Volume 18, Number 11 · June 15, 1972
Cavafy: The Historic and Erotic
By Stephen Spender
Passions and Ancient Days
by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Edward Keeley, translated by George Savidis
Dial, 91 pp., $5.00
Constantine Cavafy (born 1863 and died 1933) lived in Alexandria (where during the First World War E. M. Forster, employed by the British Red Cross, knew him). He lived and wrote, as befits an Alexandrian, on the edge of modern as well as of classical Greek civilization and of the European symbolist and decadent literature of his time. And yet he seems in some early-Eliotish way at the hidden center of our own time. His poetry might have come out of a shadowy corner of Yeats's Byzantium. His imagination, as Rex Warner explains in his excellent Introduction to John Mavrogordato's translation of his poems from the Greek,[*] finds its themes 'in the Hellenistic blending of cultures and races in cities like Alexandria or Antioch where Greek and Jew, pagan and Christian, sophist, priest, and barbarian form a complicated and far from Periclean pattern.' One might add to the cities mentioned The Waste Land's 'Jerusalem Albens Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal' and, to them, New York, to throw light on the magnetic pull Cavafy has for us.
Review, 1718 words
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