Alexandria's unpublished poet waited for barbarians
Constantine P. Cavafy, Konstantinos Kavafis of Alexandria (1863–1933), wrote 154 canonical poems yet refused book publication, sharing broadsheets and newspapers instead. Forster called him a Greek gentleman at a slight angle to the universe; history and homoerotic longing share his lines.
Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria, then part of Ottoman Egypt, to Phanariot Greeks from Constantinople who had settled there in 1855; he had six older brothers. His father Petros, a prosperous merchant holding both Greek and British citizenship, died suddenly in 1870, and the family spent years shuttling between Liverpool and London until losses in the Long Depression sent them home in 1877. In 1882 a revolt against Anglo-French control brought a bombardment of the city, their flat at Ramleh burned, and they took refuge in Constantinople with his maternal grandfather. There, aged nineteen, he began researching his ancestry and writing verse in earnest.
Returning in 1885, he never again lived anywhere but Alexandria. He swapped his British citizenship for Greek, reported for the journal Telegraphos and later worked at the stock exchange. Because he was a foreign national, his clerkship at the British-run Ministry of Public Works stayed temporary, renewed every year for three decades. He resigned in 1922, calling it a liberation, and devoted himself to finishing his poems. Greece gave him the silver medal of the Order of Phoenix in 1926, and laryngeal cancer killed him on 29 April 1933, the day he turned seventy.
Beyond the canon, his archive held 75 hidden poems unpublished until 1968, along with 37 he printed and then disowned and 30 left unfinished. He sorted his work into historical, philosophical and sensual poems, and his mature lines are unrhymed iambics of 10 to 17 syllables, where an occasional rhyme usually signals irony. His mix of Katharevousa and Demotic Greek drew attacks from Kostis Palamas and his followers, and Greek readers largely ignored him until Heracles Apostolidis issued an anthology in 1935.
Waiting for the Barbarians, written in 1904, pictures a decaying city whose expected invaders never arrive, and it later fed novels by Dino Buzzati, Julien Gracq and J. M. Coetzee. Ithaca, from 1911, turns Odysseus's voyage home into an argument that the journey outweighs the arrival. Forster, Arnold Toynbee and T. S. Eliot championed him in English before the Second World War, and in 1966 David Hockney made prints for a selection of his poems.
Source: Constantine P. Cavafy
