I first encountered Constantine Cavafy in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where ‘the old poet’ represented the ghostly voice of the city.
I was immediately attracted to the dreamlike quality of his poems, and the way he captured a sense of melancholy that I’ve always felt.
Cavafy wrote about human desire, inglorious epochs of Greek history, and civilizations in decline, using plain factual descriptions undressed by metaphor.
He never published his poems in a book, but circulated carefully chosen specimens in broadsheets that he printed himself. And yet this seemingly isolated man living in an obscure post-colonial backwater became the best known Greek poet in the world today.
How did a writer who showed little promise in his youth find a place in the literary canon and become ‘the poet of Alexandria’?
I’m joined by Gregory Jusdanis, co-author of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography. Gregory is also the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature, and A Tremendous Thing: Friendship from the Iliad to the Internet. He teaches Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University.
We spoke about Cavafy’s childhood of faded aristocratic grandeur, the Mediterranean Greek world he grew up in, and his lifelong poetic preoccupations.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys
We also mentioned:
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
‘Walls’
‘Ithaka’
‘The City’
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