© DAVID NAHMIAS
Alexandria, a mirage city whose history lies swallowed by waters or captive of the modern city’s macadam and concrete. Alexandria, rebuilt on her very tombstone, has only one column, the so-called Pompey’s column, to remind us that she had Alexander the Great as her founder, Cleopatra as her queen, Caesar and Bonaparte as her conquerors, and that she saw the earth’s most wonderful library standing. This mirage city that is no longer the obligatory passage of every traveler heading to the pharaohs’s ruins in Upper Egypt; this city that does not even appear any more in tourist catalogues, witnessed the birth on April 29th 1863 of the greatest contemporary Greek poet: Constantine Cavafy. It is also in this city that seventy years later, on another April 29th, he died having published during his lifetime only feuils volants that he graciously distributed in the neighborhoods where the important Greek colony lived.
He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
And yet the time when he was young seems like
Yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.
And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
And how he always trusted her – what folly! –
the liar who would say, “Tomorrow. You have ample time.”
[from “An Old Man”, 1897, tr. Rae Dalven]
Two years after his death, in Alexandria still, one hundred and fifty four posthumous poems were published that constituted what was called the established work of the Greek poet, those for which he had given his consent, authorizing thus their publication. The rest of the poems that were found among his papers, he had voluntarily rejected, attaching onto them the mention: Not for publication, or annulling them totally or in part, but without destroying them.
*
Like Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, like Joris Karl Huysmans in Paris, like Franz Kafka in Prague, Constantine Cavafy occupied all his life a position at a Ministry in Alexandria, the Ministry of Irrigations. It was with the ink of this Ministry that he wrote; it was in the constraint of this job that he had to do daily in order to earn his living that his poetical creation was constructed. In spite of the coercion of his job, Constantine Cavafy never complained about it; he even confessed that this was a job that permitted him to earn a living – a job that was neither too heavy nor too exacting – and that was therefore quite to the artist’s advantage. It refreshed him, it purified him, it almost gave his mind rest, that’s how it was, for some people at least.
Constantine Cavafy created a perfect circle in the heart of one and only place (Alexandria), i.e. his journey to Ithaca that did not defraud him. Ithaca, the chimerical island that he evoked in the most accomplished and moving of his poems. This Ithaca that offered him the most beautiful voyage of them all: a poet’s existence.
Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.
And if you fond her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
You must have surely understood by then what Ithacas mean.
[from “Ithaca”, 1911, tr. Rae Dalven]
Constantine Cavafy’s poems lead us into shadowy subterranean vaults, maybe those of a museum where statues of marble or ebony are stored and that his poetry illumines abruptly with a halo of light that gives us the impression of being in front of tangible and living bodies, the bodies of those Alexandrians he loved. In such a way and thanks to the transparence of time he introduces us into the labyrinths of an ancient world that by the magic of poetry manifests itself suddenly to us as daily as the walls, the streets of this modern city that dies day after day its own past.
So much I gazed on beauty,
my vision is alive with it.
Contours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.
Hair as if taken from Greek statues;
Always beautiful, even when uncombed,
And it falls, a little, over the white temples.
Faces of love, exactly as my poetry
desired them… in the nights of my young manhood,
deep in my nights, in secret, encountered…
[“So much I gazed”, 1917, tr. Rae Dalven]
*
In November 1878 Arthur Rimbaud , who at the age of twenty had already burned all the lymph of his words, landed in Alexandria. He remained there only about fifteen days. Just before he left he wrote to his parents: I will send you shortly some particulars and some descriptions of Alexandria and of Egyptian life. I don’t have time to do it at present. But he found the time to do it neither in Larnaka nor in Aden… By that moment his poetry had become only a lengthy will that had remained in France. He felt neither ashamed of the poems he had written in his youth, nor did he want to let his poetry mature too long, as Constantine Cavafy did, who in that year 1878 was eighteen years old, was already engaged in his poetry, had already started on his journey to Ithaca, a journey he was not in a hurry to bring to a conclusion. Maybe these two poets passed one another on the soil of Alexandria and in any case I love to think that the very essence of poetry, the very essence whose fire-ship Rimbaud had so rapidly set alight, was conveyed while still aflame – on this land where the ashes of the most legendary library of the world lie spread – to Constantine Cavafy who kept this gift secretly till his death, before handing it in his turn – blissful old man – to the heart of the world.
*
Great poets enfolded a whole century with their poetry, their echoing voices
have been heard through the world the length of their existence; the poetry
of Constantine Cavafy, as it was, went through a century of stubborn silence
sanctioned by the author himself before it could be heard. In the course
of this century, though, Cavafy’s poems were whispered to the ear of his
friends. They were also shouted by other poets who had had the chance to
meet him in Alexandria: E. M. Forster and others. Old age is a gift that
Cavafy was able to use to the point that he knew how to impose wisdom to
the twisted art of poetry.
When he looked at the sea from the Corniche of Ras el Til, in the direction
of his motherland , the lighthouse pointed not toward the port of Alexandria
but to that of Hellenic poetry.
*
Constantine Cavafy is buried in the vast necropolis of Alexandria, that sequence of English, Coptic, Israelite and Muslim cemeteries that cover in part the neighborhood of Chatby all the way to the seaside. He did not die outside of Greece, for he belongs entirely to this immense external Greece of the spirit, as Mauro Giachetti tells us; and Callimachus, another Greek of Alexandria, could have unquestionably dedicated these Alexandrian verses to Cavafy, as well as to to Heraclitus who died in a foreign country, to whom he dedicated them in his own time:
But death that takes all will not take
your song
the black fowler is deprived of power over you
poems
and the living lovebirds soothe those who
are fond of you.
[Tr. from French by Mauro Giachetti]