‘Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography’
By Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 560 Pages

World-renowned poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), a meticulous artist who left behind 154 carefully composed poems, seems to have readied the world, and many of the historical characters who appear in his work, for death. The lines in one of his most famous poems, “The God Abandons Antony,” have not only history and fame in mind, but what it means to depart this life:

“As one long prepared, and graced with courage, / say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.”

No poem I have ever read seizes so powerfully on what it is like to die, as if it is not Antony (or you) that is coming to an end but all of existence itself. 

Alexandria was Cavafy’s home for most of his life, though he spent a significant period of his youth in England and spoke Greek with an English accent. Born into a large family that had fallen on hard times after enjoying much wealth and prestige, he employed his own sense of loss to show what it is like for the great and not so great to hold on to memories and a sense of place. 

Steeped in history, he is the poet of the Greco-Roman world, writing poems that seem of that world, not just about it. Cavafy himself could appear to his young disciples like one of the ancients. Visiting him was like consulting an oracle, one who occluded himself in candlelight, uttering gnomic words that reflected his utter control of himself and his image.

I say image because it took Cavafy decades to become Cavafy. He began as a sociable, romantically inclined fellow with a rhyming dictionary — rather like the young Sylvia Plath, in that he thought of poetry as something that could be extracted from a thesaurus.

Only when Cavafy simply plunged into the past could he align his personality with the movement of history, as Plath does in a poem like “Cut,” in which her bloodied thumb becomes a battlefield, with Redcoats swarming over it, and her bandage a gauzy Ku Klux Klan hood.

As he grew older before dying at 70, Cavafy withdrew into the life of his poems, deciding not to publish them in books, but using instead privately printed broadsides bound together and worked over and given to hundreds of friends, critics, and acquaintances. The extraordinary energy that went into the physical production of his work reflected an artisan who could not bear to have others produce him, except in periodicals, as though such ephemeral publication could preserve him for the physical construction of his own masterpieces.

After a brief chronology of the poet’s life, this biography proceeds thematically, which the biographers say is the best way to deal with Cavafy and his archive — one that has been partly lost and partly tampered with, and therefore is not best explored through a sequential arrangement of his life.

Part I deals with the Cavafy family; Part II with Alexandria, so crucial in the development of his character and work; Part III with the friends the poet cultivated and who devoted themselves to his legacy; Part IV with how he began to restrict his contacts to a coterie so that he could “live for poetry”; and Part V with how he deliberately sought fame. So many figures ferried Cavafy from Alexandria to the world that the biographers wisely include a section on important people in the poet’s life.

Mysteries remain: Why was Cavafy so resistant to translations of his work? Not even E.M. Forster’s prodigious efforts to make Cavafy known to the English-speaking world prevailed. Forster had a contract lined up with Hogarth Press, owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Yet Cavafy demurred.

The poet spoke and wrote to himself in English as well as Greek. He could have, like Nabokov, translated himself. So why not? The biographers do not hazard speculation, but I will submit a guess: The precious originality of Cavafy’s work perhaps suggested to him that no translation, not even his own, would suffice. Perhaps he anticipated that one fine poet after another would attempt a Cavafy translation, as though to do so is to scale the summit of Parnassus that only Cavafy could command.

Mr. Rollyson has published biographies of Amy Lowell and Sylvia Plath.