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C.P. Cavafy |
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C.P
Cavafy (1863-1933), the most influential poet in
modern Greek, was the ninth child of rich Constantinople
merchants. He was educated in England and Alexandria, but
moved back to stay with his grandfather and two brothers
in Constantinople when the family business collapsed. Cavafy
worked briefly for an Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian
Cotton Exchange, but at 29 became a clerk in the Irrigation
Service of the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, a
position he held for 30 years. He lived with his unmarried
brothers and their mother until the latter's death in 1899,
had two brief love affairs with men, and thereafter lived
on his own in a furniture-filled flat above a much-frequented
male brothel. A dapper but solitary man, Cavafy made few
friends or literary contacts. His poems were never sold
in book form, but appeared in pamphlets, creating little
stir. He was awarded the Order of the Phoenix in 1926, but
his reputation is largely posthumous. He became a little
seedy towards the end, and died of cancer of the larynx.
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Reading Cavafy |
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Cavafy wrote in modern demotic Greek, in a style not far
from prose, and a stripped
prose at that. His sparse
style avoided rhetoric and metaphor, but conveyed a
mythical world of Hellenic exile with irony, erotic
hedonism and sometime humorous acceptance. His importance?
Cavafy's poetry has an unmistakable tone: realistic, taking
life for what it is, small in the dark lens of history but
filled with individual moments of happiness, particularly
of sensual pleasure. Alexandria
is never far away, a city murmurous with past greatness
but also mercantile, hardheaded and matter-of-fact. The
second importance of Cavafy is his style: very simple, unemphatic,
almost throwaway. The poetry is created by a finely-honed
sensibility and not verbal skills. The language does not
call attention to itself, but has been carefully constructed
from everyday speech so that an individual, almost random
event or recollection becomes something significant and
worth dwelling on.
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Modern Greek
poetry |
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The Greek
language spread, but Greece itself lost its identity
as city states were amalgamated into the Hellenic,
Roman,
Byzantine
and Ottoman
Empires. Greek poetry of the Alexandrian
school
inspired the great Roman poets, but was somewhat derivative
of the classical. Literature
specifically Greek survived on the fringes of the Ottoman
Empire, particularly areas under Venetian influence, and
joined the European
mainstream after liberation in 1828. Cavafy's work is
modern, in some ways more contemporary than the poetry of
Nikos
Kazantzakis (1885-1957), Kostas
Varnalis (1895-1974) and Takis
Papatsonis (1895-1976). Modernism proper began with
the Generation
of the Thirties movement, two of whom won the Nobel
Prize in Literature: George
Seferis (1900-71) and Odysseus
Elytis (1911-96). Seferis created a language rich in
nuance, and Elytis a mythology of images with surrealistic
overtones. W.W.II brought somber realism in the work of
Takis Sinopoulos, Manolis Anagostakis, Miltos
Sachtouris and Nikos Karouzos. Contemporary
poetry flourishes, and is much influenced by postwar American
figures.
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Reading Cavafy |
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Modern Greek — very different from the classical —
can be learnt with book, CD and cassette: try languagequest,
dealtime,
abroadlanguages,
gogreece,
worldlanguage
or filoglossia.
There are also free learning sites at Greek
through the Internet, Resources
for Learning Greek, Introduction
to Modern Greek, and Modern
Greek as a Foreign Language. Greek speakers will find
these useful: Modern
Greek Poetry, Greek
Poetry Links and Internet
Resources in Modern Greek. Cavafy translates well into
English — his Greek was indeed influenced by the English
he spoke well — and online versions of his poems are
provided by: George
Barbanis, Huck
Gutman, Aliki
Barnstone, Alicia
Ostriker, Rae
Dalven, Keeley
& Sherrard, thrace,and
the
other world. What little biography exists for Cavafy
is collected in R. Liddell's Cavafy: A Critical Biography
(1974), and the following will also be of interest: E. Keeley
and P. Sherrard's C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (1992),
G Jusdanis's The Poetics of Cavafy (1987), C.T. Dimaris's
A History of Modern Greek Literature (1972) and E.
Keeley's Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and Myth (1983).
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