Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 6

“IN THE POEMS of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,” Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, “something extraordinary happens.” As will be evident by now, little about the external events of his life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap; in this respect Cavafy resembles, more than a little, his near contemporary Proust, who similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling littérateur into a major artist. Only by tracing the course of Cavafy’s interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to discern the path by which (to paraphrase that other great Greek poet again) Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one.

In the 1880s and 1890s, when he was in his twenties and thirties, Constantine Cavafy was a young man with modest literary ambitions, steadily writing quantities of verse as well as contributing articles, reviews, and essays, most in Greek but some in English (a language in which he was perfectly at home as the result of those adolescent years spent in England), on a number of idiosyncratic subjects, to Alexandrian and Athenian journals. (“Coral from a Mythological Viewpoint,” “Give Back the Elgin Marbles,” Keats’s Lamia.) Such writings, as well as the historical poems that belong to this early period, already betray not only a deep familiarity with a broad range of modern historians, whom he read in Greek, English, and French, but also the meticulous attentiveness to primary sources in the original languages—the Classical and later Greek and Roman historians, the early Church Fathers, Byzantine chroniclers—that we tend to associate with scholars rather than poets.

The writings of those early years indicate that Cavafy was struggling to find an artistically satisfying way in which to unite the thematic strands that would come to characterize his work, of which the consuming interest in Hellenic history was merely one. (An interest, it is crucial to emphasize, that rather strikingly disdained the conventional view of what constituted “the glory that was Greece”—which is to say, the Archaic and Classical eras—in favor of the long post-Classical phase, from the Hellenistic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium.) There was, too, the poet’s very strong identity as a product of the Greek diaspora, an Orthodox Christian and the scion of that once-distinguished Phanariote family who saw, in the thousand-year arc of Byzantine history, not a decadent fall from idealized Classical heights—the standard Western European attitude, crystallized by Gibbon—but a continuous and coherent thread of Greek identity that seamlessly bound the antique past to the present.

And, finally, there was homosexual sensuality. However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter-of-fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wilde’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for “Hellenic” civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.

The earliest poems we have date to the poet’s late teens, the period when he was sojourning with his mother’s family in and around Constantinople. These include dutiful if unpersuasive exercises on Romantic themes (ecstatic encomia to the lovely eyes of fetching lasses; a Grecified adaptation of Lady Anne Barnard’s ballad on love and loss in the Highlands) and, perhaps predictably, some flights of Turkish Orientalism, complete with smoldering beauties locked up in harems. As time passed, he was drawn more and more to recent and contemporary currents in Continental literature. The Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s, in particular, with its eager response to Théophile Gautier’s call for an “Art for Art’s sake,” its insistence on elevating polished form over earnest subjective, social, and political content, and particularly its invitation to a return to the milieus and models of the antique Mediterranean past, had special appeal. (That a number of Cavafy’s poems from this period are sonnets is surely a testament to the influence of the Parnassians, who prized the form for its rigorous technical requirements.)

From the Parnasse it was but a short step to Baudelaire, a Greek translation of whose “Correspondences” constitutes part of one 1892 poem; and, ultimately, to Symbolism. It is not hard to see the allure that the French writer’s elevation of the poet as a member of an elite—a gifted seer whose special perceptions were denied to the common mass—had for the young Cavafy, in whom a taste for the past, as well as a necessarily secret taste for specialized erotic pleasures, coexisted. Lines from the second half of “Correspondences According to Baudelaire” suggests how thoroughly the young Alexandrian had absorbed the lessons of the pioneering French modernist:

Do not believe only what you see.

The vision of poets is sharper still.

To them, Nature is a familiar garden.

In a shadowed paradise, those other people

grope along the cruel road.

With Cavafy, the inevitably self-justifying preoccupation with the notion of a rarefied artistic elite (“Cavafy’s attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one,” wrote Auden, perhaps a trifle indulgently)—an attitude irresistible, as we might imagine, to a painfully closeted gay man—was paralleled by a lifelong fascination with figures gifted with second sight, extrasensory perception, and telepathic knowledge. It found its ideal historical correlative in the first-century A.D. magus and sage Apollonius of Tyana, about whom Cavafy published three poems and, as the corpus of poems left unfinished at the time of his death now makes clear, was working on the draft of another toward the end of his life.

As with Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the later Esoteric and Decadent poets, the furious nineteenth-century obsession with progress, fueled by the technological advances of the industrial age, found no favor with the young Cavafy. His 1891 sonnet “Builders” not only makes clear his allegiance to Baudelaire’s worldview, but also sets the stage for a poetic gaze that would, for so much of his life, be backward-glancing in one way or another:

… the good builders make haste

all as one to shield their wasted labor.

Wasted, because the life of each is passed

embracing ills and sorrows for a future generation,

that this generation might know an artless

happiness, and length of days,

and wealth, and wisdom without base sweat, or servile industry.

But it will never live, this fabled generation;

its very perfection will cast this labor down

and once again their futile toil will begin.

The rejection of modern notions of progress, the inward- and backward-looking gaze, inevitably led to a flirtation with Decadence and Aestheticism as well. The same turbulently formative years of the 1890s produced, for example, a coldly glittering poem, in quatrains, on Salome, in which a young scholar, having playfully asked Salome for her own head—and having been obeyed—“orders this bloodied thing to / be taken from him, and continues / his reading of the dialogues of Plato”; one feels the spirit of Wilde hovering here. More important, the beginning of that decade saw the composition of a cycle of eleven poems, all but two of which we know by their titles alone, which were collected under the heading “Byzantine Days”—Byzantium being a milieu much beloved of the Decadents, who viewed it, of course, from the Western, rather than Eastern, European point of view. Cavafy would come to reject these poems as “unsuitable to his characters”: only two survived the later purge of his early work. It would be some time before he came to appreciate fully just how well Byzantium would serve his artistic and intellectual needs.

Indeed, by the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis that had been precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 (the year after he wrote the last of his “Byzantine Days” poems) and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian. The exasperated rejection of Gibbon’s disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a Romantic-nationalist vision of a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy’s reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on “Ancient Days” (one of the thematic headings into which he’d group his poems: others were “The Beginnings of Christianity,” “Passions,” and “Prisons”), and inspired him to try to find a way to integrate History and Poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.

This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a “crisis of lasciviousness,” which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to Alexander Mavroudis. Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life’s work thus far: the “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1902–03, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation “Repudiated” for a group of poems that he’d already published by that time and subsequently disowned.) A contemporary note that he left reveals a writer at a moment that he recognizes as one of deep significance, even if he hasn’t yet seen his way through to his ultimate destination:

After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.

Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.

Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical …

Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet—who even when he works most philosophically, remains an artist—gives one side, which does not mean that he denies the other, or even—though perhaps this is stretching the point—that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling—sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.

Very often the poet’s work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or his immediate readers: Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realizing them themselves …

My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking the poems one by one and settling them at once—following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is finished, or effacing it if vowed to destruction: or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working on them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work …

If a thought has really been true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short-lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically. (tr. Manuel Savidis)

This unsparing (if, typically, not unforgiving) self-examination was the portal to the poet’s mature period, one in which the tripartite division that he had once used to categorize his work—into “philosophical” (by which he meant provocative of reflection), “historical,” and “sensual” poems—began to disintegrate. The enriched and newly confident sense of himself as a Greek and as a man of letters that resulted from the intellectual crisis of the 1890s seems to have resulted in some kind of reconciliation with his homosexual nature, too. (The death of his mother might, in its own way, have been liberating in this respect.)

Indeed, it is no accident that Cavafy himself dated this period to the year 1911—the year in which he published “Dangerous,” the first of his poems that situated homoerotic content in an ancient setting. Nor is it a coincidence that the subject of this poem is a Syrian student living in Alexandria during the uneasy double reign of the sons of Constantine the Great, Constans and Constantius, in the fourth century A.D., at the very moment when the Roman Empire was segueing from paganism to Christianity. As if profiting from that uncertain moment, and reflecting it as well, the young man feels emboldened to give bold voice to illicit urges:

Strengthened by contemplation and study,

I will not fear my passions like a coward.

My body I will give to pleasures,

to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,

to the most daring erotic desires,

to the lustful impulses of my blood, without

any fear at all.

Both the setting and the character are typical of what George Seferis described as the characteristic Cavafian milieu: “the margins of places, men, epochs … where there are many amalgams, fluctuations, transformations, transgressions.” (The reader of his poems would, indeed, do well to observe how often, and how strikingly, we encounter the vocabulary of indirect placement—“nearby,” “in front of,” “by,” “next to,” “on the side”—in these poems. The titles alone of many betray this preoccupation with the edges of spaces: “In the Entrance of the Café,” “The Mirror in the Entrance,” “On the Outskirts of Antioch.”) As he neared the age of fifty, Cavafy had at last found a way to write, without shame, about his desire—a way that suggestively conflated the various margins to which he had always been drawn: erotic, geographical, spatial, temporal.

The painfully achieved reconciliation of Gibbon’s eighteenth-century, Enlightenment view of history and Paparrigopoulos’s nineteenth-century, Romantic national feeling, coupled with a startlingly prescient twentieth-century willingness to write frankly about homosexual experience, made possible the “unique tone of voice,” as the admiring Auden described it, that is the unmistakable and inimitable hallmark of Cavafy’s work. Ironic yet never cruel, unsurprised by human frailty, including his own (“Cavafy appreciates cowardice also,” Forster wrote, “and likes the little men who can’t be consistent or maintain their ideals”), yet infinitely forgiving of it, that tone takes its darker notes from the historian’s shrewd appreciation for the ironies of human action (which inevitably result, as did the life-altering business misfortunes of his father and uncles, from imperfect knowledge, bad timing, missed opportunities, or simply bad luck); yet at the same time is richly colored by a profound sympathy for human striving in the face of impossible obstacles. (Which could be the armies of Octavian or taboos against forbidden desires.) And it is inflected, too, by the connoisseur’s unsparing and unsentimental grasp of both the pleasures and the pain to which desire makes us vulnerable.

That appreciation, that sympathy, that understanding are, of course, made possible only by Time—the medium that makes History possible, too. As I have said, for many readers, even sophisticated ones, Cavafy is a poet who wrote essentially two kinds of poems: daringly exposed verses about desire, whose frank treatment of homoerotic themes put them decades ahead of their time—and make them gratifyingly accessible; and rather abstruse historical poems, filled with obscure references to little-known and confusingly homonymous Hellenistic or Byzantine monarchs, and set in epochs that one was never held responsible for learning and places that fringed the shadowier margins of the Mediterranean map. But to divide the poet’s work in this way is to make a very serious mistake: Cavafy’s one great subject, the element that unites virtually all of his work, is Time. His poetry returns obsessively to a question that is, essentially, a historian’s question: how the passage of time affects our understanding of events—whether the time in question is the millennia that have elapsed since 31 B.C., when the Hellenophile Marc Antony’s dreams of an Eastern Empire were pulverized by Rome (the subject of seven poems), or the mere years that, in the poem “Since Nine—,” have passed since those long-ago nights that the narrator spent in bustling cafés and crowded city streets: a space of time that has since been filled with the deaths of loved ones whose value he only now appreciates, sitting alone in a room without bothering to light the lamp. What matters to Cavafy, and what so often gives his work both its profound sympathy and its rich irony, is the understanding, which as he knew so well comes too late to too many, that however fervently we may act in the dramas of our lives—emperors, lovers, magicians, scholars, pagans, Christians, catamites, stylites, artists, saints, poets—only time reveals whether the play is a tragedy or a comedy.

The references to long-vanished eras, places, and figures that we so often find in Cavafy’s poetry, and which indeed are unfamiliar even to most scholars of Classical antiquity, are, for this reason, never to be mistaken for mere exercises in abstruse pedantry. Or, indeed, for abstruseness at all. A poem’s casual allusion to, say, the autumnal thoughts of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus in the year 1180 functions quite differently from the way in which invocations of arcane material can function in (to take the well-known example of a contemporary) The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot—where the self-consciously rarefied quality of the numerous allusions is part of the texture of the poem, part of its Modernist project. Cavafy, by contrast, may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him. Not for nothing are a striking number of his poems about nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In “Caesarion,” for instance, a poem written in 1914 and published in 1918—the intervening years, the years of the Great War, saw the publication of a number of poems on beautiful dead youths—the beautiful (as he imagines) teenage son of Caesar and Cleopatra materializes one night in the poet’s apartment:

Ah, there: you came with your indefinite

charm …

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And I imagined you so fully

that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp

went out—I deliberately let it go out—

I dared to think you came into my room,

it seemed to me you stood before me.

Such apparitions do not always belong to the distant past. In “Since Nine—,” published in 1918 and written the year before, an “apparition” of the poet’s own “youthful body” suddenly materializes in front of him one evening as he sits alone in a darkened room; similarly, in an Unfinished Poem of the same period, first drafted in 1919 and bearing the provisional title “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the poet’s own soul appears in the form of a louche youth on a street in Marseille, a place he’d visited years before—this scene replacing a decor that is itself a suggestive mélange of past and present (a commonplace settee, a piece of Archaic Greek statuary). Although in the latter poem the narrator attributes his supernatural vision to the excess of wine he’d drunk the previous night—hence the title—such apparitions are, therefore, hardly anomalous in his creative life, and symbolize a crucial theme of the entire body of work: the presence of the past in our own present. To Cavafy, figures such as those of the dead princeling and his own youthful self all inhabit the same era—the vastly arcing past that his own imagination inhabited so fully—and were therefore as alive and present to him as the whores who lived in the brothel below his apartment on the Rue Lepsius. (“Where could I better live?” he once remarked, in the worldly tone we recognize from his verse. “Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”) It is the responsibility of the reader to inhabit that past as fully as possible, too, if only during the brief space during which he or she explores these poems. Otherwise, the meaning of many of them will be obscure, if not opaque. And the reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems, is missing the point of Cavafy’s work—is, like so many of his characters both real and imagined, mistaking the clouded part for the clear and illuminating whole.

The rich tension between furious human striving (political, intellectual, or erotic) in the present and the poignantly belated ability to assess the true significance of that striving indeed characterizes the most memorable of Cavafy’s poems. It is there in “Nero’s Deadline,” in which the thirty-year-old emperor, freshly back in Rome from a trip to hedonistic Greece, never dreams that “beware the age of seventy-three,” the Delphic oracle’s stern warning to him, refers not to him but to his aged general, Galba, plotting revolt in Spain, who will replace him on the imperial throne. It is there, too, in the dazzled and uncomprehending gawking on the part of the citizens of Seleucia, in “One of Their Gods,” who can’t possibly know that the stupefyingly beautiful youth whom they see passing through the marketplace on the way to the red-light district is actually one of the Greek gods. Quite typically of the great mature poetry, the confusion of the hapless observers within the poem mirrors a purposeful and productive confusion, for the reader, as to what era we are in, and indeed what order of being—human? divine? real? mythological?—we are reading about:

And as he disappeared beneath the arcades,

among the shadows and the evening lights,

making his way to the neighborhood that comes alive

only at night—that life of revels and debauch,

of every known intoxication and lust—

they’d wonder which of Them he really was

and for which of his suspect diversions

he’d come down to walk Seleucia’s streets

from his Venerable, Sacrosanct Abode.

Here we have another inscrutable apparition; and we have, too, the subtle, richly matured transformation of a theme from the early years: a message from the gods that only the elect can decipher.

The poet’s predilection for the historian’s perspective—his interest in the way in which the experiences of the present, always confusing as they occur, can only be properly understood in the future; which is to say, at the moment when the present has become the past—helps to explain why so many of the ostensibly erotic poems are, essentially, poems about the past, too. A significant number of poems about desire in the poet’s own time (or his recent past) are, in fact, cast as memories of love, or of desire. More often than not, when this poet speaks longingly of “skin, as if of jasmine” or eyes that are a “deep blue, sapphirine,” as he does in the 1914 lyric “Far Off,” he does so not as most conventional love poets might extol the virtues of their beloveds, but in his own distinctive way—which is to say, he speaks of them as a memory so far off that we cannot be sure whether the details of skin and eyes that he recalls are quite accurate:

I’d like to talk about that memory …

But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:

because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.

Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …

That August—was it August?—evening …

I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …

Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.

Even in the most intensely erotic verses, poems in which the poet reveals that he knows “love’s body … the lips, / sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness,” as he does in the 1916 poem “One Night,” the celebration of the physical turns out to be a memory:

And there, in that common, vulgar bed

I had the body of love, I had the lips,

sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—

the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now

as I write, after so many years have passed!,

in my solitary house, I am drunk again.

This poet very seldom writes what we usually think of as love poetry; his verse, which if anything tends to be about desire, is also—if not primarily—about the way in which the passage of time makes possible the poetry about desire that we are reading.

That Cavafy saw not only desirable young men but desire itself through a historian’s appraising eyes helps to account for a distinctive feature of his poetry. In sharp contrast to other Greek poets of his day, he notably shuns elaborate, exotic, or self-consciously “poetic” diction; his language, so famously plain, is striking above all for its lack of precision in descriptions of physical beauty—a choice of arresting significance in a poet greatly preoccupied with desire. More often than not he will resort to abstract adjectives—oréos and émorfos, “beautiful,” idanikós, “ideal,” exaísia, “exquisite,” idonikós, “sensual,” “voluptuous,” esthitikós, “refined,” “sensitive,” “aesthetic”—where another poet might seek to evoke greater detail.

We very seldom know, in fact, just what the beautiful young men in so many of Cavafy’s poems look like. In “One of Their Gods,” the figure seen walking through the marketplace of a great city is simply “tall and perfectly beautiful”; in “Before Time Could Alter Them,” the narrator’s reverie about a long-ago affair whose premature end may have been a blessing (since it preserves the memory of the lovers’ beauty “before Time could alter them”), the lover is described as a “beautiful boy,” oréo pedí. And the climactic vision to which “Days of 1908” inexorably leads—a glimpse of a ravishing youth who is the subject of the narrator’s fascinated gaze, after the boy has stripped for a seaside bathe—reveals only that he is

flawlessly beautiful; a thing of wonder.

His hair uncombed, rising from its peak;

his limbs a little colored by the sun

What is of interest to Cavafy is not so much individual beauty, but the idea of beauty itself—what happens to it when it is filtered through the passage of many years. Significantly, one of the few poems to include some particulars of what a beautiful young man might actually look like is a poem about beauty in the abstract: the short lyric “I’ve Gazed So Much” (whose original title, it’s worth noting, was “For Beauty”):

At beauty I have gazed so much

that my vision is filled with it.

The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.

Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:

always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,

and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.

The poet’s descriptive vocabulary, then, while narrow, has the supreme advantage of imparting to his imaginations of the beautiful an abstract, philosophical dimension—and, perhaps more important, of forcing his reader to do what the historian must do, which is to apply his own imaginative powers to subjects of which, so often, few details are extant.

Indeed, if the desire that flares in so many of these poems has, more often than not, been extinguished, the compensation for all those vanished or disappointed or broken-off love affairs is an artistic one: for we are always reminded that the poem itself is the vehicle for the preservation of desire, and of beauty, that otherwise would have disappeared. This important theme has its roots in the young poet’s debt to the Parnasse and to Baudelaire, with their elevation of the poet as a craftsman and seer whose gifts are denied to the common masses. A crucial aspect of this theme, developed as the poet evolved, was that the artistic creation ultimately has a life more substantial than the object that inspired it. Two decades after the early poems of the 1890s, with their heavy debt to those French poets, the theme recurs with greater subtlety, in suggestive ways. In the 1913 poem “In Stock,” for instance, a jeweler—a stand-in for the poet, of course—fashions fabulous pieces that may mimic nature, but are symbols of the superiority of his creative fantasy to any vulgar needs of the public:

Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,

amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,

and judges, and wanted them; not in the way

he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away

in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.

Whenever a customer comes into the store,

he takes other jewels out of the cases to sell—

. . . .

And in another poem of virtually the same period, “Painted,” written in 1914 and published in 1916, the theme of the superior powers of Art is again stressed. Here, however, it is not natural life but a beautiful boy who becomes the object of Art’s transformative, and in this case healing, power:

In this painting, now, I’m looking at

a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;

it could be he’s worn out from running.

What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon

has caught him and put him to sleep.—

Like this, for some time, I sit and look.

And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.

Another twenty years later, the theme of the artist’s observing gaze and creative powers as the indispensable vehicles for both an emotionally charged reverie and a creative commemoration has its most sublime expression in the magnificent late poem “Days of 1908,” published the year before the poet’s death. Here, the beautiful but down-at-the-heels young Alexandrian, full of his schemes to make, win, or borrow money (a character we have met before, to be sure), never dreams, as he strips for his seaside swim, that the beauty by which he may well end up making his living will be immortalized in unimagined ways by the poem’s anonymous speaker. Or, rather, by Time itself, since the “you” to whom this speaker addresses himself is, in fact, the days of the long-past summer of 1908:

Your vision preserved him

as he was when he undressed, when he flung off

the unworthy clothes, and the mended underwear.

And he’d be left completely nude; flawlessly beautiful;

a thing of wonder.

His hair uncombed, springing back;

his limbs a little colored by the sun

from his nakedness in the morning at the baths,

and at the seashore.

The hotly yearning heart, with its ambitions, its strivings; the coolly assessing mind, to which those yearnings can appear so puny, even absurd, when measured against the epic forces of history and time and chance. Beauty, yes—the red lips, the jasmine skin, the sapphire eyes: but we can only know that beauty, know about the red and jasmine and sapphire, because of the assessing, measured gaze of the observing artist who beheld and touched and looked; and remembered. The rich, perfervid, sensuous present of most lives is lost forever to recollection: only the living memory of that past, memory that is itself alchemized into something permanent, and permanently beautiful, by poetry, “preserves” them forever. The past and the present; the past in the present. Small wonder that Cavafy, toward the end of his life, insisted that “plenty of poets are poets only, but I am a historical poet.” Those last two words are one way of rendering what he said in Greek, which was piïtís istorikós; but the adjective istorikós can also be a substantive, “historian.” There is no way to prove it, but I suspect that what he meant was precisely what his work makes clear: that he was a “poet-historian.”