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Daniel Mendelsohn is a cultural critic whose reviews and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear regularly in the New Yorker and The New York Review of Books as well as other publications. His previous books include a collection of critical essays how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken. The mime the memoir The elusive embrace a New York Times Notable Book of the year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the year as well as the international bestseller The Lost. A search for six of six million which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Medici and other honors Mr. Mendelson has received a Guggenheim Fellowship the national books Critics Circle citation for excellence in reviewing and the George Jean Nathan award for dramatic criticism. He teaches that part of his new translations Harper's writes the explanatory essays has attached to almost every poem can contain every bit as much passion and humanity as the poets own work. Mendelssohn Mendelssohn is such a felicitous interpreter of Caffie because the poet himself was a kind of

scholar complex allusions to distant figures and events at the margins of Mediterranean history are essential to his art as his Evocations ardent erotic encounters. Please welcome. Daniel Mendelsohn thank. Thank you. Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria Egypt on April 17th 1863 and died on his birthday exactly 70 years later. And in 1933 at the age of 70 on April 29 the calendar had changed but it was actually his birthday and he died of cancer of the throat and in his last illness was forced to have a lawyer inject to

me and I'm telling you this because he was a famous conversationalist and a great rock on tour and storyteller and his sort of little shabby salon in Alexandria was a gathering place for all sorts of sort of interesting cross currents of both the high and one imagines the low aspects of Alexandrian society and was very famous for his storytelling and his model if Louis. Recitations of his own poetry but in his last months he was without his famous voice and because of that was forced to communicate with his loved ones by means of penciled notes and on the day that he died. There is a story that he beckoned for his notepad and his pencil and he

made the last sort of act of writing in his life time of writing so many hundreds of thousands of words and what he actually wrote was not a word but a sort of strained symbol he drew a circle and then in the middle of the circle he put it Dot. And then he died. Nobody knows exactly what that was supposed to mean. If you're in the writing or publishing business you will immediately think of the notation that you put in manuscripts when you're correcting galleys of your books and articles that dot in the middle of the circle means a full stop and that certainly is a tempting interpretation although I'm still researching whether this was a symbol used in Alexandria in 1933. But whatever else it means I always like to start thinking about Cavafy as poetry by thinking of this sort of last thing that he ever wrote because to me it seems to

suggest what was most interesting about his work and what was most interesting about his thoughts and sort of the arc of his career which was all about. I think you could say the relationship between the center and the edge of things and I think that is a great preoccupation for Cavafy in three principal areas. And I just want to bring these to your attention before I actually devote my minutes here to your reading. Just because these these three areas keep coming up in the poems and also these sort of. These are areas in which this sort of tension between being on the margins of things and at the center of things is very much at play in the poems. First of all there's a sort of geographical preoccupation and Cavafy Cavafy you have to remember is a Greek an Alexandrian Greek which is a very special kind

of person that no longer exists. Born in a city that was a great center in ancient times a great cultural capital and reduced to being a sort of provincial backwater a place where interesting and louche people ended up. By the 1930s when he died. So just by virtue of being an Alexandrian Greek he was sort of born into this tension between being at the center and the edge of things also temporally or chronologically or historically. We could see Cavafy sort of wrestling with this tension as well when we think of Greece and Rome and classical antiquity we tend to think apparently in Athens or gust and Rome the sort of the high purple points of ancient history Cavafy is completely uninterested in all of that. What Cavafy is interested in are what until really quite recently. In

classical studies were considered this sort of an interesting and sort of off color backwaters of the historical spectrum the Hellenistic era for example as opposed to the classical era when I was in graduate school at Princeton about 20 years ago. I remember very distinctly being told when I was frantically studying for my history as being a literature person I was very worried about the history bits and somebody said to me these are the the Hellenistic period which is to say the period after the death of Alexander the Great Oh don't worry you don't need to be responsible for that nobody cares about that. You know and this is 300 years of ancient history. That's what's interesting and Cavafy as well as what we now call the late antiquity which is a sort of a growth business right now in classics but certainly when I was in grad school was something nobody was very

interested in. And also in particularly what historical or historical period that Cavafy is very interested in is Byzantium which partly because of Gibbon was disdained you know as this tawdry thousand year stretch in which nothing of any great significance happened except there are a lot of badly behaved Byzantine emperors. And so Cavafy sort of naturally in terms of time is also attracted to sort of the edges the marginal bits of history that nobody else cares about everybody else is working on Parrot please. And the Golden Age of Rome and coffee says To hell with that. I want to talk about Antiochus the force. You know people that nobody else really cares about or off color Byzantine emperors. So that's the sort of second I would say area in which Gadhafi cares more about the edges of things and the centers. And then finally of course the

important area in which this comes into play in Cavafy these poems is the erotic. As a homosexual living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries naturally Cavafy finds himself more at the edge of things than at the center although in Alexandria Of course we have to make a special exception because Alexandria is not like London and things are a little looser I always think of the fabulous remark that Jimmy Merrill made about Cavafy and his life and Merrill was a great translator of Cavafy and it's only a shame that he didn't do all of it. And he said oh you know poor Cavafy as a homosexual living at the turn of the century in Alexandria and you expect the next part of the sentence to be you know it was such a closeted and repressive time the poor man. And instead Merrill said every day all those opportunities which one did you choose from you know.

So but nonetheless With that said. You know you have to remember that Cavafy at the age of 40 began writing his explicitly erotic or homoerotic poetry and even though it was the case that he was doing so in Alexandria where it wasn't as big a deal as it was in other places. You know one was only still 10 years from the Oscar Wilde trial I mean people could be severely punished for this let alone talking about it in public so we have to keep that in mind. And what I want to do this evening is just sort of take you on this sort of crazy whirlwind tour of Qaddafi's career and to show how he sort of I think you know very much started as conventional and as Ferris rightly said and mediocre poet when he first started writing who was pretending to be at the center and only when he learned how to be comfortable on the edge of things did he really become

himself and start writing and start writing really great. I think. Poetry you know there's a very famous Actually I have to say one more thing which is a great story that I love about Alexandria and Cavafy is lifetime Cavafy is one of seven brothers. And he had a gay brother. And in Alexandria while he was alive the Alexandrians would refer to the homosexual Cavafy by which they only meant the brother and the poet. I think that's so wonderful. So I want to just sort of show or I think show how he became a poet who was very comfortable being at the edge. And I think I always you know when I teach Greek tragedy I always like to start with East Gilliss persons because I think it's always important to see an example of a bad tragedy before you get to the really good stuff and I know that's a controversial comment but if

you don't appreciate great art unless you look at bad art I think and I'm so therefore going to briefly torture you with an example. I'm pretending to be able to do this without my reading glasses but I can't. An example of one of Kovach these early poems he he as I said he was born in 1863 already at the age of fourteen he was producing quantities of verse in Greek Italian French and English. As far as we know he wrote his first attempt at an epic when he was just a teenager. So he said you know you have to imagine a sort of the young kid in the 18 80s and 90s and he's heavily absorbing all of the currents of European poetry at the founding. And he's a great admirer of the Parnassus IANS in France and mimics them a lot of Cavafy early poetry takes a form of sonnets which is surprising to those who only know his later poet

poetry. And this is a typical example of Cavafy in his 20s he has this poem in 1884 called the bass to his lady love. It's a son of a high official of the Ottoman court. And it's and rhyming couplets which I've endeavored to reproduce and it just gives you a sense of how phony and fufu he is at the very beginning but I think it's always you know when you think of what he ended up writing it's quite extraordinary So here is the base to his lady love written in 1884 when Cavafy was 21. I love you but if you're just a humble Fischer's lass are your eyes bright for that. The less is your hand not whiter still than milk is white. Is your body with amorous graces not replete lineages name. I dearly forget them all. A slave before you.

Princes do fall I love you. And when I see you on the Blue me leave the Dancing With the village lads by viciously I envy or my harsh fate keen that I your slave forever cannot be betwixt us. Fate has placed a bar of horrid relentless generations of dragons and lore. Through the 1890 it was publishing in literary journals in Athens and in Alexandria and had a bit of a reputation at that point and is to give him credit publishing better poems or more authentic poems than that one which is completely derivative in every conceivable way and famously cut off a sort of biography. Something happens as it does to many of us when he when he hits 40. Throughout the 1890s

he's writing again much better poems but nothing particularly striking he's already showing an interest in the ancient world he wrote an entire series of poems on Byzantium most of which he subsequently destroyed. And then at the turn of the century something happens and he himself. At the age of 40 between 100 to 1983 went through what he described later on as his great philosophical scrutiny where he looked at everything he had published and destroyed and repudiated almost everything up to that point and committed himself to writing a more authentic and truer kind of poetry and to give you a sense of what happens because it's always remarkable to see in a great artistic consciousness it's a sort of sea change taking place the change that makes the artist into whoever she or he is.

Luckily with Cavafy he often worked on poems for many years and published them in different stages. So you have the sort of early version of things and then a later version of things and an example of this which I think will sort of suggest. Whatever it was that happened that turned him from the mediocre poet into an unquestionably great poet is to be found in two versions of a home which ended up being called Voices. And in the first version he published in 1894 and it's called sweet voices and it's actually a poem I like a lot and it's about something that comes off the as a student of ancient history as a student of his own erotic past is very preoccupied with all the time which is how the past comes back to you. And in this case how the sort of ghosts of people whom one has loved returned and so hears sweet voices. What happened was he continued to work on it for 10

more years and published the final version in 1904 and I'm going to read that to you afterwards in between these two versions. It's very clear that something extraordinary happened so hear sweet voices 1894. Those voices are the sweeter which have fallen forever silent mournfully resoundingly only in the heart that sorrows in dreams the melancholic voices come timorous and humble and bring before our feeble memory the precious dead from the cold cold earth conceals for whom the mirthful DAYBREAK never shines nor spring time's blossom. Melodious voices. And in the so our life's first poetry is like music in the night. That's far away. Then he had his crisis.

What the crisis was is as with everything about Cavafy too open to interpretation we do know that there were sort of two kinds of crisis that he went through during the 1890s. The first is sort of obvious and emotional one which is virtually everyone that he was close to died between 1889 and 1903. His grandfather to me was very close his two closest friend both died as young men. Several of his brothers and his mother with whom he lived until her death. So there's a kind of emotional paring away that's going on during those 11 or 12 years. There's also a very interesting intellectual wrestling match that's going on in the 1890s at the end of which he comes out sort of in the old as who he is. He very we know that during the

1890s he's reading to historians is very interesting. One is given. And so from Gibbon he gets the great enlightenment. Ironic view of history. And we have his marginal notes which is very interesting because he's often arguing with given and given often says quite dismissive things about particularly about biz in Byzantium but also about Greek figures from history and Cavafy always pushes back. In fact that's a fabulous point which given his writing about Cleopatra and he talks about I think something like her Oriental wailings or something like that at the end of her life. And Cavafy wrote in the margin I should very much like to see what the source of this is you know. So he was having none of that but he respects give and then he's also reading the 19th century romantic Greek nationalist historian property Gough all of us who sees unlike Gibbon who sees sort of Greek identity as a continuous whole

from ancient times right up until Cavafy time and at the end of. And he somehow tries to work out a sort of compromise between these two essentially incompatible views of Greek history. So somehow both intellectually and emotionally he's sort of working through a lot of difficult. Problems and on the other side of this tunnel so to speak he writes he rewrites sweet voices as a poem just called Voices which is published. He as I said originally wrote 1894 published it in 1894 reworked it in one thousand or three and published it again one thousand 04 So here's just voices imagined voices and beloved to those who died or of those who are lost unto us like the dead. Sometimes in our dreams they speak to us. Sometimes in

its thought the mind will hear them. And with their sound for a moment their return sounds from the first poetry of our life. Like music in the night far off that fades away. And that's a great poem. And one of the things that's happened between sweet voices and voices is sort of emblem of ties by the dropping of the adjective in the title. And one of the things that you notice in voices is that all the adjectives have been taken out of the original version except there's only two adjectives or modifiers in the entirety of voices which are imagined and beloved and those are the only two adjectives that you need when talking about the voices that you hear at night of people whom you've loved and are dead. And so what happens in that 10 years is Cavafy has learned how to edit himself very

severely. And relying on the strength and the purity of his language ever more greatly. And by the time he comes out of this tunnel in the first decade of the 1900s he's already writing the poems that have a kind of distinctively Cavafy in tone everybody always talks. I think it was Auden who said you know it doesn't matter how bad the translation essentially you always know it's Cavafy talking and that's one doesn't want to be on the receiving end of that comment. But it's true. You always recognize cut off E's voice and one of the things you recognise in it is I think a product of his intellectual wrestling match of the 1890s which is at once a kind of irony about the past a almost jaded Alexandrian wisdom about the futility of human action in the great span of history after all if you're Alexandrian you've seen everything. Nothing can shock you and yet

also because of the sort of romantic. The energy that he was picking up on as a Greek reading popular calculus a sort of tenderness. And I think a kind of tender stoicism is one way to think about what Cavafy does. And you see it in a lot of a lot of the poems of the first decade of the 19th the 20th century one that I particularly love. It's called The God abandons ANTONY A poem written a nine hundred ten and published the next year I think it was Forster who said of Cavafy you know you always have to remember cut off he is a great poet but a very serious student of history. He was constantly reading ancient history both in the original languages and in all modern which is to say at that point one thousand 18th and 19th century commentators in French Italian Greek

and English. And this poem is a sort of perfect example of something Cavafy loves to do which he finds in an ancient source story that he likes about the ancient past and then he reconfigures it and re-imagines it. So we know from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony that the knight. Before he died Marc Anthony was said to have heard imagine hearing a procession of Diane niceness passing by Die niceness or Baucus was his patron God. I think that it was Forster who said it may have been Auden who said of Cavafy that he loved the losers of history. And there is no bigger loser in history than Mark Antony. I always think who rolled the biggest pair of dice and came out 0. And he writes a lot of poems about Marc Anthony which I think is interesting. So here is Cavafy re-imagining this this moment and

you know in it you see the both his wisdom about losing and the sort of recognition and also his sort of real sympathy for somebody who loses well so to speak. When suddenly at midnight there comes the sound of an invisible procession passing by with exquisite music playing with the voices raised your good fortune which now gives way. All your efforts. Ill starred out the plans you made for a life which turned out to wrong. Don't mourn uselessly like one who has long prepared like someone brave bid farewell to her to Alexandria who is leaving. Above all do not fool yourself. Don't say that it was a dream that your ears deceived you. Don't stoop to futile hopes like the

US like one who has long prepared like someone brave as befits a man who has been blessed with a city like this go without faltering toward the window and listen with a deep emotion but not with the entreaties and the whining of a coward to the sounds of final entertainment to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew and bid farewell to her. To Alexandria whom you are losing. As the 19 it's turned into the 900 teens Cavafy kept struggling with the problem that was both a poetic problem and a historian's problem to a certain extent which is how to represent the power of the past and the sort of the presence as it were of the past in the present and he hits upon a figure that

he will reuse quite often and to great effect in a number of poems all during the same decade in which he embody the past he literally has ghosts coming to life in a number of poems. The most striking of these poems as I think of them is one that he wrote towards the end of that decade in 1017 and published the following year I should make a quick. Parent that acle remark when when you say Cavafy publish something it's not at all straightforward it's not like Alfred A cannot publishing my book published as I said in the 1890s in different journals and then he stopped and his sole mode of publication after that was just to go with his manuscripts to a printer have the printer print up broad sheets and then he would circulate the poems to people he thought would like them. If only we could all have such control

over our readership. And occasionally he would pin number of these sheets together and that would be a collection. So one has to keep that in mind but when I say he published he circulated essentially and this poem is called since 9 which is my single favorite poem by Cavafy published as it were in 1918. And it's the most daring of these apparition poems because the apparition that comes to him as he sits drinking alone late at night in his darkened house is his own goes to his own the ghost of his youthful self come to haunt him in his old or even maybe just his middle. So this is since since 9. Half past twelve. The time is quickly passed since 9 o'clock when I first turned up the lamp and sat down here.

I've been sitting without reading without speaking. With whom should I speak so utterly alone within this house. The apparition of my useful body. Since nine o'clock when I first turned up the lamp has come and found me and reminded me of a shudder perfume and of pleasure spent with wanton pleasure and it also brought before my eyes streets made unrecognizable by time bustling city centers that are no more and theatres and cafes that exist here long ago. The apparition of my youthful body came and also brought me cause for pain deaths in the family separations the feelings of my loved ones the feelings of those long dead

which I so little value. Half past twelve. How the time is past. Half past twelve. How the years have passed. One of the extraordinary things about that poem is as in much of Qaddafi's poetry there's a great to deal of repetition throughout the poem certain lines and words are repeated half past twelve. The time has passed. The apparition of my youthful body these things keep recurring. The only things in the poem that don't recur is the central stanza where he lists the things that have disappeared. Those you only get to encounter once and that wonderful notion Cavafy as he mature grew I think increasingly confident in his conflation of his true primary interest the one so to speak

historical. What is the past what is the meaning of the past in our lives in history with a capital H but also in our personal histories and the erotic current of his life and he combines them in this fantastic poem 1014 published in one thousand eighteen called scissoring in which the historical classical historical and the erotic become confusingly conflated says Arion was the teenage son of. I always want to say Elizabeth Taylor and Rex Harrison but. Cleopatra and Julius Caesar and the love child. And when Mark Antony and Cleopatra lost two Octavian who later became Augustus Caesar at the battle of Actium Augustus eventually had this boy killed as a potential

rival for power. And this young character about whom we know very little is the character whom Cavafy imagines coming to him one night. So here is a poem called says Erin the only thing you need to know the only sort of scholarly detail you need to know is in the last line of the poem. He has this line where he makes reference to an incident which is also reported to us that when Octavian gave the order to kill says Arion. He said After all we cannot have a poly too many Caesars or a surfeit of Caesar. It's in Greek because of course like most educated people he spoke in Greek. And what is a sort of elaborate pun that's going on already in Octavia's comment is that he was making a very subtle and quite sophisticated literary

allusion because in the Iliad. There's a moment when there's a mutiny in the Greek camp which Odysseus tries to put down. And he says to these seditious soldiers after all we cannot have a public order I need too many captains and so often knows this and he knows that Augustus and he delights in the fact that as Augustus gives this quite cold hearted and inhuman order to kill the 16 or 17 year old boy he's making a very fancy literary historical allusion and I think a Buffy the Alexandrian loves that idea. So that's what the last line that's the line to which the last line of Qaddafi's poem makes reference so here is Cavafy again home late at night starting out boring but getting very interesting. In part to ascertain a certain date and in part to while away

the time. Last night I took down a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions to read. The unstinting laudation and flatteries are the same for all. All of them are brilliant glorious benefits and every undertaking utterly Wow. As for the women of the line they too all of the barony KS and Cleopatra are wonderful too. When I had successfully ascertained the date I would have finished with the book if a tiny insignificant reference to Kings hadn't attracted my attention. Suddenly there you came with your indefinite charm. In history there are only a few lines that can be found concerning you and so I could fashion you more freely in my mind. I fashioned you this

way beautiful and feeling my artistry gives to your face a beauty that has a dreamy winsomeness. And so fully did I imagine you that yesterday late at night when the lamp went out I deliberately let it go out. I dared to think you came into my room. It seemed to me you stood before me as you must have been in Alexandria after it had been conquered. Pale and weary need perfect in your sorrow still hoping they'd have mercy on you. Those vile man who had whispered surfeit of Caesar was. One of the side effects of Qaddafi's interest in history and also his Greek it is that which you may not have won't have noticed so far but if he had an extraordinary sense of humor and he likes to

see. While he does have sympathy for the sort of losers of history he can be quite tart at the expense of certain characters whom evidently doesn't like so much and here's a funny poem about Nero called Nero's deadline and this is also based on a true story in Sewa Tonio So I think it is. We have a story that Nero when he was on his concert tour of Greece visited the Delphic Oracle and had an Oracle saying that he had to be where the age of 73. He was only 30 at the time so he figured he was OK and that's exactly the kind of figuring that both Greek tragedy and Cavafy love to go after because you always know it's never good. The only historical fact you need to know to get the punchline of this poem is about a character called Gul who was one of the seditious generals who ultimately were part of the coup d'etat that toppled De Niro and led to the end of his life.

So here is a poem called Nero's deadline. Nero wasn't worried when he heard the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle let him be where the age of 73. He still had time to enjoy himself. He is 30 years old. It's quite sufficient this deadline that the God is giving him for him to think about dangers yet to come. Now to Rome he'll be returning a little wearied but exquisitely wearied from this trip which had been endless days of diversion in the theater. In the gardens the gymnasia evenings of the cities of Greece the pleasure of naked bodies above all so Nero. And then Spain Galba was secretly assembling his army and preparing it the old man 73 years old.

I love that. I'm just going to read a couple more to move us in the direction which I wanted us to be moving in which is how Cavafy becomes Cavafy this problem which he gets more and more concerned with. The coffee is weirdly off in the middle of nowhere doing its own thing. Not having much contact with what's going on in European literature and yet like everyone else in European literature at the beginning its 20th century is worried about the same things time. Memory desire and there's a wonderful short poem which is going to read you one which you see him working out a problem about how much memory can do and how much art can do. And it has a sort of unexpected ending because you think as a poet he's going to be all for art. But it's not doesn't work like that in this poem. So here's a poem called aboard the ship written in 1900 and published the same year.

It certainly resembles him this small pencil likeness of him quickly done on the deck of the ship and then chanting afternoon the Ionian Sea all around us. It resembles him still. I remember him as handsome or to the point of illness. That's how sensitive he was and it illumined his expression. Handsome or he seems to me now that my soul recalls him out of time out of time. All these things they're very old. The sketch in the ship and the afternoon. In his final decade he you can see Cavafy sort of moving with great aplomb toward the edge of things and in his final years in the late 20s and early 30s before he

became ill in the summer of 32 there's a number of poems in which there is a figure who is clearly the poet. Whether him or an artistic character of some kind who is always sitting in the back off to the side at the edge watching some beautiful boy or something interesting happening and it's quite extraordinary how able he is at the end of his life to be that person I'm just going to read two final poems one. Has a. Works this sort of watching and being watched. Problem in a very interesting way because he makes the hero of the poem a mirror. At which point one always wants to say Paging Dr. Freud but this is a great poem of 1930. So it's a very late poem and he's figured it all out by now and he's happy to be the watcher.

So this is called The Mirror in the entrance 1913 in the entrance hallway of that sumptuous home. There was an enormous mirror a very old acquired at least 80 years ago a strikingly beautiful boy a tailor's assistant. On Sunday afternoons an amateur athlete was standing with a package. He handed it to one of the household who then went back inside to fetch a receipt. The tailor's assistant remained alone and waited. He drew near the mirror and stood gazing at himself and straightening his tie. Five minutes later they brought him the receipt. He took it and left. But the ancient mirror which had seen and seen again throughout its lifetime of so many years thousands of objects and faces but the ancient mirror now became elated

inflated with pride because it had received upon itself a perfect beauty for a few minutes and the final poem I'm going to read you is from 1031 published in 1931 he started working on it in one thousand twenty one and it's called Days of 9000 No wait and there's a whole series of poems called with that have this title days of X X X which Jimmy Merrill then borrowed in his own work and it becomes interesting because as somebody who's constantly working out problems about time and how to represent time you know he once again does this extraordinarily bold thing which is just to apostrophized time and talk you know talk to days. So here is days of 19 08 which features a kind of character that Cavafy with his love of losers and his interested in the loose margins of society keeps recurring in his poems which is

you know a cute guy who's probably going to end up in jail or worse. Sort of caught at the at the very acme of his beauty and right before he ends up sliding down the slide. You know there is that always expression I was always terrified with as it terrified by subpoena a teenager when you say someone fell between the cracks. You know I was terrified when I was a classics major in college that that would happen to me and these guys do fall between the cracks there's no question but he gets them at the right moment and they whatever happens to them. They are still with us in these poems which is the ultimate triumph of Cavafy and art which is to sit at the edge watching someone and moralising them in the home. So here is days of 19 away. That year he found himself without a job and so he made a living from cards from back him and what he borrowed. A job at three pounds a

month at a little station had been offered to him but he turned it down without the slightest hesitation. It wouldn't do. It was in a way for him a young man with some education 25 years of age. Two or three shillings a day was what he'd get sometimes not. What could the boy possibly earn from cards and back and the coffeehouses of his class the common ones. However cleverly he played however stupid the partners he chose and loans and there were the loans. It was rare that he'd manage a crown more often that was half. Sometimes he'd settle for shillings sometimes for a week occasionally more. When he was spared the horror of staying up till dawn. He'd cool off at the back of this with a swim that morning. His clothes were in a dreadful state. There was one suit that he would always

wear a suit very faded cinnamon hue. The days of the summer of 1908 your vision quite exquisitely was spared the very faded cinnamon colored suit your vision preserved him as he was when he undressed when he flung off the unworthy clothes and the mended underwear and he'd be left completely nude flawlessly beautiful a thing of wonder. His hair springing back his limbs a little colored by the sun and from his nakedness in the mornings at the back and at the seashore. Thank you very much thank you thank you. Well you know it's funny you know like most good things in life this happened accidentally. You know it's not like I set out in life to be trans like a vacuum what happened. I mean there are a fine translations of Cavafy.

One thing I came to meet because of a terrible summer I had in Greece once doing this is the summer when I realized I had no interest at all in archaeology which I thought I had until I had to get up at four in the morning and go climb to the tops of mountains looking at Mycenae and beehive tunes all eight thousand four hundred twelve of which look identical to each other and and I was having a nervous breakdown. Literally I was doing the American school program in Athens with all kinds of nice people and you know like most people get into the classics or ancient history or whatever you start out as a kid thinking you're going to discover some great tunes you know and you think archaeology is the way to go. And so there I was you know wretched schlepping all back and forth across Greece and giant tour buses. Miserable and I essentially had a kind of nervous breakdown in the our

garage one afternoon I'll never forget this. We were being shown around this thing called the stove to list the second which is a row of columns essentially. And although very important and as a cup of coffee and we have to love out a list the second and and being shown this by an eminent archaeologist so this is the end of the summer you know we've been doing this for 12 weeks and you know it was one hundred eighteen degrees. Literally you know one hundred and six. And this next fall the smug The Athenian smog was literally at a nose level that day so you were inhaling sulfur dioxide. You know and where and this guy famous archaeologist came to do the story about Alyssa second you know and I'm already like my eyes are rolling in different directions. And he said oh here we are at the store about a second. And as you can see it consists of a colonnade of 16 or whatever you know double colonnade of Ionic columns one two three four five.

And I burst into tears and wandered like a madman into the wind. And I said I want to go home I can't take it. So that summer to make a long story short one of these bus trips I thought I'm a literature person. I'm not of pots and pans person. And and we stopped at a grocery store in a place called Tripoli and I wandered in in my crazed way and I was just beginning to learn modern Greek as a classicist but I was just starting to learn modern Greek and I said in my you know and I only knew the words for like you know buckle and toilet paper you know which of the two most crucial things I could ask for and and I wandered in and I said Do you have any books you know any kind of book. And I mean this is literally a place that was like a Shell station in the middle of the Peloponnese and it was like Ahrens fun you know and popcorn and he said yes

one minute and I swear to god this is true. And the only book that they had was this beaten up old copy of the nine thousand nine hundred sixty three Cavafy. And I started memorizing a poem a day just to keep from going mad and I didn't even understand. But as a result of that I am going to answer a question. But this is how I talk bring composition. Because I had it by heart before I understood it. What I was very aware of in this crazy way was this sort of rhythm of coffee and the sort of our role our role quality that there is a you know Cavafy was fluent in English lived in England as a teenager and was said to have spoken Greek with an English accent and you always talk about these English rhythms he has a sort of a blank verse rhythm quite often. And I was very aware of this sort of I am Bic pentameter quite often beat and all these

things which I probably wouldn't have been aware of if I had understood the Greek better at that point and if I had been in my right mind. And so when I started reading in English I mean I'd read stuff over the years because I was a classicist because I was gay because he seemed like the right guy for me. But what struck me was that I wasn't getting as much of that as I would have liked and it's you know it's funny because. I like the Keeley translation which is a great translation. I mean a great work of translation because it feels like something you know it's distinctively something you know. Every translation emphasizes something different. Right and the Keeley you get the astringent quality of Cavafy the terseness the maternity too because one thing that's so funny about Vavi is how quickly he sounds modern. You know I read you some early ones but you know very fast he sounds very modern. And so I would say that the thing that got me into this business was the desire to create a translation that sounded you know that had a certain

kind of rhythms which I thought you know in a way because of Caylee. I was liberated to look at other considerations you know. And the process you know what can I say. I would say that I worked on this for 12 years you know and and I did it often in the 12 years because I think quite you know where to begin to go I have to say I mean what I know. I used to write a lot about translation. And then I thought oh this has to be so much fun every night I'll have a cigarette and a glass of wine it's like doing The New York Times crossword puzzle and you know you're like oh yes that's the right word you know. And then I think you know after a couple of years of that I realized I had undertaken something very serious and I would say there were two major moments. One. And this is something that you know you're in a weird way I would say you only ever know an author by translating. You know that's that's like being married to somebody you know it's the greatest kind of literary

intimacy that you can have because in a weird way you have to imagine what they're thinking which of course we never know. But you have to keep trying so early on I realized that I was in the presence of someone much greater even than I imagined. And that took a lot of getting used to. And also at a certain point I also thought there needed to be notes because Cavafy is writing about as I said episodes of ancient history which are unfamiliar even to classicists quite often. And as the Nero poem. Or this is airy and indicate you know the punch lines you know cut off his humor his particular philosophical stance about the past it's only apprehensible if you understand everything that he understood when he wrote the poem. If you see what I mean so you need to know I think. And that's my philological training and I remember when I was reading dolphin and different peoples you know translations and it would say oh you know

so it would mention some weird thing from history Mithridates king of Pontus and some you know campaign against the Romans and 88 or whatever it was and you know and so you scurried at the back thinking what happened in the battle you know and it would say this poem was published in 1921 and I would say you know what I would say. What happened to Mr. Davies you know. So at a certain point I realized I had to do real notes that will be helpful to people because I think as I keep saying when I'm presenting him you know there is these sort of levels of irony tartness that you don't get if you don't know what happened in the battle you know and people are still figuring out. You know levels of irony that are dependent on how he frames a poem within historical situation is a wonderful poem of Cavafy in which someone says Hellenistic figure says or a post Alexandrian figure says oh you know we the Greeks were so

wonderful and great and and in the name of the poem is a date. And if you know your dates you know that a few years later the Romans totally trashed those Greeks. Right and one of the decisive battles that that established Roman supremacy over Greek supremacy in the Mediterranean world. So you know if you read the poem you don't know your history say oh how great are the Greeks. Right but what Cavafy knows is how how foolish to boast of one's greatness when just around the corner is your demise. You see stuff like that. I think it's very important what the interesting story is so he was well known you know in literary circles by the end of his life although never really part of the scene which I suspect he liked. You know the story of his English. Fame is an interesting one because what happened was he

met E.M. Forster during World War One. Forster was with the Red Cross in Alexandria and Forster inevitably they came together and Forster had some poems translated and knew that he was in the presence of something special and he sent them to Leonard and Virginia Woolf and they were published in these early translations and so you know it was very clear to a certain kind of person right away that something very special was happening. You know 30 years later by the time the Alexandria Quartet was published you know he's already a kind of figure he's the old poet of the city who keeps you know if you've read the whole he's always coming up but you know in fact the main the Raider meets Justyna reading Cavafy the lexer that the narrator is from back of the series already in 30 years a kind of figure of Alexandrian Greek culture. But you know he wasn't. It took a while and I think that's

very cut off. You know it took a while for people to understand you know what he what he was up to because in a ministry he always referred to himself as a poet of the future which is interesting and I don't think that he was referring to the fact that he was gay and he was writing openly about gay things I mean somewhat. But I think his attitude about history he understood to be quite modern in many ways. What's shocking. I mean if you're a classicist you know what's so shocking about Cavafy is how I may have to remember he's born as a Victorian person. How totally unsentimental he is about the ancients. He has none of that Victorian you know white marble and ethical lessons. Business is about the about the ancient Greeks and he gets them exactly in a way that looks very much forward to our sort of Britishness understanding of who the ancients were and

that is what I think he was talking about when he said he was a poet of the future and it took everybody 50 years or 40 years to get up with him. Well he's language is it. Yeah it's a great question and it's a complicated question because you know in Greek particularly when in the 19th century becoming the 20th century. Which Greek you're right and it's a very vexed and even political question because there was a sort of literary Greek that was available in the 19th century in which most people were writing certainly when Cavafy was a young man and it was also which is this weird phony Greek that had been invented in the 19th century by non-Greek philologists who thought that modern Greeks should be speaking something more like ancient Greek. And this became the official language of the State and University teaching and public life and all of that. And then there was the Greek that people actually spoke which was the demonic language and at the turn of the century Cavafy was one of a

number of poets who started turning towards the demotic every day. Great. But typically he fools around with this so most of the first few you know first bunch of poems are in custody in this sort of fancy Mancy language and then he adopts the demonic fairly quickly. But. Every now and then in many of the poems you'll be reading along and then there will be some totally wonky archaic or custom or even classical word or phrase thrown in. You know it's like one of these apparitions in the linguistic level you know where suddenly you're reading along and then there's an ancient Greek word or a cough that have a word and you're it's very it's as if one were speaking as we're speaking now and then for a few sentences I would revert to a perfect King James E. and language you know. And so the

texture is the hardest thing to do in Cavafy you know. And so the answer is he doesn't choose he. He uses archaisms too. Quite often a very special point. This for example and sometimes in the same poem he will use both a cough or an archaic word and the demotic version of the same word to evoke a point is a fabulous poem in which a Hellenistic monarch down on his luck goes to Rome. And you know many of these poems are about this sort of tension between the RA and Greek culture are falling to Rome to beg for help from the Romans. In one of these Internet sign conflicts with some other Hellenistic monarchs and in the final stanza

says you know it starts out by saying But you know he who had come as a beggar blah blah blah blah blah. And it describes what he did in Rome. And the last line of the poem is because he knew the right way to bag. And the first time the word beg appears in the poem it's in a sort of very high. It's not quite but it's a very high fancy. Way to say that. And the last time which is the last word of the poem that he says beg your demotic every day speak. So the demotion and status of this figure as a powerful Hellenistic monarch coming to beg for help is marked linguistically by the shift from this very high register of language to this very ordinary register of language and that's very hard to translate. And that is the famous problem of translation. What I tried to do and it's not quite perfect but I hope

suggestive is when there are cases like that in a poem which are very clear. I used a very high Latinate multi-syllabic version of a word like I think in that poem I said but he who had come mendicant to Rome or something like that and then used an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. You know so one senses that there's something going on but it is it is the questioning of Buffy in translation there's no question about it. You know I think you know we can. We need to you know. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.