The 20th century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy is not a well-known figure in his Egyptian homeland, despite the fact that he lived almost his whole life in Alexandria. He wrote in Greek, not Arabic, and his literary work, consisting of the 150 or so poems he circulated in his lifetime and others that have since come to light, belongs to the history of modern Greek literature, not Arabic, despite its having been entirely composed in Egypt. Cavafy spent most of his adult life working at the irrigation department in Alexandria, a precursor of today's Ministry of Irrigation, but he was not an Egyptian national and he did not read or write Arabic. A recognised man of letters abroad, where his work was often read in English translation, Cavafy neither sought an audience among the Egyptian writers of his lifetime nor did he seek to read their works in English or Greek translation. His writing career, covering the first three decades or so of the last century, coincided with the rebirth of Egyptian literature and the early careers of luminaries like Taha Hussein and Tawfik Al-Hakim, the latter also born in Alexandria. Yet, for Cavafy such writers might as well not have existed, since his interests were almost entirely focussed either on Greek antiquity or on the private lives of the presumably Greek-speaking characters of his poems. He is not known to have had any lasting interest in either Arabic literature or Arab history and civilisation, meaning that his version of Alexandria, a city that plays a central role in his poetry, may not be one that Arab readers will recognise. However, paradoxically Cavafy, in some ways a rather unlikely Alexandrian, has perhaps done more than almost any other modern writer to produce an image of the city that is familiar abroad. Poems of his like “Waiting for the Barbarians,” used as the title of a recent novel by the Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J M Coetzee, or “The God abandons Antony,” quoted in translation by the English novelist E M Forster in his celebrated guidebook Alexandria, a History and a Guide, have made Cavafy famous among international readers who may not read Greek or Arabic and who in many cases may never have visited Egypt or Alexandria. A new translation of Cavafy's poems by the US writer Daniel Mendelsohn, billed as the most complete to date, has recently been published by Knopf in New York, adding to existing translations by, among others, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, the standard version published in 1975, Rae Dalven, a more complete version published in 1961, and Evangelos Sachperoglou, published as recently as 2008. Cavafy, in fact, may be one of the most-translated of modern poets, certainly the most translated of modern Greek poets, and the appearance of the new English version of his poems indicates that the thirst for new versions of his work shows no sign of abating. This has been a boon for Cafavy's hometown of Alexandria, with many visitors now coming to the city with the intention of visiting the Cavafy Museum in the poet's former flat in the Rue Lepsius, now Sharia Sharm El-Sheikh, where an attempt has been made to retain it as Cavafy would have known it in his lifetime and up until his death in 1933. However, such new-found celebrity has not been without its dangers, and some have argued that the popularity of Cavafy's work abroad has helped perpetuate a fantastic and possibly politically suspect version of the city, dwelling on its ancient Greek and pagan past rather than on its Arab and Islamic history and marginalising or discounting its present. Cavafy was no more genuinely Alexandrian than the English writer Lawrence Durrell, such critics say, who also built an international literary career with works set in the city. The latter lived in Alexandria in the 1940s when the city was under British military occupation, but it would be difficult to argue that his novels Justine, Balthasar, Mountolive and Clea, together called the Alexandria Quartet and based on memories of the city, have much to say about modern Alexandria, at least not when seen through Egyptian eyes. But whereas Durrell's reputation has faded with his writing finding few readers today, Cavafy has been attracting a growing and increasingly diverse readership, testimony to his permanent importance. A HELLENISTIC GREEK: Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863, and aside from periods spent in England after his father's death and in Istanbul in the early 1880s during the British invasion of Egypt, he lived his entire life in the city. While he came from a business background, the family having arrived in Egypt earlier in the century along with thousands of others to take advantage of the commercial possibilities that Egypt, more and more integrated into the world economy, offered Greek and other migrants, Cavafy himself seems to have had little interest in commerce and set his sights instead on a literary career. However, he did so in what was to become a famously eccentric fashion, making few efforts to publish his poems and even fewer to find a readership for them, prizing instead, as he wrote in a private note from 1907, the “intellectual independence that [public indifference] grants.” Cavafy was also a famously late developer as far as his creative work was concerned, and while poems from the 1880s, 90s and early 1900s do exist, 33 of those later suppressed by the poet published in translation in Dalven's versions, standard arrangements of Cavafy's work begin with poems written after 1911. This was the date that Cavafy, 48 years old at the time, felt represented his poetic coming of age, and as a result poems from before that date are generally placed in a separate preliminary section in the standard editions. However, these early poems, some of them from the first two privately printed collections of Cavafy's work, Poems 1910 and Poems 1905-1915 made to be circulated among friends, also contain some of his best-known work along with poems later suppressed from the canon. They include “Waiting for the Barbarians,” for example, written in 1898, “The God abandons Antony,” written in 1910, and the biographically important “The City,” written in 1894. The latter poem, perhaps an unflattering account of Cavafy's home city, has been taken as an important staging post on the path towards what the critic Edmund Keeley, one of Cavafy's most important interpreters, has described as the poet's “myth” of Alexandria. In this poem, retained by Cavafy in his Poems 1910, the city is a place of waste and frustration, the speaker telling his interlocutor that “You won't find a new country, won't find another shore. / This city will always pursue you, / You'll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in the same houses” (Keeley and Sherrard's translation). However, this version of the city might be compared with others, among them the version of Alexandria presented in “Exiles,” written in 1914, in which Cavafy employs the voice of a Greek exile in Alexandria after the Arab conquest in the 7th century CE. “It goes on being Alexandria still,” the speaker says. “Just walk a bit / along the straight road that ends at the Hippodrome / and you'll see palaces and monuments that will amaze you. / Whatever war-damage it's suffered, / however much smaller it's become, / it's still a wonderful city.” For Keeley, the two poems are important not just because of the contrast between the two cities they contain. This contrast is in any case misleading, Keeley says, since it distracts attention from Cavafy's real discovery of these years, which was his habit of underpinning the modern city of Alexandria with its ancient past, producing poems that refer to multiple temporal planes and mix present experience with memories of the classical past. The Anglo-American poet T S Eliot had done much the same thing with London in his urban poem “The Waste Land,” Keeley points out, where echoes of Elizabethan or Dickensian London have a habit of jutting through the contemporary surface, as had the Irish writer James Joyce in his novel Ulysses, in which the doings of a modern advertising agent in Dublin recapitulate Homer's Odyssey. Cavafy's two-plane writing, either set in the present or in the classical past, or in a mixture of the two, produce a “myth” of Alexandria, Keeley says, that adds up to the poet's vision of the city. Beneath the modern grime lies the city's classical past, released, at times, through involuntary acts of memory. The city, he says, is “Alexandria still for those who see it as it really is – a city of the imagination, a city that satisfies the mind's eye.” The “Alexandrian mode,” as employed by Cavafy, entails “the search for the hidden metaphoric possibilities, the mysterious invisible processions, of the reality one sees in the literal city outside one's window.” Sometimes there is an ironic comparison of the two planes, “the furtive, transient, mucky experience of the present” contrasted with the assumed “glories of Ptolemaic and post-Ptolemaic Alexandria.” But more often Cavafy's writing indicates that the one shows through the other, or is even identical with it, underlining areas of continuity. All this, Keeley says, contributes to Cavafy's unique tone of voice and his identification of Alexandria's special qualities with the experience of the later Hellenistic world – a “hedonistic bias,” a “display of power that no one believes in,” a “love of theatre” and “sympathies with the underdogs, the victims of history rather than its manipulators.” These qualities unite early poems like “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which an unnamed late Roman emperor, ruling over an increasingly helpless Roman state, turns out in all his splendour to meet the barbarians who will put an end to his rule, with later Alexandrian pieces like “Alexandrian Kings” or “The Displeasure of Selefkides”. In the former poem, taken from an episode recounted in the Greek historian Plutarch's Life of Mark Antony, the population of Alexandria turn out to see the children of Cleopatra crowned kings of the eastern Mediterranean in a ceremony the splendour of which is entirely unrelated to its true political significance. In the latter, Ptolemy VI Philometor, reduced to begging in rags for Roman favours, is offered “purple robes, a magnificent diadem, / precious jewels, numerous servants and retainers… / so that he might present himself at Rome as he should, / an Alexandrian Greek monarch.” “To the extent that ‘our race,' the Greek race, became a metaphor for the human race in general, Cavafy's historical survey [in his Alexandrian and Hellenistic Greek poems] also implied a definition of man's predicament,” Keeley comments. This meant “his pleasure and his doom, his pride and his humiliation, his changing destiny under capricious gods, through the course of centuries.” CAVAFY IN TRANSLATION: Some of Cavafy's work was translated into English during the poet's lifetime, though there was never a full-scale edition. There was a need for the Greek text of the poems to be established first before work on a reliable English translation could begin, and this took place only in the 1960s with the appearance of the two volumes of the Greek critic George Savidis's edition in Athens. Translations then followed thick and fast, with the versions by Keeley and Sherrard swiftly establishing themselves as authoritative. However, new translations still regularly appear, sometimes subtly altering received perceptions of the poet. In his introduction to his new translation of Cavafy's work, for example, Mendelsohn says that “in attempting to restore certain formal elements in particular, to convey the subtleties of language, diction, meter and rhyme that enrich Cavafy's ostensibly prosaic poetry, this translation seeks to give the interested reader today, as much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels and sounds in English the way he looks, feels and sounds in Greek.” As Mendelsohn points out, this is by no means easy, since, in addition to the usual problems of translating poetry, translating Cavafy's work also involves finding English equivalents for the sudden shifts of contemporary and archaic forms in the Greek that he uses. “With the free relaxed iambic verse he generally uses, we are familiar,” the English poet W H Auden wrote in a 1961 essay on Cavafy that prefaced Dalven's translation. But “the most original aspect of his style, the mixture, both in his vocabulary and his syntax, of demotic and purist Greek, is untranslatable… We only have standard English on the one side and regional dialects on the other, and it is impossible for the translator to reproduce this stylistic effect or for the English poet to profit from it.” Turning to Mendelsohn's new translations with this warning in mind, it is not always clear how he has improved the existing ones. For the English-speaking reader with no modern Greek, for example, the ostensible target of the new translations, it is not obvious how Mendelsohn's clotted version of “The God abandons Antony” improves on Keeley and Sherrard's more elegant one. Perhaps the problem is that many English-speaking readers of Cavafy, probably most of a certain age, have become so used to Keeley and Sherrard's versions of the poems that Mendelsohn's sometimes sound wrong because they are unfamiliar. But in many cases there is not much in it. Keeley and Sherrard, for example, render the first chorus of “Waiting for the Barbarians” as “Because the barbarians are coming today. / What's the point of senators making laws now? / Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.” Mendelsohn has “Because the barbarians will arrive today. / Why should the Senators still be making laws? / The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.” Comparing the two versions, and then looking at other versions of the poems by Dalven, Sachperoglou and others, perhaps bears out another observation of Auden's, namely that “a tone of voice, a personal speech” somehow immediately identifies a poem as being by Cavafy no matter the translator. While English versions of the poems have proliferated, it seems that none of Cavafy's poems were translated into Arabic during his lifetime, although it was certainly known, at least among his immediate Egyptian entourage, that he wrote poetry. Cavafy's biographer Robert Liddell writes for example that Cavafy's Egyptian colleagues at the department of irrigation were aware of his writing and even noted Cavafy's meeting with important Arab poets, such as the “prince of poets” Ahmed Shawki (though the two men, speaking in French, seem to have discussed the work of Molière). But this awareness does not seem to have extended to Arabic speakers interested in contemporary poetry, and Cavafy himself seems to have made no effort to circulate his poems in Arabic translation. This situation continued long after the poet's death and the appearance of the first major Greek edition of his poetry in 1935. However, things looked up decades later, and the Egyptian critic Hala Halim, an occasional contributor to Al-Ahram Weekly, usefully excavating the history of the Arabic translation of Cavafy in her book Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism, has discovered 120 poems rendered into Arabic by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef in the 1970s and the canon as a whole translated by Naim Attia in 1992. The vast majority of Cavafy's poems, including early pieces and works in prose, was translated into Arabic by Rifaat Sallam in 2011. Earlier references had included a somewhat dismissive article by the Egyptian man of letters Abbas Mahmoud Al-Akkad in 1951, an admiring article on the poet by the Egyptian short story writer Yehia Hakki in 1967, and an equally admiring discussion of Cavafy by the Egyptian poet Salah Abdel-Sabour in his memoir My Life in Poetry in the 1970s. Later ones include discussions of Cavafy and his relationship to his Egyptian environment by the Egyptian critic Ragaa Al-Nakkash. THE ARAB CONTEXT: However, discussion of Cavafy in the Arab context has tended to focus not so much on the felicities, or otherwise, of the Arabic translations of his poems as on the nature of the poet's political sympathies and in particular his attitude to the British occupation of Egypt. Cavafy, like the other members of the foreign communities that proliferated in Egypt during his lifetime, sheltered under the British military umbrella, their presence in the country and the benefits they enjoyed being guaranteed by British colonial rule, later ending with it. According to Liddell, quoting an interview with an Egyptian former colleague of the poet at the department of irrigation, Cavafy is unlikely ever to have entered an Egyptian household during the time he lived in Alexandria, and though he charmed his British employers – “they listened to him going on and on about the ancients” – he had little to say to his Egyptian colleagues, sharing neither their language nor their everyday concerns. Yet, at least one of Cavafy's poems, “27 June 1906, 2 PM,” does have a contemporary resonance, since it refers, at least obliquely, to the famous Dinshiwai Incident of the same date on which a group of British soldiers was attacked by villagers in the Delta village of Dinshiwai. The soldiers had been shooting the pigeons the villagers needed for food, turning their guns on the latter when they protested. In the resulting mêlée a British soldier died, though apparently of heatstroke, and this was enough to trigger savage reprisals by the occupying forces, with 26 villagers punished and four of them hanged. Cavafy's poem on this subject, not included in the canon of his published poems, focuses on the reactions of the mother of one of the hanged villagers, emphasising the horror of the scene. However, it would be difficult to argue that it directly criticises British imperialism in Egypt, and it is, in any case, the only poem Cavafy wrote that makes any reference to contemporary politics. Liddell writes that “there is no need to draw a political conclusion from Cavafy's humane reaction to a scene of horror… he had, moreover, a particular abhorrence for capital punishment.” Finally, the truth is likely to be that Cavafy was more interested, more involved, in his “mythic” version of Alexandria than he was in the modern Egyptian city. Perhaps this is what the English novelist E M Forster, important in the promotion of the poet's work abroad, meant when he famously described Cavafy as a “Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” His mind was on other things. Yet, the modern Egyptian city was the one Cavafy lived in, and it would be a pity if today that city were not able to benefit more fully from the growing international interest in this important 20th century poet. Recent months have seen the re-opening of several important visitor destinations in Alexandria after extended periods of renovation, including the Graeco-Roman Museum, the Royal Jewellery Museum, and, most recently, the Mahmoud Said Museum. Perhaps now is the time, with international interest in Cavafy growing and efforts to protect the built environment of the city gathering momentum, for Alexandria's colonial-period heritage to be further valorised. This would not only place Cavafy back into his Egyptian context, but also contribute to the city's economic development.
