Constantine Cavafy, the greatest Greek poet since antiquity, spent thirty-three years in Alexandria, Egypt, from 1889 to 1922, as a part-time clerk. By day, he performed his ordinary Alexandrian act. 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 that ensued. His readers were limited to the select group who received his poems, privately printed on broadsheets or bound in folders.
Daniel Mendelsohn has translated all of Cavafy’s poems, including the thirty “unfinished” poems never before rendered in English. The results—now published in two volumes, “C. P. Cavafy: The Collected Poems” (Knopf; $35) and “C. P. Cavafy: Unfinished Poems” (Knopf; $30) —are extraordinary, and a whole galaxy orbits them.
Cavafy thought of himself as a “poet-historian,” which meant that he viewed all human conduct, his own included, in the light of recorded time. He was fifty-three when he met E. M. Forster, who became a good friend, but in certain ways his life had just begun.
Cavafy was born in 1863 into a merchant family that was prominent in Alexandria’s Greek colony. As an adult, he took care of his mother, while sneaking out at night to cruise for young men. Cavafy wrote a number of erotic poems in historical dress, but until 1918 he hadn’t attempted direct treatment of homosexual desire. In the next fifteen years, until his death, in 1933, Cavafy would complete one of the great bodies of poetry in any literature, and the “sensual” poems, as he called them, were at its heart.
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The poems of C. P. Cavafy.
by Dan Chiasson
