Complete Poems

"Cavafy is a typical Levantine. He came from Constantinople and Liverpool, where his family was in the cotton trade. So he had an international background and was very familiar with English literature. His family eventually settled in Alexandria. They suffered financial decline and he took a lowly job in an Egyptian ministry. His Arabic wasn’t actually very good – he was culturally and intellectually Greek. His poems express universal themes of love, desire, longing and loss but also a particular Levantine vulnerability – a sense of always being on the edge, and an awareness that things might end or change. I particularly like his historical poems, which are largely about the Hellenistic kings about to be gobbled up by the Roman Empire, or Byzantine rulers about to fall to the barbarians. He wrote a famous poem called “Waiting for the Barbarians”, which is about senators of Rome all dressed up for a barbarian delegation that never comes. It has the famous line: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.” There are also lots of poems about suspect tavernas, about his boyfriends and glances exchanged through windows. Written in about 1907, these were very daring for the time. Another feature of the Levantine cities is that they were historically very modern – more modern than their hinterlands. Although Alexandria could be quite stuffy and bourgeois, it somehow allowed this at the same time that EM Forster couldn’t write openly about homosexuality in England. People pointed a finger at Cavafy, but he was still printed and published. He’s a brilliant and very human poet, and his fame is growing. I’m sure something gets lost in translation, but many brilliant English and Greek scholars have done versions that are very haunting. It is a reminder that even at the height of Alexandrian prosperity people were aware that it could all disappear. Cavafy was in Smyrna in 1922, when it suffered fire and massacres. He made the famous and rather cruel comment that he particularly regretted those events because Smyrna had been a very good market for Greek books. But he was aware that it had a message for Alexandria."