Friday, July 30 2010

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John Mavrogordato

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Finalities

Sunday September 09 2007

CP Cavafy worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria, living first with his mother and, after she died, alone. He published his poetic works in pamphlet form in 1904 and later contented himself with circulating poems among his friends. He wrote, of course, in Greek, but was not part of the revival of Greek poetry which took place on the mainland in the early years of the 20th century. The imagined life of Alexandria, a city where Jew and Roman, Greek and barbarian mingled, supplies the background to his poems, but it is filtered through a sensibility which is peculiarly modern in its scepticism, its irony, its knowledge that philosophies and religions come and go and that even calamities are rarely final. A meeting with EM Forster in 1917 led to widespread recognition in the English-speaking world. His poems have a psychological acuteness and an epigrammatic quality which lends itself to translation, and translators have been many. A number of them are dramatic monologues, either historical or contemporary and some have a frankness about homosexuality which was rare in the English-speaking world when they were first published.