Cavafy in Oxford

 

"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.”

EM Forster

 

On 21 February, AE Stallings, the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, delivered a lecture with the title ‘What These Ithakas Mean: Cavafy, Translation, Influence and Imitation’. She explored each of these aspects with great insight and understanding. In time, the lecture will become available on the Oxford English Faculty website. Alicia Stallings is a fine American poet who has lived in Athens for the last 25 years with her Greek husband and family.
 
She started reading, in both Greek and English, Cavafy’s poem Ιθάκη - Ithaka.
 
Ithaka
 
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
 
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
 

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
 
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
 
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
 
This is the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard; the writer has read several translations and does not think this one has ever been bettered.
 
It is well known that Cavafy did not publish, commercially, any poetry in his lifetime; he printed small pamphlets of his poems which he circulated among his circle. He was nonetheless acclaimed as an outstanding poetic talent. The first translation was that of John Mavrogordato in 1951; another notable early translation was by Rae Dalven in 1961. What brought the works of Cavafy to a much wider audience was when the poem Ithaka was read at the funeral of Jacquleine Kennedy Onassis in 1994.
 
Alicia Stallings touched on other interesting aspects of Cavafy’s life: that he was born on 29 April 1863 (old calendar) and died on 29 April 1933 (new calendar). His 70^th birthday. His name: Constantine - resonant of Byzantium; Cavafy – perhaps from the Turkish word for ‘a shoe-maker’. 154: both, the number of poems in the body of Cavafy’s work; and, the number of sonnets written by Shakespeare. The poet’s gross [144]? she speculated.
 
In Stallings’ view, the only poet to match Cavafy’s influence across the whole poetry world is Emily Dickinson. In looking to explain the particular quality of Cavafy’s poetic voice, she thought an important element of it was a ‘flatness’. Seferis had found something similar and felt it matched the flatness of the Alexandrian landscape. Stallings noted the factual basis of many of his poems and the presence of a prose quality as a building block of the poetry. This was refreshing: usually there is no greater insult a poet can deliver to the poetry of another than to say ‘it is prose’, not poetry at all.
 
It is beyond the scope of this report to consider in detail the specific poems of Cavafy referred to in the lecture. These included:
 
·        Walls (that illustrates the scope for rhyming in Greek poetry)
·        In a Large Greek Colony
·        In the Year 200 BC
·        Days of 1908 (written in 1932, shortly before Cavafy’s death)
 
Stallings described the ‘Days of …’ poems, of which Cavafy wrote several, as ‘a new genre of the lyric poem in the aorist’. She noted that there persisted in Greece some reluctance to acknowledge Cavafy on account of the homoerotic content of several of his poems. Many gay poets have found him a particularly relevant inspiration.
 
The lecture considered poems by other poets that were also inspired by, or at least owe some debt to, Cavafy. Notably Auden’s poem Atlantis written in 1940, shortly after he re-located to live in America and the poem To go to Lvov written by Adam Zagajewski.
 
AE Stallings (the name in which she is published and the one she uses in her social media accounts – Bluesky and X) has posted several times in the last five weeks referring to Cavafy’s poetic enquiry ‘why are the Senate not legislating?’
 
Which observation helped bring her to the conclusion ‘Ithakas are everywhere’.
 
Richard Devereux