On Mendelsohn's Cavafy

One of the great things about new translations is that they compel you to revisit poets, you may have already consigned to that zone known as the already read. The new translation of his work by Daniel Mendelsohn was just the catalyst I needed to pick Cavafy up again. After about an hour of reading, I fell into a pleasant state of half-sleep in which I dreamed of him at his desk writing. Imagine Constantine Cavafy settling into his creative realm to write one of his poems. Outside, the Alexandrian evening is clattering with its noise, a noise that has sung an unbroken urban aria for thousands of years. Rising from within him to meet that sound is a kindred cacophony from antiquity. He hears the internal, and often mundane, voices of countless sailors and bureaucrats, winners and losers, as if he were the lone confidant of an utterly lost age.
While Cavafy is the Greekest poet since Homer, he is also an Egyptian poet writing in Greek. And it’s precisely his Egyptian qualities that enable him to conjure up the Greek and Roman voices that haunt his poems. Cavafy’s eloquently measured testimony of the players of the past, both mundane and magnificent, are an expression of Alexandria itself, where the horizontal reality of the living street intersects with the vertical presence of the passage of time and its attendant dead.
The book begins with The City, whose opening admonition sent a chill through this travel writer.

You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship or a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted your life throughout the world.

A different, and perhaps more American, tone comes from Whitman’s, “afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road.” Cavafy’s tone is what makes him sound so Egyptian to me. If you’re lucky enough to get to Cairo or to make good friends with Egyptians you’ll likely find that they have about them, for lack of a better term, a world weariness that seems steeped in their experience of a vast and dry country whose population centers gather around water whether it’s the Nile, the oases, the Red or Mediterranean sea shores. Herodotus said it best with his famous line, “Egypt is a gift of the Nile.” Couple that with an overwhelming sense of the Past deriving from the enormously powerful monuments from antiquity. Even in its infancy, ancient Egypt was preoccupied with the mysteries of death. It’s not for nothing that its most famous surviving manuscript is The Book of the Dead.
In Cavafy, these essentially Egyptian sensibilities are expressed in Greek measures that endow them with that unadorned elegance that give them a classical feel. Thus the poetry speaks with the confident authority of a sensibility speaking almost from beyond the grave with the full knowledge of history, especially its limitations, as when the Alexandrians knew “what empty words these kingdoms were.” Compare the presence of history in Cavafy to the history served up by a poet like Tennyson, who mainly sees it as a grandiloquent canvas for the spreading of glorious battle pennants and monumental achievement. At times, as in the lines about travel above, Cavafy’s authoritative admonitions sound similar to Aeschylus at his most didactic.