more than half a century to complete and publish, it is difficult to remember all the writer’s debts, especially with a perennially failing memory and its attendant ills. Therefore, apologies are hereby extended to all those who might have been forgotten during the intervening years.

To the company of French-Canadian poets and artists whose conviction that great artists are born, not made, according to Cicero’s precept that nascuntur poetae, and which was later at least partly responsible for their demise by their own hands, a heavy debt of obligation is due. I had found in Cavafy grounds for exactly the opposite conviction, a major poet of excruciating slow and gradual development, and not by any stretch of the imagination to the manner born. It was such differences in viewpoint, among other things, that initiated this long study of the poet and his poetry.

To Theodore Sampson, Harry Sarr ( 423.jpg ), Dimitris Spentzos ( 421.jpg ), Nicolas Sampson ( 419.jpg ), and Paul Kassirer ( 417.jpg ), companions of the writer’s youth, and for the long if not always fruitful discussions about poetry during these cold Canadian winter nights (the controversies of fervent youth, my dear Cavafy would have no doubt interjected here with imperceptible irony), the writer is also in debt. He learned by fruitful association the dangers of presumption, enthusiasm, caricature and extravagance, long before he saw how successfully Cavafy dealt with these matters in his poetry.

Elizabeth Herring, poet and editor, lovingly corrected an early version of the writer’s translations of many Cavafy poems, at a time when such translations were few and raw. She did that with subtlety and taste, and as the !Kung people of the Kalahari say, my thanks will follow her forever.

John Chapple, editor and publisher, did very much the same for the writer’s prose, trying to iron out all its faults. If that did not always obtain the writer’s consent, it is not the fault of the editor and friend. Peter Mackridge, Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Oxford, gently pointed out many years ago some of the deficiencies of the early translations and the accompanying texts. His prompt and thoughtful criticism was greatly appreciated.

Apostolos Sahines, Professor of Neohellenic Philology at the University of Salonica, more than thirty years ago read a large part of the manuscript and expressed his appreciation and advice for immediate publication. Similarly, Telis Nikolaides, psychiatrist, author, former Vice-President of the Hellenic Literary Society, Kimon Friar, well-known author and brilliant translator, Aris Stamatopoulos, gifted engineer and life-long friend, all of whom persistently urged the writer to publish this work. I regret to have disappointed them all now that they abierunt ad plures. Pace tanti viri—I know my regrets are no remedy.

Kyriakos Delopoulos, prolific author and library studies scholar, Evangelos Sachperoglou, the translator of Cavafy in the Oxford World’s Classics series, Nikolaos Biniaris, a Plato enthusiast par excellence, Judith Binder, scholar at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, old friends George and Elyn Marangides, also long encouraged the writer to publish, offering both advice and help.

Yannis Papavassiliou and Yanna Lambrou ably helped the writer through some of his computer cobwebs.

Finally, to my wife Connie, for her patience, encouragement and sheer determination to see the end of this project, I cannot sufficiently express my obligation and gratitude.

INTRODUCTION

We know that from the mansions of antiquity

Much has been looted, and not all of marble.

The very nomenclature of their prosody,

Unsuited as it is to ours, we claim,

And garble modern textbooks with misnomers

That once applied with accuracy to Homer’s.

Karl Shapiro, Essay on Rime

PART ONE: THIS COLLECTION OF

HISTORICAL POEMS

Skimping on quotation marks

What are historical poems? How are they distinguished from poetic compositions that simply use history as a convenient background? Besides, which kind of history are historical poems supposed to represent, refer to, or accommodate? Without even touching Marxist models the choice is embarrassing, as the French would say. If history is a continuous and methodical record of public events, the study of the make-up, growth, diminution, or disappearance of national and political entities, and of the whole train of events leading to such developments, then most Cavafy poems included in this study could not be called historical by any stretch of the imagination. They would not be historical by a more precise definition of history, that is, a systematic investigation of past events and their causes in the light of material, written, and oral testimony. These poems would fail to qualify as historical even from a cynical viewpoint that looks at history as no more than a slanted record of peoples’ maladjustment to their environment—though a few perenially misread of his compositions would seem to flirt with this scornful characterization. Neither would James Joice’s view of history as a bad dream (History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake) fit all the poetic circumstances, though here too a few Cavafian compositions may be viewed as kindred. But generally these poems are not historical under most definitions of history; and that is why this adjective when applied to Cavafy’s poems must be understood as between quotation marks: historical. Such marks will be used sparingly in this study and only when the special emphasis of the occasion appears to require it. But history is a more demanding and capricious mistress.

At the beginning of his book, The Ancestror’s Tale, Richard Dawkins records in two superscripts the ambiguous nature of history: Mark Twain asserts that history does not repeat itself, while Clarence Darrow that it does and is in fact one of its faults. By whim, conceit, or inclination, history has been often viewed in the past as a succession of events with a predestined, if perhaps uncertain, goal. But the whimsy of this view as seen in the previous viewpoints induces the careful researcher to note and guard against two widespread tendencies—not only among contemporary historians. One, is to search the past to find the rhyme and reason for everything, as Mark Twain said, for whom history was an utterly confused and hazardous affair. The second tendency is the vanity that animates the present, the sometimes almost unconscious belief that the past had no aim but the present, as if the personages of that past had nothing better to do in their lives than be our predecessors, reasonably and sardonically argues Dawkins (For balance and a theoretical treatment see Karl Popper’s book, The Poverty of Historicism, London 1957).

The above conceit goes deeper than one might imagine with profound roots in human smugness. The history of evolution for many of the interested scientists involved in this enterprise over the years has been no more than a long series of advances, developments, amendments, and impovements, culminating in that precocious biped that not only manipulates and utilizes all other useful species, but writes their history as well.

History as a revolving stage

Of course, when one uses such terms as history and its derivatives a slew of second thoughts crowds one’s consciousness. Is it narration or knowledge of past events that history engenders? A seasoned commentary about the past, or a reasoned scrutiny of the related sources? An enlightened if ephemeral evaluation of the effects, or a thorough but dated analysis of the relevant causes? Is it what historians do, or what they are accused of not doing? In such a highly complex process, where knowledge, scrutiny and narration are burdened with an enormous variety of theories, methodologies, and procedures; stipulations, reservations, and qualifications; philosophical criticism, archeological empiricism, and archeometrical sophistication, it would be at least naïve to think that some definition of history, however reasonable or successful, would fit all the poetic circumstances. Yet one could argue that Johan Huizinga’s 1936 definition in his article published in a Festschrift dedicated to the Dutch historian Ernst Cassirer could admirably fit many of the historical poems examined in this book. Wrote Huizinga after considering a number of definitions and stressing the need for conciseness, accuracy and completion in any definition of history: History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account of its past to itself[1]—admirable terseness, inviting prompt comparisons. Cavafy may not be equivalent to civilization; but he was a civilized intellectual who rendered a thoughtful and incisive account of a substantial part of their cultural past to his compatriots and contemporaries. And as it will be seen in this study he used the material, written, and oral testimony of this past in a masterly fashion.

The poet, however, might have gently abjured this accolade, just as he was reluctant to see his thinking poems being called philosophical. Cavafy (1863-1933), basically a self-educated man but with a partiality for precision, felt that the intellectual burden of philosophy was a little too overwhelming for the brief, fragmentary instances his poems examined and presented, for the partly… and partly characters that haunted his poems, for the partial case of the poet proposed as a possibility for a section of humanity. For similar reasons, and after careful scrutiny, he might have disclaimed this demanding historical characterization for the poems examined in this book.

But then why use the word historical at all in connection with these Cavafy’s poems, one would be justified to ask. Mainly because it is very convenient; but also because it reflects a certain reality. It is convenient because it would be difficult to class the 72 poems included in this study under any other category. And it reflects a certain reality, because first, the poet himself for a time used this classification to divide his work [2]; and second, all these poems, some little and others more, use history as a framework and background, a sort of movable or revolving stage, where Cavafy presents his protagonists with conviction, sincerity, and notable economy. This will become clear from the first poem of this collection and still clearer as this narrative progresses towards the later poems.

In other words, these poems are historical only in so far as they have been placed within a specific time-frame, and more often than not, in a certain place and cultural context as well. Thus history provides a more or less familiar background, what for want of a better name may be called the functional base-level of these poems. They are not historical in any other sense and even though a few may give the impression of being slices of history. Or perhaps they have such a familiar ring about them one’s subconscious hints that the reverberating echoes must belong to history. The echoes may indeed be historical, but the chances are that the ring is not. If a qualifying epithet must be placed before the word ring, it should be dramatic rather than historical. Thus, dramatic compositions with historical echoes would be this writer’s brief, if still not entirely problem-free, description of these poems.

The problem is that history is usually written by historians or by persons in a position to record past events with or without the necessary detachment. Wrote Winston Churchill: History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it. But the account of our past is too important to be left to professional recounters, who base themselves first, on older narratives almost invariably found to be doubtful, inadequate, prejudicial or subjective (which somehow implies that the modern narrator is free of all these faults); and second, on a necessarily partial and frequently little understood archeological record. They often argue the negative side of a question based on the absence of relevant records or explicit comfirmation, disregarding the wise and repeatedly confirmed archeologocal dictum that the absence of evidence is no evidence of absence. Historians must have problems to solve, just as doctors must have patients to treat. When the specific period of their historical expertise does not possess enough of them, they can be always made up with due attention to exhaustive analyses of minute details in previous narratives, which help discount precisely those claims that would discredit their own. But then, this is hardly an exclusive specialty of historians, as Cavafy might have reminded the reader by quoting the wellknown distich of Jonathan Swift:

Thus every poet, in his kind,

Is bit by him who comes behind.

Cavafy the historical poet

Of course, Cavafy called himself a historical poet (but without specifying or explaining sufficiently what he meant [3]), while the historical aspect of his poetry is stressed so much that it is almost a misdemeanor to argue otherwise. So many students of his poetry have written that Cavafy found his inspiration in history, that the relatively minor offence of doubting this claim assumes the proportions of major villainy when voiced in a book about his historical poems. Yet the risk must be taken if only to rescue the poet in Cavafy and restore to him what is his own.

Cavafy is first, last, and foremost, a poet. In historical narratives he found no more inspiration than the rest of educated humanity. This does not mean that on occasion he might not have found in history that special character, incident, action, thought, or phrase, which in the circumstances provided a sudden stimulus to express succinctly the poet’s thoughts or feelings, what many would call a spark of inspiration. But that was only the spark. To produce a poem, the spark had to flare up in an atmosphere charged with emotion. This furnished the energy to stretch the phrase to its utmost, to evoke a meaning from the far side of language, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her delightful On not knowing Greek. Once the spark and the energy were available, it was necessary to sense what kind of poems would help the poet to best express his ideas, feelings and emotions, before deciding on the language that would effectively evoke his situation, viewpoint, or predicament in a linguistic labyrinth like modern Greece (see below).

After a poor start, Cavafy gradually understood that the historical topical poem had limited duration, that even the hot topic diminished in significance with the passage of time, and then such poems became simple curiosities or simply irrelevant. To write poems without a predictable date of termination, one had to either avoid the confined, contemporary and parochial by employing generalities and abstractions, but which entailed the risk of losing the reader, or by utilizing historical events that had some relationship and significance with the poet’s subject, even if such significance may be re-assessed by later generations of historians or historically minded persons.

What the poet found in recorded history is a facility that offered the advantages of both a system and a readymade contrivance. A device that required no special training of the reader, but which was easily understood and perhaps even readily remembered. A common fount of emotion and an intellectual framework that could be tapped at will, and often at the turn of a single phrase. Even an apparatus criticus in the scholarly terminology, which could be used, abused, amended, paraphrased or discarded as the spirit moved him.

For Cavafy read history esthetically, culling the incidents and characters that appealed to his sensibilities, unburdened by the exigencies of the scholarly open mind. He seems largely indifferent to the scruples of the historian: the tormenting question of objectivity and its evaluation; the blessing and curse of multiple evidence and its contextual problems; the relationship of cause and effect; the quandary of whether a historical event should be considered in isolation, and thus what is gained in objectivity be dropped in significance or the reverse, and so on.

Perhaps it is unfair to say that Cavafy was indifferent to such issues. Reading history esthetically does not imply carelessness, at least not in the case of Cavafy. His scrupulous adherence to original sources, his verification of the names, dates, titles, etc., his minute attention to every single word he used, his critical judgement of even historians whose well-turned phrases and ironies he admired such as Gibbon, his stern refusal to take the easy road of literary expedience when the historical record was either inadequate or simply unavailable, would seem to bely the previous judgment. And he had certainly read enough history to have been exposed to these problems many times over. But they seem to have remained theoretical questions; things that concerned a great deal his very active mind, but occupied his poetic soul only a little. That is no wonder. Cavafy was a poet, and his brief epigrammatic poems are hardly the place to express the scruples, hesitations, or specifications of the historian.

The emphatic pronouncements of many commentators in the past regarding Cavafy as a historical poet had the poet’s own confirmation on the subject. But they who take Cavafy’s word outside his poetry, do so at their own risk (see below). These claims, with or without the poet’s encouragement, were largely made by persons who looked at ancient names in his poetry, read dates, historical incidents, and a variety of allusions there, gathered some of the consequences of such events, but couldn’t really read this kind of poetry to save their lives. This need hardly surprise, of course. Many people write with emphasis and bombast about matters they do not really grasp. Some even do so with style, panache, and literary licence, as well as other liberties. The reader of Cavafy’s historical poems must learn to be grateful to them. Without such personalities and attitudes these poems would not be what they are.

Cavafy the critic

The situation is reversed when one considers Cavafy as a critic of his society. A historian the poet might not have been, but a critic he was and is—eloquently, memorably, revealingly, one could say with vengeance. A review of George Seferis’s writings discloses the following brief passage written by the Nobel Prize winner:

The permanent human element that Cavafy expresses without letup, and to a far greater degree than any other feature of his poetry, is deception, it is mockery; and the panorama formed by his poems is a world of deceived men and impostors [4].

An anti-heroic poetry par excellence, it was prompted by his dismay with the society of his own times, and designed to partly stigmatize the pseudo-heroic postures of his contemporaries. This seems to be one of the reasons why his poetry appealed to both the general public and the intelligentsia. And to men and women as different as Gregorios Xenopoulos and Miltiades Malakassis, Yiannis Gryparis and Napoleon Lapathiotis, Lambros Porphyras and Kostas Karyotakis, Galatia Kazantzakis and Myrtiotissa, Kostas Varnalis and Kostas Ouranis, Alkis Thrylos and Elli Alexiou, Tellos Agras and Marios Vayanos, Nikos Kazantzakis and George Seferis, Timos Malanos and Stratis Tsirkas, George Katsimbalis and Nanos Valaorites, E.M. Forster and Sir Maurice Bowra, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, André Gide and Alexis Minotes, Nione Carlson and Katina Paxinou, Laurence Durell and T.E. Laurence, Arnold Toynbee and R.A. Furness, R.M. Dawkins and David Hockney, W.H. Auden and Rex Warner, Kimon Friar and James Merrill, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal, Eugenio Montale and Alberto Moravia, Edmond Jaloux and Mario Meunier, Filippo Pontani and Giuseppe Ungaretti, Marguerite Yourcenar and Jackie Kennedy Onassis—the list of his recognized admirers is endless.

Seferis’s previously quoted remark that the panorama formed by these poems is a world of deceived men and impostors, would have no doubt been received by the poet with a smile, and an imperceptible, ever so polite, almost affable irony: How can you have deceivers without the deceived, my dear! In Cavafy’s balanced poetic opus, of relatively few short poems, but a poetry of substance, passion and measured eloquence, such one-sidedness would be unthinkable. And although generalisations have a nasty habit of becoming obsolete one moment after they are made, the deceived appear to be found mostly in Cavafy’s erotic poetry, while the deceivers seem to crowd his historical poems.

This is by no means an axiom, and already the exceptions spring up like a vintage crop of dragon teeth demanding instant restitution. On the other hand, characters like King Demetrius (poem 8), Orophernes (poem 19), Emilianos Monae (poem 64), Anna Comnena (poem 68) and others may demand to know why they have not been included in both categories, or conversely, may be tempted to use their status as deceived to seek absolution as deceivers.

Precious fakes and gentle frauds

Cavafy’s criticism of his society takes many forms, but in this limited collection of his historical poems one can only speak of the criticism inherent in these poems. They brim with illustrious bombast-bees and earnest humbug artists, precious fakes and amiable impostors, attractive rascals, amusing knaves, gentle frauds, and other such characters of similarly ambivalent feelings raised in the reader. Of course, this implies reading Cavafy’s historical poems with far greater attention than has been the case till now, as the commentaries following these poems are bound to show. A natural question springing from all this is why did Cavafy concentrate so much of his energy and intelligence, and indeed his life, in portraying such unheroic, unromantic, partially unattractive, decidedly second-rate, flawed and prosaic characters and personalities?

A complete answer to this question cannot be given without recourse to the entire Cavafian Canon of 154 poems, which is out of the question here. What may be said is that the poet used these partly… and partly characters first, because historical prototypes and archetypal heroes, though admirable, tend to be acutely boring. One has heard all that many times before and constant panegyrics singularly fail to convince. Second, because Cavafy understood the value of little art, the attraction of the insignificant but real, the hidden poetry in the apparently prosaic, the magic of the luringly obscure, the little gem rescued from the webs of ancient, or perhaps not so ancient, grandiloquence. In this, the poet’s study of the old Alexandrian poetic and literary traditions was undoubtedly a stimulus. And third, in order to criticize his society; and it is the aim of this study to show that in the manner he accomplished this task he has no peers. His verses show a poet who took nothing essential for granted. His mature judgement and measured eloquence bespeak of a critical intelligence without arbitrary preconceptions. And his criticism is often both cutting and gentle, scathing and amusing, ironic and affectionate, all at the same time, at least where such dual qualities are called for—the discerning musings of a cultured man, writing for equally cultivated readers.

He was critical of his society because he heard the declamatory effusions and resounding slogans, the empty bombast and loud noises like these (τα ηχηρά παρόμοια), and he was a little dismayed. He saw the pseudo-solemn, bunk-serious faces of the contemporary officialdom and the elite (ξόανα επίσημα και σοβαροφανή), and he was plainly disenchanted. He listened to their claims of a glorious past and a brilliant history of achievement, and saw some insignificant and ignorant impostors and frauds (το καιραμεούν τε και φαύλον) wiggling their way into positions of power and influence, and he was frankly appalled. He took stock of much of his generation and of his loud-mouthed cliché-spewing learned compatriots, of easy enthusiasms, monolithic convictions, one-sided judgements, sworn monopolies on truth, and heavy-handed treatment of dead certainties, and found them lighter than the shadow of a cork (κουφότεροι φελλού σκιάς), as their progenitors would say (Strabo 1.2.30).

If this sounds severe or arbitrary to any degree, there is an easy way of verifying its truth. All one has to do is spend some time reading George Souris’s contemporary newspaper in verse, O Romios (The Greek, published in Athens from 1883 to 1919, covering Cavafy’s formative period [5]), to realize the reasons for the savage satire—reasons and reasonings that continue unabated till today. This turned Cavafy into a critic, as well it might have. But like everything else about Cavafy, this is only one part of the story. His criticism is through a poetic medium that has never countenanced ostentation or maliciousness, so often the only qualities of his contemporary critics. Neither can one say that Cavafy is a crusader for reform, wielding the weapons of instant retribution over the heads of his readers, at the same time stuffing their ears with the grandiloquent tones or hair-splitting harangues.

Cavafy often uses the simplest language, the historical incident, the foibles of humanity, much irony and mockery to criticize, while simultaneously suggesting that the flawed humans he depicts may not be without some gentle appeal or even great allure. And he is effective as a critic because somewhere among the ironic smiles and sparks of sudden comprehension, the reader may catch a corner of one’s own portrait in the poem. But the surprised reader need not feel chastised or reduced by the experience. The only punishment found in Cavafy’s poems is a better appreciation of oneself, of one’s partly… and partly character, of the fact that most things about human nature and behavior are relative, conditional, dependent on circumstances; that nothing is absolute, categorigal, conclusive, definitive. Cavafy was the ultimate and unrepentant realist, the man who rejected big ideas and loud and overworked ideals, the poet who showed a preference for the warts and flaws of humanity, because he saw they were so much more real and frequent than the corresponding virtues. And it is one of his achievements as a poet that this did not turn him off, as it easily could have, but prompted him to find the seduction of the trivial, as previously related.

PART TWO: THE COMMENTARIES

A largely historical poetic myth

Before continuing with the commentaries accompanying these poems it is important to have an idea of the changes taking place in the interpretation of history at the beginning of the 19th century and again a couple of decades before the poet’s birth, which would play such a decisive role in Cavafy’s poetry. What may be called scientific history made its first appearance with the German scholars, Barthold Georg Niebuhr (Roman History) in 1811, Leopold von Ranke (The History of the Latin and Germanic Peoples Between 1494 and 1535) in 1824, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of History) between 1822 and 1831 [6]. These and related publications were groundbreaking studies and critical evaluations that initiated our present multifaceted view of history. Then some thirty years before the poet’s birth, Johann-Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) published his famous The History of Alexander the Great, (Berlin 1833), probably one of the most thorough works on the subject, and followed this up with The History of Hellenism, published first in Hamburg (1836-43) and later in Gotha (1877-8). In this latter revolutionary and comprehensive work, later translated into French, the ardent Prussian nationalist, Professor of Classical Philology at the universities of Berlin and later of Kiel, Jena, and Berlin again, Droysen presented for the first time the thesis that during Hellenistic times took place a veritable fusion between Greek and Near Eastern cultures, between these overseas Greeks and the native elements of the local populations [7]. As it will be seen from the poems included in this study, Cavafy’s poetry is filled to the brim with persons and characters that came out of this fusion.

Droysen’s work was revolutionary in more ways than one. The classical period had its contemporary historians, such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, who provided the essential background for the interpretation of material evidence obtained from excavation. The Hellenistic age, by contrast, furnished no such convenience. The texts of the early historians, such as Aristobulus of Cassandreia, an army technician and historian of Alexander’s campaigns; Callisthenes of Olynthus, the nephew of Aristotle who also accompanied Alexander; Cleitarchus of Alexandria, who wrote during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus; and Ptolemy I Lagus himself, the founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty and one of Alexander’s childhood friends and generals, are now all lost. The same fate befell the second generation, or the historians of the third century B.C., such as Ephorus of Kyme in Asia Minor, Douris of Samos, Hieronymus of Cardia, Phylarchus of Athens, and Timaeus of Tauromenium, for example. The later Bibliotheca of Diodorus Siculus stops at 301 B.C., the year of the Battle of Ipsus, precisely when the Hellenistic kingdoms begin to take shape. Livy’s work is helpful, but the ten chapters covering the period from 292 to 219 B.C. are missing. In fact, it is not till the middle of the second century B.C. and Polybius that once more history is recorded and commented by contemporaries, which has survived but only in part, till today. Therefore, Droysen’s contribution partly based on the material evidence played an important role.

This was a period when together with systematic excavation began the discovery at a few Egyptian localities of a large variety of written materials, which vastly increased the contemporary or near-contemporary written evidence about a substantial part of antiquity. Inscriptions aimed to record usually on stone, events, laws, dedications, etc.— things considered worthy of preservation. Papyrus was used for normal writing, but it was unlikely to be preserved until a change in burial practices from the time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus helped to change that. Used papyrus documents were employed as cartonnage, or a kind of papier-maché to make up mummy casings, and these were preserved together with the mummies. Starting with the Memphis Serapeum in 1820, then in the Fayyum in 1877, and later in Oxyrhynchus in 1897, papyrus scrolls were discovered to the surprise of excavators. These found at Oxyrhynchus alone exceed half a million pieces. Their variety and contents provided an arresting, detailed and illuminating image of Ptolemaic Egypt, not only of the official side as most inscriptions and histories usually do, but also of contemporary life and mores. There is no doubt at all that Cavafy read much papyrology, together with archeology, epigraphy and numismatics, during his interminable visits to the municipal and other libraries of Alexandria, where he was a regular boarder according to one librarian.

Finally, European expansion in these same areas where Alexander the Great had created his vast empire, and the subsequent Hellenistic kingdoms, allowed and encouraged scholarly exploration and archaeological excavation that brought to light the evidence of history. But the systematic excavation of the Hellenistic east started only in the middle of the 19th century, at about the time of Cavafy’s birth. This evidence was superbly used by the poet in his historical poems, and indirectly commented by him (see the Special Section at the end of the notes below).

Although Cavafy may not have been a historical poet in the strict sense of this designation, history in all its aspects intensely preoccupied him. And his poetic myth is largely historical, if one may use this ostensible contradiction to point out something that has given rise to innumerable discussions among his commentators. Cavafy, like any other major poet, required a mythical world so that he could present the protagonists of his poems in a world fairly familiar to the reader. The Hellenistic, Late Roman times and to a lesser extent the Byzantine period gave him such a world, which he used with originality, effectiveness, and unusual economy.

Aims and expectations—nothing accidental

It seems only fair to explain here why the commentaries following these 72 poems are necessary, and thus present both the aims of these commentaries and what is expected of the reader. Starting with the last, what is expected is essentially a relatively open mind and the certainty that there is nothing accidental in the poetry of Cavafy, and consequently that one can’t take anything at all for granted, not even a comma. In the beginning the poet followed the Hellenistic tradition of what may be called the learned literature, as exemplified by the poet Callimachus (c. 305-c. 240 B.C.) and his contemporaries. These talented literati scarcely sought to describe and interpret the life and mores of their times, but instead concentrated their efforts to recapture the life and thought of their glorious past. They naturally molded their style on the Attic idiom, but which was no longer current in Alexandria and the other Hellenistic cities founded by the Greco-Macedonians, and could be acquired only with the help of a teacher and the appropriate lexicons and other aids. The Byzantines inherited the learned traditions of the Hellenistic scholars, and occasionally propelled them to giddy heights, as when an author apologizes to the reader for using barbarian names! The post-medieval Greeks continued this tradition, since the writing of the learned language could distinguish an educated person (and needless to say a wealthy one), from the mass of the poor peasants who could neither read nor write. In this way arose the cleavage between the language spoken by the people and the tongue written by the intellectuals, which was the cause of innumerable controversies that were not resolved until the 20th century.

Cavafy gradually realized that neither the learned tongue nor the language of the people could by themselves provide the verbal materials and processes that he needed. Slowly he turned more and more towards the language of the people, trying to capture the living tongue in its animated and dynamic manifestations, but without quite forsaking the learned idiom. He was hardly alone in this ambivalance of course. On the contrary, some brilliant minds of the times, though clearly partizans of the demotic tongue, wrote only in katharevousa, the learned idiom. Grigoris Vernardakis, the erudite author of the "Interpretative Dictionary of . . . Ancient Greek Authors, wrote his opus in the purist language, but with such contempt for it that he expressed his total indifference about its possible evolution. And Christos Tsountas, the dean of Greek archeologists and arguably one of the ablest, most systematic and precocious brains to apply itself to the problems of Greek archeology, though a warm and firm believer in the demotic tongue so as to be considered by Christos Karouzos one of our own," wrote mainly in katharevousa. Cavafy, a contemporary of both these men, struggled for years to combine the spoken and the written tongues and in this he was not merely a visionary precursor, but a minor martyr as well. But in the end he achieved his goal, to the extent that George Seferis referred to Cavafy as the necessary filtration plant for the demotic tongue (1973, 162).

The mature poet was not only a man who sought the use and abuse of words in the stock market, or the cafés and bars he frequented, where grammatical and syntactical bonds are broken and language was molded in anarchy, but equally a man who could lose his sleep over a comma, or the use of three or four ellipses points. This ostensibly contradictory attitude towards language was never quite understood by his contemporaries, and gave rise to great controversies. On its account (but also because he refused to take part in the raging language controversy), he has been called an anachronistic provincial and an unsufferable cosmopolitan; a buffoon of the demotic tongue and a Byzantine vampire; a stoic Narkissus, but dressed in a Phanariot soutane; a half-literate crank who failed, etc. His language itself has been denounced as an example of what to avoid, Greek spoken by an Armenian, one more epidemic from Egypt, pearls from a provincial dross paper, and so on and on.

A brief on language

One cannot examine the subject of Cavafy’s mature language in such a limited collection of his poems since some examples would require reference to others than these included here [8]. But generally the mature poet would no doubt underwite the words of the early Byzantine ecclesiastical historian Socrates (A.D. 380-449), when he also tried to explain his own choice of language:

Ισθι δε ημάς μη εσπουδακέναι περί την φράσιν, εννοήσαντας ως ει σπουδάσαιμεν

καλλιλεξία χρήσασθαι, ίσως μεν και αποπεσούμεθα του σκοπού.

It behooves us not to elaborate our expression, having understood that if we used

elegant speech as we have learned, then perhaps we would fail in our purpose [9].

In greater detail, it may suffice for the present to equally stress that names of persons, places, or things, titles of officials, functionaries, or other mandarins, dates whether directly stated or to be extracted from the context, adjectives not strictly necessary for the purpose of description, parentheses, repetitions, quotations, ellipses points, dashes, visual or acoustic emphasis of whatever kind, and all other details specifying the circumstances and events of these poems, are highly significant contributions that must be seriously and carefully considered, if the reader is to get the most out of Cavafy. Whether the result of such attention to details is worth the effort is for the reader to decide. One way of doing so is by comparing how his poetry has been read by others of his commentators and how it is read here. The reader will have ample opportunities for comparison beginning with the first poem.

But the previous remark must not be misunderstood as either a special faculty for reading poetry, or idle boasting by this commentator. It is neither. It is rather that Cavafy has been read even by his most careful students as just another poet. An interesting, fascinating, engrossing if you will, even a great poet, but another poet just the same. Therefore, enormous attention has been paid to his poetic language as a means of expression, including some amusing if libelous pieces, and strictly insufficient attention to what he says and in particular how he chooses to say it. Not from the viewpoint of prosody, but from these of vocabulary, syntax, grammar, punctuation, accent, and emphasis, the primary tools for grasping the full significance of written speech, as it will be seen from the very first poem in this collection.

The proper names he used in his poetry have been divided into historical and mythological, philological or fictitious, etc., but their significance has hardly been appreciated (see for example poems 1 and 37 here). His dates, whether stated outright or implied by the contents, have been sometimes looked at with interest, but they have scarcely enhanced an understanding of these poems (e.g. poems 7, 39 and 61). His so-called allusions have occasioned many a learned commentary about hints and implications, austere pieties, shifting relativities, hidden meanings or what have you, but have hardly ever clarified what it is that the poet is actually saying. This is because Cavafy is read just like any other poet. Hence in the best of circumstances the interpretation of his verses is appropriately vague, couched in generalities and abstractions that could fit any shifting relativity, either of the poet or of his reader. Only from this viewpoint Cavafy’s poetry is not like that of any other poet. If poetry is what is lost in translation according to the precept of Robert Frost, then one is led to the inevitable conclusion that either Cavafy did not write poetry, or if he did, it was of a very special kind.

Cavafy’s fame outside of Greece depends almost entirely on translations, despite the fact that unlike Nicos Kazantzakis, Cavafy has not yet been lucky enough to find another Kimon Friar as translator. And since many foreign poets and men of letters consider Cavafy a real poet, it follows that what he wrote must have been a very special kind of poetry to have got through the translation without great losses, rather than non-poetry or anti-poetry as some of his contemporaries maintained, who accused him of reducing poetry to the level of common speech, branding him a half-literate crank who failed, and similar courtesies previously detailed [10].

A question of distinction

What is so special then about Cavafy’s poetry, one may ask. A simple answer is that Cavafy does not write for the collective ears of humanity. He writes for relatively few aware and critical brains like his own. Cavafy does not expect to find universal truths bathed in the radiant light of eternal beauty. Rather, he brings out the odd relevance of half-truths and the tentative allure of human flaws. The poet expresses his own feelings, visions, ideas and criticism, but unlike most poets who would consider themselves lucky for having expressed a fraction of what they thought or felt, Cavafy expressed precisely what he wanted and absolutely nothing else. And he did so with rare conciseness, notable attention to the minutest point he suggested, strict respect for the written tradition he used, and a language free of the juices of rhetoric that so bedeviled the lyrical poets of his day. This is why Xenopoulos suggested his poems should be examined with a microscope. Why Seferis wrote that in Cavafy’s poetry you cannot take a comma for granted. And Bowersock was surprised to find a poet with such an incredible adherence to original sources. That is also why there is no ambiguity in his poetry, contrary to the contentions of his commentators.

In a recent publication, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, eminent student of Cavafy and perennial compiler of the poet’s voluminous bibliography, writes in an article entitled Parallel readings in five bibliographies: Seferis-Cavafy-Sikelianos-Elytis-Ritsos:

The only one of the poets examined here, who had the fortune from an early date to see his poems translated in foreign languages, and indeed some translations published in magazines of high standing, as Eliot’s Criterion or London’s Listener, is C.P. Cavafy. His case is not comparable to this of the others (emphasis added). The general circumstances of exposure of neo-hellenic literature abroad were very different during the first decades of the 20th century that what they are today. The majority of foreigners involved with the Greek literature of the times, did not correspond with the notion of neo-hellenist as we understand the word today [11].

This may be true, of course. But the general circumstances of exposure of neohellenic literature abroad were no different for Cavafy than for the other four poets named in the article’s title, or for any other Greek poets for that matter. Why is Cavafy’s case not comparable with this of the others in the phrase emphasized above? Writes the author by way of explanation and quoted again for the sake of criticism and illustration:

The rapid, impressive and successive translation of the entire Cavafian opus in various languages, countries and editions all over the world immediately after the war [WW II] is a fact related to the response and acceptance of his poetry itself, without the auxiliary support of prizes and distinctions.

No doubt an indisputable fact, but the author does not explain here the reasons for this enhanced response and acceptance, since that was probably not part of his agenda. But there is simply no doubt that Cavafy’s poetry was emphatically different from this of all other Greek poets named, or of any other poets for that matter. And this is the reason for the exceptional response and acceptance it enjoyed, despite not particularly informed or successful translations, and grossly inadequate reading of his poems. It is this difference, which the following few sections attempt to briefly examine and explain, and the following analyses of his poems hopefully elucidate.

Attention and the role of the visual arts

The poet made certain that his readers would know, or at least have some guiding lines on how to read his poetry. Having been often called a poet of pessimism, Cavafy countered with the remark that, to judge Cavafy’s poems, either from a literary or a philosophical point of view, these must be read with the greatest attention, as Malanos added to Lehonitis’s booklet reporting what Cavafy said about his poems, but without grasping what the poet meant [12]. What is certain is that the reader’s attention is critical for reading a demanding poet like Cavafy.

This is obviously not a poetry of well-worn generalities and timeless truths, but a poetry of specifics, partial verities, and limited validity— the reasons why it cannot be dealt with the usual all-embracing generalities and abstractions. As it will be shown from the first poems in this collection, these are not embroideries designed to praise a rare poet, but warnings to his readers about what is expected of them.

Yet in spite of these constraints and surprises, it is the poetry of the verses that touch the reader’s sensibility. One agrees with his often severe criticism, but it is his maturity of judgement one admires. One observes the iniquity of many of his characters, but it is Cavafy’s integrity that shines through. One is surrounded by a crowd of loud frauds, but it is the poet’s whispered half-truths that remain. This is the magic of poetry. Rendered more effective by understatement, by supple suggestion, a hinted feeling, irony that is both wry and humorous, an atmosphere charged with sorcery breathing subtle but enduring messages, and an almost religious adherence to concreteness, as if abstractions were the odium and bane of poetic expression. Writes Rex Warner in his introduction to John Mavrogordato’s first complete English translation of Cavafy’s poetry: Words like ‘politics,’ ‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’ are never abstractions, but are always seen in some real, and usually rather surprising context [13].

Familiarity with Cavafy’s poetry shows that the mature poet constructed his poems on the same principles as his ancient Greek ancestors used for the visual arts. But similar statements have become clichés among Cavafy scholars, who compare his poems to statues and such other misapplied metaphors. Hence, it is best to explain here what these principles imply. This is that everything, every detail and every sign meant something specific and concrete. Art had traditionally elected to pursue the beautiful—the visible loveliness, the enchanting vision, the bewitching dream. But that was rarely enough. Greek art had also something to relate, something to suggest, but something that was not a vague implication, a loose association, a nebulous intimation of some sort, but something usually rational, definite, and singularly concrete. That is why many of Cavafy’s poems must be given the same consideration as the poetry of his ancestors—they must be taught. The ancient tragedies, comedies, and poems were recited and taught by men who knew. Fervor, tension, stress, inflection, tone, restrain, cohesion, shading, pitch, are nowhere apparent in a text; and neither for that matter are phrasing, accent, hesitation, balance, modulaion—the music, suggestion, and nuance of words zestfully strung together. When old Solon, the great and wise Athenian statesman, poet, and lawgiver, learned that Sappho, the famed poetess from Lesbos he admired so much had written another set of verses, he asked to be taught the poem so he could know it before he died. Later, Callistratus, the 5th century B.C. dramatic poet known as didaskalos (teacher), had taught two of Aristophanes’ plays (see poem 37 here). Poetry was too important to be just read. Writes Seferis in his diaries: . . . poems that must be heard—that warp when they are read (Meres VI, 9/10/1954). But this meant among other things to grasp the kinship between poetry and concreteness. Cavafy understood perfectly that finding the original and unburdened meaning of words meant going back to their concrete beginnings, long before Jorge Luis Borges said in his Norton Lectures at Harvard: We find that words did not begin as abstractions, but more as concrete entities—and I suppose that the word ‘concrete’ is here synonymous with the word ‘poetic’ (Thought and Poetry, see below).

Concreteness, rationality and economy

The concreteness and rationality of Cavafy’s poetry jump to the inquiring eye. Few poets have understood the importance of concreteness in poetry, still fewer have made it an active principle of composition, and no one was ever better rewarded for it than Cavafy. This was so assiduously pursued by the poet that it may readily pass unnoticed unless one specifically sets out to look for it. This in turn means a poetry based on names, nouns, dates, verbs, and as few adjectives as possible, that is, adjectives not strictly necessary for narrative purposes. The poet knew only too well the weakness of the adjectival form and distinctly said so [14]. He was hardly alone in this, of course. Paul Claudel in his Journal wrote that the fear of the adjective is the beginning of style. He could have added that the avoidance of the same was one of the essences of style. At the same time, Cavafy avoided poetic attributes, compound or synthetic adjectives, and all these ringing epithets other poets have used so successfully, ever since Homer and the Orphic Hymns, to Aeschylus, Pindar, Kazantzakis and beyond. For Cavafy these would be only distractions from the essential task. In matters of language nothing is of value for itself, he might have said. It is the result that counts. Besides, all these noisy epithets didn’t accord very well with the poetic economy he practised as if his fame depended on it.

Briefly, he seems one poet who understood perfectly that even the most abstract concept or dimly drawn atmosphere in poetry, must be constructed out of concrete elements and symbols, if it is to be effective, if it is to capture and hold the reader’s attention. No matter what means he used to initially focus the reader’s attention, Cavafy knew that to succeed as a poet he had to hold his reader’s attention uninterruptedly for the short time it takes to read the poem. The slightest hitch, the vague abstraction, the smallest obstacle in the way of one’s attention, can cause the mind to wander, leave the line traced by the sensibility of the poet and result in one more interesting poem that no one has the time or desire to ever read again—what Samuel Johnson called temporary poems. But the poet had at least one more reason to avoid the pitfall of abstractions, well described by Aldous Huxley in his 1927 book, Proper Studies (pp. 35-36), and quoted here for the purpose of this inquiry:

An abstraction can never be true. To abstract is to select certain aspects of reality regarded as being, for one reason or another significant. The aspects of reality not selected do not thereby cease to exist, and the abstraction is therefore never a true, in the sense of complete, picture of reality.

Similarly Karl Shapiro, in his enchanting 1945 booklet, Essay on Rime, quoted at the beginning of this introduction and referring to W. H. Auden’s contribution to English poetry, cannot quite refrain from damning the English poet’s propensity towards abstraction (p. 41):

Let us examine one

Salutary effect, vocabulary,

And one pernicious influence of his style,

Abstraction.—

Cavafy, the ultimate realist poet, had certainly grasped that much by the time he reached poetic maturity and long before Huxley and Shapiro; and his reaction was to almost banish abstractions from his poetry, or treat them as Rex Warner suggested above, since contrary to material objects an abstraction exists only in one’s head.

It is this concreteness that allows the poems to be grasped even in translation. The lack of florid, embellishing adjectives and of a sonorous poetic language is what permits the reader to go straight to the heart of the matter at hand. Cavafy knew that in the final analysis poems like these he wanted to write would live only on the substance he wished to convey to the reader, the multiple messages that spring from his words. He was by no means indifferent to language and prosody as already mentioned; but he used this instrument rationally to convey and compress his meanings. He knew that his strength was in what he had to say, and that the force of his speech derived from the pregnancy and significance of that which it conveyed as economically as it was feasible. This is also what is meant by the rationality of his speech. It is in this context that the often poetic language surprises and delights. But here one must understand poetic language for Cavafy—appropriately measured, restrained, lean, free of capricious elements, trenchantly to the point. There are no ambiguities here, vague allusions, all-embracing abstractions, equivocal implications, obscure hints, or hidden meanings, which his commentators seem to invariably find in his poetry. There are extentions of his messages, extenuating circumstances, even complex implications, but of the kind we find in partly this… and partly that situations, not in the absolutism of (n)either this… (n)or that positions. Something that is bound to appear from the following sections of this part of the introduction, and further enlarged when the poems of this collection are examined and analyzed in the rest of this book.

But Cavafy equally grasped two more facts that would give his poetry a lasting allure. First, the lyrical poets of his day exulted the spontaneous effusions of the soul, the blood-stained heart of the poet, the tear-strained face of the heroine and so on, which after a first reading sounded too operatic for serious contemplation. Such explicitly powerful emotions might have become a great ancient poet describing some momentous event, the destruction of a city, the enslavement of another, the hubris of a royal despot bringing down upon his head the anger of the immortal gods and the ruin of his people. But such overemphasis seemed inappropriate for lesser evils. And exaggeration was precisely what Cavafy set out to eliminate in his verses. A new generation had come forth, tired of all big ideas, exhausted ideals and the accompanying verbal inflation, which found a kindred niche in the soul of the poet.

Cavafy also eventually found out that by setting out the circumstances of the case, deftly prompting the reader to discover the hidden emotion of the situations he described, was much more effective than simply presenting the spontaneous effusion, because the former involved the reader’s active participation. The reader of his poems was no longer a passive recipient of readymade feelings, but a participant in their discovery or formation, an active associate or even accomplice in the purveyance of emotion. The reader was not asked to take for granted the implied feelings, but encouraged to seek out their source, grasp the underlying motives of the poetic character or the intentions of the poet, fathom the multiple levels of the poet’s criticism. Cavafy does not create a record of events, but an imaginative criticism of life, wrote Sir Maurice Bowra [15]. Cavafy does not simply invite you to think, he incites you to think, and sometimes he obliges you to do so, with his simple, apparently declaratory sentences, which are neither simple nor only declaratory, but replete with fascinating extensions, other aims or scopes, and multiple suggestive implications—but nearly always in a rational, distinct, and concrete context. Naturally, the poet had to prepare the ground by a suggestive atmosphere, words that could be readily understood, notions that might need some analysis but not philosophical disquisitions, symbols of human virtues and especially vices, images that recalled directly the sources of the emotions portrayed, but not necessarily the emotions themselves—these had to be discovered by the reader, with the invaluable help of the poet, of course. Cavafy struggled to present a slice of the real world, and to comment on it with rare sincerity. That is why, and where, the historical sources are so relevant.

PART THREE: REASONS AND RATIONALE

More specifically, the aim and function of the commentaries following these historical poems may be examined under the following headings.

The sources

In some poems, usually these placed in a historical or mythical context, the poet used names, dates and shorthand descriptions for events, actions or processes of far-reaching consequences in order to maintain the necessary textual economy. Cavafy continuously sought to compress his verses and the extreme