Michael Dirda

By instinct, Cavafy is primarily an elegist, capable of recalling with equal emotion the touch of a hand and the fall of an empire, of memorializing both the carnal favorites of ancient Antioch and the perfect limbs of a dirty young blacksmith down the street. For this Greek living in Egypt amid Arabs and British colonials, the world appears as a palimpsest: When Cavafy looks at Alexandria, he glimpses, beneath the blandness of a modern urban wasteland, the playground of youthful gods. That imagined city, a city of sybarites, teaches one to enjoy the sensual pleasures of this world, to live without self-delusion or self-pity, to meet all experience with irony and aesthetic appreciation, to admire the fleeting beauty of youth and the permanent beauty of art. Little wonder that Lawrence Durrell (in Justine ) called Alexandria "the great winepress of love."

There have already been several translations of Cavafy's poems, most notably those by Rae Dalven, Theoharis C. Theoharis, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Though the Keeley/Sherrard versions have been long viewed as standard, all these editions (and now Barnstone) are worth acquiring, not only because it's nearly always rewarding to read several translations when one doesn't know a poem's original language, but also because the Cavafy canon isn't fully settled and the various collections tend to differ somewhat in their contents. Cavafy never formally published his work and disliked the fixity of hard covers. Though he did bring out a couple of booklets (the first in 1904, in an edition of only 100 copies), he much preferred to gather his loose-leafed poems into folders that he would simply give to his friends and admirers. He was constantly winnowing out the sentimental: Of the 148 known poems written between 1891 and 1900, he kept only seven for his "canon."

At its best, his mature work hardly seems poetry at all. (Marguerite Yourcenar once likened his short pieces to reading notes or aides-memoires .) Cavafy prefers nouns and avoids epithets, uses rhyme sparingly if at all, offers lots of historical or physical detail, and typically casts a poem as a dramatic monologue. Even his titles are oddly prosaic, though touched with a kind of shabby grandeur: "A Byzantine nobleman in exile composing verses" or "The melancholy of Iason Kleandros, poet in Kommagini, 595 C.E." In fact, Cavafy gains most of his power, as the Greek poet George Seferis insists, when we view his work as "one and the same poem" and "read him with the feeling of the continuous presence of his work as a whole. This unity is his grace." Even when Cavafy avoids speaking in his own person (as in his many poems on historical subjects), everything he writes sounds like a fragment from a great confession, melancholy, witty, refined, sexy:

When I entered the house of pleasure,

I did not stay in the front rooms where they celebrated

Conventional lovemaking with some order.

I went to the secret rooms

And I touched and lay down on their beds. . . .

Cavafy tended to divide his work into separate categories: historical, philosophical and erotic. But a poem about Caesarion, the son of Cleopatra and Antony, also comments on Alexandria's endemic taste for make-believe and theater, even as the princeling himself is lovingly described as a rococo male beauty. In general, the poetry about the Hellenistic past tends to dramatize minor or fictive historical figures or to explore a byway of antiquity; Cavafy has no taste for the obvious or monumental. Usually the poet will expand on a brief textual allusion -- it is said that he knew Plutarch by heart -- or try to reimagine a moment in the life of, say, the Emperor Julian (aka the Apostate) or the magician Apollonios. Such a remembrance of things past hardly differs from what he does in the erotic modern poems, in which a damaged photograph found in a drawer may recall ancient yearning.

Memory and revery, then, followed by the re-creation of the voluptuous past, are the central elements of Cavafy's technique (just as they are in Proust). Only art can preserve, even enhance, the vanished moments of ardor and fleeting encounters with youthful bodies. The resulting poems burn with passionate immediacy. "The artisan of words," said Cavafy, "has the duty to combine what is beautiful with what is alive."

For all his apparent paganism, Cavafy remained an orthodox, or perhaps unorthodox, Christian. He was reportedly timid, somewhat vain and fond of drink. As a boy, he spent a half-dozen years in England with his then wealthy family -- they lost most of their money after the father's death -- and he learned French and English well enough to work as a copyist and translator in Alexandria's Irrigation Department. Until he was 36, he lived with his mother and had to sneak away for his trysts; later he took an apartment with his brother on the Rue Lepsius: "Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die." During the final days of his battle with cancer of the throat, he would read only detective novels, preferably by Georges Simenon.

In the years since his death in 1933, Constantine Cavafy has come to be honored as the finest Greek poet of the century. In critical esteem, his reputation in America rivals that of Rilke and Neruda. Certainly, his voice remains one of the most seductive in all modern literature. ·

Michael Dirda is a columnist for Book World. His books include "Bound to Please," "An Open Book" and, out in May, "Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life."