Bard from Byzantium

By T.E. Kalem

C.P. CAVAFY, COLLECTED POEMS

Translated by EDMUND KEELEY and PHILIP SHERRARD

261 pages. Princeton University Press.

Paperbound. $3.45.

CAVAFY

by ROBERT LIDDELL

222 pages. Duckworth. $16.

C.P. Cavafy loved young men and old cities. He was a Greek homosexual poet from Alexandria with a passport for Olympus. His years were 1863-1933, but he has shown a prodigious gift for outgrowing his death.

Largely unknown, he has enjoyed the esteem of his peers. Lawrence Durrell praised him as a major force; Auden ascribed Cavafy's power to surmount translation to "a tone of voice," the revelation of "a person with a unique perspective on the world." That perspective is keenly evoked in a new translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. And as a bonus, the first English biography of Cavafy has just been published. In it Robert Liddell scrupulously assembles and sifts the frugal details of the poet's life.

In order to acquire an ear for a tone of voice, the best thing is to hear it. Here is a poem called Tomb of lasis, written in 1899:

I, lasis, lie here--famous for my good looks in this great city.

The wise admired me, so did common, superficial people.

I took equal pleasure in both.

But from being considered so often a Narcissus and Hermes, excess wore me out, killed me.

Traveler, if you 're an Alexandrian, you won't blame me.

You know the pace of our life--its fever, its absolute devotion to pleasure.

Cavafy is a laureate of loss: loss of youth, loss of love, loss of existence. Some poets seem to be peering at the dawn of the world; Cavafy stares at its doom, a weary Olympian contemplating the "toys of fate." With age, the poet might have become a complete Cassandra of declivity. But he never relinquished his belief in the power of the artist to transform the sordid into the contemplative serenity of beauty.

Synoptic Vision. Cavafy possessed that power. With a pagan selection of detail--the gaze of an eye, the tilt of a head --he evokes the ardor of youthful flesh as tunelessly as does a frieze on a Grecian urn. Indeed, Cavafy introduces the shapers of the ancient world--the Ptolemies, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony--as if they were embarking on their adventures this very day. Simultaneously, he moves contemporary people backward into the total stillness of history so that they seem to have been formed in the ruins of Pompeii. Except for Yeats, no modern poet has surpassed Cavafy in this synoptic vision that knits the destinies of men.

No one quite knows how Cavafy was drawn to poetry. Certainly there was no artistic strain evident in his family. He was born and christened Constantine Photiadis Cavafy (originally Kavafis), the last of seven brothers. His mother, Haricleia, was so bent on having a girl that she referred to him as "Helen" in the womb and dressed him in frocks during his early years.

Haricleia had the manners of a grande dame and the temperament of a neurasthenic. In later years she expected Constantine to spend the hours of 7:30 to 10 p.m. as her dinner companion and to act as her gentleman-escort at social functions. Constantine seems not to have bridled. His father, Peter John, headed an import-export firm dealing in textiles from Manchester and Liverpool, cotton and wheat from Egypt. Peter John was a prodigal spender, and at his death the family finances were in precarious shape. Constantino's elder brothers bankrupted the firm .

After that, the Cavafys were to remain shabbily genteel, though they retained the lofty airs and graces of a family that had once known wealth. At age 29, Cavafy was appointed a special clerk in the irrigation service of Alexandria's Ministry of Public Works. Despite small, unperiodic raises, he remained a middle-level functionary for most of his days.

His nights were reserved for sordid encounters. Cavafy secretly kept a room in a brothel on Alexandria's Rue Mosquee Attarine and took willing boys there. But he expressed no more than the most fleeting qualms about his homosexuality. He seems to have been much more disturbed by his autoerotic propensities. As Biographer Liddell explains, "In Egypt the name for this practice '39' is popularly explained by the myth that [masturbation] is 39 times more exhausting than any other sexual act."

In 1932 Cavafy underwent a tracheotomy for throat cancer. After prolonged agony, he died on April 29, 1933, his 70th birthday. His last conscious act was to draw a circle on a blank sheet of paper and then place a period in the middle of it. The cycle of his life had ended; the cycle of his art had scarcely begun.

T.E. Kalem

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