“On Cavafy, Then and Now”

Essay invited by the C.P. Cavafy Chair at the University of Michigan to celebrate the 150 years of Cavafy’s birth. In C. P. Cavafy Forum, “Greek Diaspora Intellectuals on ‘the meaning of Cavafy today’”; curated by Vassilis Lambropoulos, Department of Modern Greek at the University of Michigan, April 2013

 “[In college we] discovered the sensuous Cavafy, the clandestine poetry that our teachers had kept unseen. The entryway to what I like to call “the muted” Cavafy, might have been Manos Hadjidakis’s setting of “Days of 1903.” What robust musical language! We ended up memorizing not only the poetry but all the songs of his Magnus Eroticus record. Cavafy wrote about diaphanous erotic landscapes with an extraordinary linguistic boldness. His descriptions of sensual hedone transferred as synesthetic aromas onto our young souls; and his innate musicality fed our voracious minds with sensory and spiritual delight: “. . . those lips—I never found them again. […]

Today, more than ever, we yearn for Cavafy’s poetry. It teaches us the pleasure of solitude, in a world that screams for exposure; it promotes the fragility of pleasure in a world full of fake cacophony; and it elucidates a mythical world of grandeur and fall, at the same time robust and weak, familiar and alien, attractive and grotesque, much like our own. In our ever-changing world, Cavafy’s poetry embodies the melancholy of ruin as well as the promise of desire. Maybe we can exorcize some of today’s evil if we start to recite his poetry out loud again. ‘Δώδεκα και μισή. Πώς πέρασεν η ώρα. / Δώδεκα και μισή. Πώς πέρασαν τα χρόνια.’”

 https://lsa.umich.edu/modgreek/window-to-greek-culture/c-p--cavafy-forum.html