Constantin Cavafy

Constantin P. Cavafy , also known like Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis , or Kavaphes (in Greek Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης ) is a Greek Poète born with Alexandria of Egypt the April 29th 1863. He died in the same city, in 1933, the very same day of sound 70e birthday.

Far from known of alive sound, he from now on is regarded as one of the most important figures of the literature of the 20th century. He was Fonctionnaire with the public Ministry of Labor of Alexandria, Journaliste, and Courtier with the Bourse of Alexandria.

Biography

Constantin Cavafy is the seventh of the new children of Petros Kavafis, negotiating in import-export of textiles and cotton, and Hariklia Photiadis, girl of diamond cutter, all two originating in Constantinople and installed with Alexandria. His/her father dies in 1870 and the family settles then in Great Britain, with Liverpool. These last years in Great Britain mark it deeply and its writings indicate a great familiarity with the English poetic tradition, particularly Shakespeare, Browning and Wilde. Its native tongue will remain tinted of a point of English accent until the end of its days.

Following hazardous speculations, the family finds itself impecunious and goes back towards 1879 to Alexandria, then, anticipating the riots of 1882 which were going to precipitate the war Anglo-Egyptian woman, Cavafy leave this city for Constantinople again. Constantin Cavafy saw three years there, in a certain precariousness; it is during this period that probably it has its first homosexual relations and that it writes its first into, in English, French and Greek. He considers a time to embrace a political career then, of return to Alexandria in 1885, works for the newspaper Telegraphos and as assistant of one of his brothers to Alexandria Stock Exchange. During this period, its ambition remains however the writing and it continues the drafting of poems and tests.

In 1892, at 29 years, it enters to the Service of the Irrigation of the public Ministry of Labor, administration in which it will achieve all its career, finishing director-assistant. Also broker with Alexandria Stock Exchange starting from 1894, it carries out thereafter a comfortable existence in company of his mother until the death of this one, in 1899. He passes the remainder of his life to Alexandria, going regularly to Greece, and dies there of a cancer of the larynx in 1933.

Cavafy travelled much to England, to France (where it resided) and in Greece. If it had a small notoriety within the Greek community of Alexandria and some friendships in the literary circles (it was in relation during more than twenty years with Edward Morgan Forster), for a long time its work remained unknown with the general public. Though it met many Greek men of letters during its many displacements in Athens, it did not have real recognition of its pars, probably because of a diverting access of poetry for the time. A little light is related to its work by the publication, on November 30th, 1903, in the review Panathinaia , of the historical article of Xenopoulos on Cavafy, heading “a poet”. It is only nearly twenty years later, the shortly after the Greek defeat in the conflict gréco-Turkish, that a new generation of Greek poets of nihilist tendency , such Kostas Karyotakis, will draw their inspiration in his work.

It did not publish any collection of alive sound, giving poems to literary reviews or making them circulate near some friends in the form of layers and of booklets car-published. Moreover it altered its texts unceasingly, and destroyed much of it, in particular for its early works. Thus, the essence of its work was composed after its fortieth birthday. Cavafy published 154 poems, to which one can add of them 75 remained new until 1968, and 27 others that it had published between 1886 and 1898 but had disavowed thereafter.

Work

He is regarded as one of the most famous poets of the modern Greece. And as Marguerite Yourcenar notes it in the foreword of the translation that it made poems of Cavafy: “it one from the largest, most subtle in any case, more nine perhaps, the most is also nourished however inexhaustible substance of the past.”

He recognized a vocation of poet early, but its production of before the fiftieth year only one small number of poems kept, of which some only count among its masterpieces. Cavafy hardly let circulate of alive sound but some rare inserted poems that and there in reviews. Its glory, arrival little by little, fed from loose leves distributed chichement to friends or disciples. This poetry which astonishes at first sight by its detachment, its impersonnality almost, thus remains to some extent secret until the end, likely in all its parts of enrichments and final improvements, recipient of the experiment of the poet until his death. And it is only towards the end that it expressed about openly its most personal obsessions, the emotions and the memories which from time immemorial, but in a vaguer and more veiled way, had inspired and sustained its work.

The originality of this poet lies in the fact that it could in an incomparable way exceed the parnassism and trace in first the way of modernity in Greece, in spite of the criticism and even the polemic of his contemporaries. First of all its poetry strikes by the musical quality of its language, which is that of the old Greek colonies, mixed to antiquated linguistic elements going up even until Homère. However its creative contribution rests initially on the use of a singular language, but which keeps the freshness of its past, déridée and resplendent. As paradoxical as that can appear, the poet could give again life with forever perished words, but which seems it always had established among with the Greek colonial periphery and with the diaspora.

The recourse to the memory is in the second place the recognizable aspect of the poetry of Cavafy. It draws with last its topics chosen according to a technique hitherto unknown, by evacuating the contents of the myths, to keep only the names. It restructures then its own myths, by simulating a diving in the history of Greece. This technique places the fiction of the poet in the vicinity of the myths which the old tragedy could forge, far away from lived historical. The most marginal topics, the details which the history puts aside, the above suspicion impression of a meeting, the intimacy of a furtive thought and the glances, tenderized and moved on the human body, such is its material of predilection. Far from sentimentalism, it sets up a universe in which the man tests his " corporéïté " on the scale of eternity. It is still Yourcenar which concludes: “The carnal reminiscence made of the artist the Master of time; its fidelity with the sensual experiment leads to a theory of immortality.”

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