Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography
Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $56 hc  or $38 pb in August, 531 pages)

Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have written a remarkable biography of a poet, Constantine Cavafy, who lived, in their own admission, an unremarkable life, by writing it thematically rather than linearly. Cavafy was born into a Greek family in Alexandria, Egypt, the son of an importer, who moved, after the death of his father when he was seven years old, to England, Turkey, and Greece, before returning to Alexandria as an adult. He was a cosmopolitan and homosexual who worked in the Office of the Irrigation Service for 30 years to earn a salary, an uneventful job that left him plenty of time to write poetry. He worked constantly and fastidiously on his poetry, a process described in great detail by his biographers. Cavafy never published a book of his poetry in his own lifetime (he died in 1933 at the age of 70) instead circulating his poetry among friends through pamphlets and notebooks.

Cavafy wrote his poetry in Greek and his writing was clear and descriptive, without flowery adornment, which ensured that little, if anything, was lost in translation. The poems, the biographers note, “fall into three broad categories: philosophical, historical, and hedonistic.” His historical poems are the most impressive and may stand the test of time, avoiding the great sweep of history to focus on discrete episodes. Although Cavafy is not one of the better-known poets today, it is not hard to imagine that “Ithica,” “Caesarion,” “Waiting for the Barbarians,” and “The God Abandons Antony,” will be read 100 years from now. About one-third of Cavafy’s poems are “hedonistic” poems, which are actually poems about the author’s homosexual life, a series of one-night stands, often purchased, at a time when homosexual behaviour ran afoul both the Muslim sensibilities of the locals and Victorian-influenced British authorities. The authors focus just enough on Cavafy’s sordid personal life – what Cavafy himself called “the same fatal pleasure” — to show its influence on his poetry without belabouring the point. In “Caesarion,” about the child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Cavafy remarks upon the child’s “indefinable charm.” In Judsdanis and Jeffreys’s telling, Cavafy had a definable charm, dazzling guests “with his brilliance and command of ancient history” – a feat commanded not only in his life, but on the page.

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