George Seferis Funeral, Athens
The Greece of my memory was two countries.
One Greece was a beautiful place full of fascinating remnants of a glorious past and home to a warmly hospitable people. This is the Greece of Part One of this diary, which was published yesterday morning at Morning Open Thread. http://www.dailykos.com/...
The other Greece, under control of the Military Junta, was full of soldiers, military police and informants. A country where student protesters were brutally killed; where the funeral of the fine poet George Seferis became a defiant march in protest through the streets of Athens; and where Mikis Theodorakis, beloved composer of the scores for Zorba the Greek and Z, could be imprisoned and then exiled.
Through these memories of mine are woven forever the poems of C.P. Cavafy (April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933), who never lived in Greece, whose work had been ridiculed and rejected early in the last century by the Athenian literati, then almost forgotten by Greece until publication of an anthology of his poems in 1935, two years after his death.
(Diary continues below the orange dingbat.)
Kalliope
Means "beautiful voice" from Greek καλλος (kallos) "beauty" and οψ (ops) "voice". In Greek mythology she was a goddess of epic poetry and eloquence, one of the nine Muses.
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“Things impolitic and dangerous” comes from Cavafy's poem Julian in Nicomedia, which refers to the Emperor Julian, raised in Christianity, but also known as Julian the Apostate, because as Emperor he rejected Christianity, and tried but failed to restore paganism to the Eastern Roman Empire. Not to be confused with the Orthodox Church Holy Martyr Julian of Nicomedia, who refused to renounce Christianity, and was hacked into pieces which were burned. Cavafy’s work is full of these ironic connections.
Whenever I asked a Greek why something was done in a certain (senseless to me) way, I'd be told with a shrug that it was “to confuse the Turks.” From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the revolution in 1821, most of Greece was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. In 1969, it was still as if the Turks had just left.
Greek memories are long. Only once during my Greek sojourn was I treated with coldly correct politeness – by the manager of a pension on the island of Rhodes as I was registering. The coldness vanished when I presented my American passport. By the 1960s, Rhodes had become a favorite vacation spot for German tourists. My coloring and wire-rim glasses misled him.
The other Greece of the military junta and the people’s growing resistance to its ruthless control brushed past my life when a bomb exploded under a seat in the Athens airport shuttle waiting room the day after I was there. I read that several people were injured, but no one was killed.
Cavafy wrote this poem in 1904, but it still sizzles and stings, eerily topical, over a hundred years later:
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Cavafy prophetically described himself as “an ultra modern poet, a poet of future generations.” He is now widely regarded as the most distinguished Greek poet of the twentieth century. His poems are the most translated of the Modern Greek poets, so his fame has also spread internationally.
Much of Cavafy’s poetry was inspired by the city of his birth, Alexandria. He felt exiled in the years when he lived abroad.
He first left at age nine after his father died, and his mother moved their large brood to Liverpool so his elder brothers could run the family import business, a time when Cavafy learned English and discovered Shakespeare, Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde. These years influenced his choice of the Anglicized “Cavafy” as his pen name. When he was sixteen, the business failed, and the family returned, in debt-ridden gentility, to the Greek community in Alexandria.
He was exiled again when he was nineteen, because his mother wisely removed the family to the home of her parents in Constantinople during the increasing tension between Egypt and Great Britain over Egyptian nationalism. The British bombarded Alexandria in June of 1882. Their home in Alexandria was destroyed during the bombardment, and most of Cavafy’s early writing was lost.
Cavafy was homosexual. He had affairs but no love that lasted. Much of his erotic poetry was never published in his lifetime. Poet and Bureaucrat, Hellenic yet Cosmopolitan, he was as contradictory as the country of his family’s origins.
E.M. Forster, marooned in Alexandria during WWI, was so impressed with Cavafy that he had Cavafy’s poem The God Abandons Anthony translated into English, and printed in his Alexandria: A History and Guide (1922) which made Cavafy known to such English writers as T. S. Eliot, T. E. Lawrence, and Arnold Toynbee. Many believe that Laurence Durrell based the character of Balthazar in The Alexandrian Quartet in part on Cavafy. Certainly Durrell became an admirer of Cavafy while spending three years during WWII in Alexandria.
After his return from Constantinople, Cavafy worked in several jobs, then took a permanent position in the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Public Works. His British superiors valued his excellent English. He would work there for thirty years, and was the assistant director of the department when he retired.
A month passes by and brings another month.
Easy to guess what lies ahead:
all of yesterday’s boredom.
And tomorrow ends up no longer like tomorrow.
– from Monotony
Cavafy died of cancer on his birthday in 1933.
His tombstone in the Greek Orthodox Cemetery in Alexandria bears the simple epitaph “Poet.”
For me, Cavafy is both the bright edge of the beautiful Greece, and the exquisite music playing on while the other Greece waits for the Barbarians.
He wrote this for a long-dead king, but it is always his face I see:
In addition he was that best of things, Hellenic—
mankind has no quality more precious:
everything beyond that belongs to the gods.
– from Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Kommagini
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C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/...
http://www.enotes.com/...
http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/...
http://www.cavafy.com/...
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