Dan Chiasson on C.P. Cavafy, Newly Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Other critics have praised colossus Daniel Mendelsohn's forthcoming two volumes of Cavafy's collected and unfinished poems as the definitive translations, which we can celebrate again next month when they go on sale; today is for Dan Chiasson's smashing New Yorker essay about the evolution of the poet. Of course Chiasson also praises Mendelsohn, saying "the results...are extraordinary," but his vision is trained on Cavafy the man more than the technicalities of the translator's task. If you've arrived late, C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was "the greatest Greek poet since antiquity." Chiasson makes the point over and over that Cavafy only achieved his greatness through his gay life. The five-page essay is crucial reading for everyone, but here are a few key passages, which taken separately do an injustice to the richness of Chiasson's narrative and the power of his argument:

...Cavafy would compile one of the great bodies of poetry in any literature, and the "sensual" poems, as he called them, are at its heart.

+ + +

By day, he performed his ordinary Alexandrian act: leaving the office, hitting the stock exchange, where he was licensed to trade; visiting a billiards club. At night he paid beautiful young men -- dishwashers and tailors' assistants and grocery boys -- for sex. Cavafy's work draws from two intensely private sources: the old histories of the Hellenic world which he read in the evenings, and the nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy, that ensued.

+ + +

Because everybody dwells in history together, all at once, Cavafy refused to divvy up the available moods into one pile appropriate for obscure Byzantines and another for his Alexandrian rent boys. This makes him a master of mismatched affect...

+ + +

These were the years when Cavafy maintained a double life, letting his mother wear herself out over dinner, then sneaking off, aided by her servant, into the seedy districts of Alexandria to cruise for young men. In short, if a great poet hadn't been sneaking around on his mother, an entire world of cabarets and coffee shops, as vivid in its way as Dickens's London, might have passed without notice.

+ + +

Cavafy would write a number of erotic poems in historical dress -- "Caesarion" is one -- but until 1910 he hadn't attempted what Pound called "direct treatment of the thing." "The thing," in Cavafy's case, was homosexual desire, a difficult subject to treat directly at the time. Oscar Wilde had, within memory, spent two years in prison for "gross indecency." Cavafy had a model for sexual frankness in the Greek Anthology, that remarkable compilation of ancient insults, boasts, epigrams, and erotica, much of it recovered from mummy wrappings and pottery shards. But many of those writers were anonymous and all of them had the advantage over Cavafy -- a towering advantage if one wants to talk openly about gay sex -- of having been dead several thousand years.

+ + +

There is a tradition of assuming that once Cavafy broke through to his mature, "sensual" poems his own sexual desires were locked safely in the past. His "unfinished" poems betray little about Cavafy's life in the 1920s. But all that missing time had to be spent somewhere, and if Cavafy had lived to write into the 1940s my guess is that we would have a record of robust sexual life two decades before.

Additional kudos to Chiasson for including James Merrill's comment, "The difficulty of being Cavafy's kind of homosexual in Alexandria in those years must have been staggering. How to choose among a thousand daily opportunities."

This is not the first time the heterosexual Chiasson has proved himself so astute on sex. Last year, reviewing the Best American Erotic Poems from 1800 to the Present, he wrote, "Lusty poems by straight men are, in our era, usually prone to failure..." Arguing that anthologies are like contests, he declared a gay victory: "dear old Auden wins this one by a knockout blow."

Mendelsohn's translations will be published on April 7. Buy both of them. Memorize every word.

Above: Detail of "The Beginning" a drawing from David Hockney's series based on Cavafy, 1966.

Comments

[Philip Clark]

Just finished reading this essay on the train this morning, and it is superb! I almost missed my stop. It made me want to get off the train and call in sick so that I could stay home and just read all my Cavafy volumes. (I restrained myself). However, I can't wait to get these two volumes -- now that's what I call an economic stimulus package.

[Christopher]

I am in love with your blog! Almost as much as I'm in love with Cafavy! ;-)

[Patrick]

Thanks for your commentary on Mendelsohn's new rendition of Cavafy's poems.I greatly admire Mendelsohn both as a gay man and as a superb classicist.
I also like the drawing in your blog.Please could you tell me the name of the artist who drew it?I can't read the signature.

[Patrick]

For those interested in Cavafy's poems in Mendelsohn's new translation and who want to know more about his poetics,I send them to the official Cavafy's website where they'll be able to read Daniel's 2002 article on "Cavafy and the erotics of the Lost",which is a dazzling commentary both on Cavafy's poetics and Mendelsohn's own works,since he published this article BEFORE the release of his famous THE LOST.
Here's the website
www.cavafy.com/companion/essays/content
To paraphrase one his latest article on this poet,it's as good as criticism gets.