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The Complete Poems of Cavafy: Expanded Edition

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This review is not about the work of Cavafy itself, which I love, but a comment on the translation. Many critics have complained that a great deal is lost in a translation of Cavafy, particularly some of the linguistic and stylistic craftsmanship, and that is true of any translation of a poet. However, I believe the tone or the mood of poems, so important in a poet like Cavafy, are underemphasized, and if a translation is capable of conveying them with profundity, it is commendable; and in this respect the Rae Dalven translation is far superior to the Keeley/Sherrard and the Theoharis translations I have read, and the only one worth returning to - it remains evocative where the others seem to miss the pitch, sounding flat or overdone.

It comes down to a matter of preference, but Cavafy's spare, elemental poetry is best translated for me by Rae Dalven, despite the greater number of titles available in an Edmund Keeley translation. This book is a worthy travel companion, with just about every extant Cavafy poem. Savour something special.

There are those days when nothing new appeals to you, and it's good then to turn to your something that is not new. I did recently -- Cavafy.

To read the verse of C.P. Cavafy is to rediscover the timeless quality of passion, desire, pain, and life itself. He offers another view of everything you have ever felt, giving it new perspective. There is little imagery in the work -- it would be unnecessary adornment. They eye and voice of Cavafy are all that is necessary. He saw and said, and did so simply. You need not ponder for hours the nuances of the work. That time can instead be well spent contemplating how and why things feel the way they do.

Cavafy questions civilization. In "Expecting the Barbarians," he describes with characteristic simplicity the essential sense of human relief that is found in giving up specifically in giving up the trappings and restrictions placed on the inhabitants of any society. Cavafy yearns for freedom, and when at last that freedom is denied, he ponders going on without that 'kind of solution. "

Cavafy never questions love or lust. "He Asked About the Quality" explores chance encounter and desire that must be hidden even when that desire is mutual:

". . . their only aim, the touching of their hands over the handkerchiefs; the coming close of their faces, by chance their lips; a momentary contact of the limbs."

The collection. the entirety of Cavafy's work, is a celebration of both antiquity and the present. Greece, Rome, Alexandria of the early nineteen hundreds, early Christianity itself -- these are Cavafy's settings. In spanning two thousand years of Western culture he discovers and reveals an immediacy, an appreciation of beauty -- the beauty of man himself, both physical and contemplative. Cavafy finds the joie de vivre even when it hurts. Then, in "The Horses of Achilles," he goes further and laments. Patroclus is slain and lifeless on the battleground. The immortal horses, gifts of the gods, begin to cry. Zeus tries to console them:

" --- Yet the two noble animals went on shedding their tears for the never ending calamity of death."

Cavafy: a look into something old, very old at times, yet always very new.

Among the poets of the twentieth century, there is maybe one who can confidently say, "I am better than Cavafy." Yet, on a top five list of the twentieth century's greatest poets, Cavafy is far less likely to appear than, say, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, or W. H. Auden, yet Cavafy's work can stand against any of these.

Poets tend to squabble with tired questions, faith vs. reason, contemplation vs. experience, knowledge vs. serenity, life vs. language, etc. Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek, does not squabble. Whether Cavafy's poems are about politics, art, or love (and those on the latter are the finest), it is as if his principal questions are answered before he writes the poem. Cavafy would never write a poem depicting the conflict between seamy, audacious amours and upright society. Instead, he goes ahead and writes about seamy, audacious amours, and at the end reminds us that upright society doesn't understand, that it makes "stupid comparisons."

And all of this Cavafy does with a fleeting tone (a la John Keats) that appears to be chiseled into marble (a la Ovid), at once the slightest and weightiest thing you've ever read.

Positively a must read and must own for any self-respecting poetry enthusiast.

I first encountered Cavafy as the writer ofa grim little poem called 'The City' - "You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas. The city will follow you." This bleak essay is the incarnation of the hopelessness of noir writing, and so my formative opinion of Cavafy perceived him as something much difference from what he is. Even though the bleak and an atmosphere of despair frequently haunt his efforts.

It was only in later study, after realizing that my 'secret' poet was actually one of the foremost of modern Greek poets. One who, despite the difficulties in the translation of his poems has had an influence well beyond the barriers of language. Cavafy habitually used to forms of Greek, demotic and purist, to carry out his devices. He writes plainly, with little or no metaphor or simile, but what makes his poems poetry is largely untranslatable. Yet, as one reads through his work in English translation, there are countless moments when something grabs your attention.

W. H. Auden, who wrote the introduction, attributes this to Cafavy's uniqueness, which somehow differentiates him from everyone else at the same time as it creates a connection. I find that reading Cavafy in translation is a bit like having a conversation with someone who has a very interesting way of expressing himself. His subjects are most often his own sensuality and the nature of the human state as a part of the old world of Greek history. But whether he is working within the parameters of his own homosexuality, or pondering the state of Demetrius Soter, Cafavy rarely fails to his home.

If you are looking to expand poetic horizons from an unexpected perspective, or smply enjoy verse that brings you up short and makes you think, there is much here for your reading. You will find Cavafy work easily accessible a valuable addition to the contemplatives library.

This review relates to the volume -The Complete Poems
of Cavafy-, Expanded Edition, Translated by Rae Dalven,
published by Harcourt, Inc., 1976.
Although his name is spelled as Konstantinos Petrou
Kabaphes, the name by which he is usually referred is
an English version, C.P. Cavafy. He lived from
1863 - 1933, and resided most of his life in Alexandria,
Egypt. Perhaps the only poem that most modern readers
might come in contact with in modern poetry anthologies
is "Ithaca." And even in this poem, one can see the
interesting, wry, ironic way that Cavafy has of reversing
what one might think would be the usual, or "safe"
way of seeing things. Cavafy has that very interesting
double vision, which knows the "usual" and the "accepted,"
and yet dares to sail in the face of convention and
expectation and create the unexpected, the delightful,
the heart touching, the soulful. That is not to say
that he is maudlin or sentimental in a syrupy fashion.
That double vision comes from the double nature of the
experiencer and the viewer and the analyzer. Cavafy
was a lover of males. The words "homosexual" and "gay"
just don't even come close to doing justice or exactness
to what that life direction meant to him. For, though
he knows what he is and what he desires, he also knows
the surrounding culture's and religion's negative
attitudes and doctrines towards that direction. So
it results in a double-awareness, with multiple levels

of subtle nuance. He sees, knows, analyzes the outward
manifestations, experiences, modes -- and yet at the
same time internally is aware, secretly, of the inner
manifestations, desires, manifestations, and modes.
The critical edge of judgment and decision is when
and in what ways he will actualize the secret internal
desire into the "public" external world. These poems
reflect those attempts and results. However, Cavafy
is also interested in ancient history, and many of
his poems reflect a sort of world-weary love and
appreciation, yet sadness at the passing of the past,
towards the history of ancient Greece and that of
the Hellenistic World which followed in the wake
of the conquests and death of Alexander the Great.
Here is a sample of Cavafy, the poem titled "At the
Cafe Entrance":
Something they said beside me directed
my attention toward the cafe entrance.
And I saw the beautiful body that looked
as if Eros had made it from his consumate experience --
joyfully modeling its symmetrical limbs;
heightening sculpturally its stature;
modeling the face with emotion
and imparting by the touch of his hands
a feeling on the brow, on the eyes, on the lips.
--------------------
-- Robert Kilgore.

I have only recently come to read the other translations of Cavafy's work and I still like this one best. Dalven's translation flows, the words - both in choice and placement - just seem more evocative and well-suited to the poems. Other translations seem... awkward somehow, with extra words at the end of lines that spoil the tone, or with terms that don't carry the same weight or charm.

I do recognize the frustration that Greek readers must feel at the lack of rhyme or rhythm. (I certainly feel that way when I see my beloved Cyrano butchered whenever it's translated from its gorgeous, flowing, rhyming French.) But from the perspective of one who could never, unfortunately, appreciate the original as it was meant to be appreciated, Dalven gives me a Cavafy who makes me dream, who makes me sad, and who seamlessly sparks emotion. These are poems that I can read to others in English, and which seem almost like they were written as unrhyming poems IN English. Doubtlessly some of the brilliance involved in their creation is lost on me, and it could not be otherwise considering the language barrier. But honestly, having seen some of the other translations out there, I am not sure I would have even become a Cavafy fan if not for Rae Dalven.

The complete poems of Constantin Cavafy (1873-1933), a Greek language poet who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt as a government clerk and who was unpublished during his lifetime but is now considered one of the major poets of the past century. The poetry of Cavafy (there are other alternative transliterations of his name) is simple (you always get what he is talking about, which is not often the case with 20th Century poetry) yet haunting. There are two main undercurrents in his poems: the classical world (where you get his wit and erudition) and stories of homosexual love (not explicit by modern standards, but certainly daring for its time and probably one of the reasons he decided not to publish his work). Sometimes these two themes overlap in his poems (as in the superb Myres, Alexandria, 340 AD), but often not. Julian the Apostate appears in many of his poems, since one of the undercurrent in his poems is a nostalgia for classical paganism and a criticism of Christianity for destroying that world. My own favorite poems are Waiting for the Barbarians (maybe his best known work), Myres but most of his poems are exceptional.

C. P. Cavafy, Complete Poems (Harvest, 1961)

In his introduction to this book, W. H. Auden repeatedly stresses that there are elements in the poems of Cavafy, "the foremost modern Greek poet" (in the defense of the publisher, Seferis and Ritsos had not yet emerged as major forces, and Odysseus Elytis was still a few years away from winning the Nobel Prize), that are untranslatable. That is true (as he goes on to say) about most works in translation, but when Auden describes the structure of Cavafy's work, the red flags should start going off in your head. "No one can speak of Cavafy's imagery, for simile and metaphor are devices he never uses..." The astute reader of poetry will likely ask the question, "so then, what makes it poetry, and not prose broken up into lines?"

In Greek, the answer to that question is "rhythm and rhyme." Cavafy is a formalist, perhaps one of the last modern masters of form poetry. The problem is, that doesn't translate (especially in this translation, by Rae Dalven) into English, and the effect becomes that of reading a disjointed, pseudo-erotic History of Greece rather than a book of poetry. Cavafy's wit and subtlety are completely lost, as is any attempt to show the original framework on which the words hang, and which, in this poetry, is so very important:

The joy and essence of my life is the memory of the hours
when I found and sustained sensual delight as I desired it.
The joy and essence of my life for me, who abhorred
every enjoyment of routine loves.
--"Sensual Delight"

The sad truth is, while in Greek it's a rhymed poem where each line is fifteen syllables, in English it would have a hard time getting published as an aphorism, much less a poem.

Perhaps a better translation of Cavafy's work has emerged in the intervening forty years; between reading this and leaving Cavafy's work untranslated, the better option would have been the latter. **

Enjoyed the product immensely. Thanks. I love this author and I appreciate anything he writes. A friend told me about this guy and I am glad he did. I am a poet and can appreciate his writings. It brings insight into the Greek mind.