Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception. What is exceptional is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poet, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia—rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately "poor" means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds "green" and describes bodies as being "young and beautiful." This technique comes out of Cavafy's realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses lan-
· The Complete Poems of Cavafy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). f C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems, edited by George Savadis (Princeton University Press, 1975).
guage for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's ownwn means.
Cavafy's use of "poor" adjectives creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader's imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to their accomplishments. For these reasons a translation of Cavafy is almost the next logical step in the direction the poet was moving—a step which Cavafy himself could have wished to take.
Perhaps he didn't need to take it: his handling of metaphor alone was sufficient for him to have stopped where he did or even earlier. Cavafy did a very simple thing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description (the "tenor," as I. A. Richards called it), and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply grammatically, allied (the "vehicle"). The implication which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way a poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the very beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career he developed and elaborated upon its implicit notions without bothering to return to the first part, assumed as self-evident. The "vehicle" was Alexandria; the "tenor" was life.
2
Cavafy's Alexandria is subtitled "Study of a Myth in Progress." Although the phrase "myth in progress" was coined by George Seferis, "study of a metaphor in progress" would do just as well. Myth is essentially an attribute of the pre- Hellenic period, and the word "myth" seems an unhappy choice if we take into consideration Cavafy's own view of all the haclmeyed approaches to Greek themes—myth- and hero-making, nationalistic fervor, etc.—taken by numerous men of letters, Cavafy's compatriots as well as foreigners.
Cavafy's Alexandria is not exactly Yolmapatawpha County, nor is it Tilbury Town or Spoon River. It is, first of all, a squalid and desolate place in that stage of decline when the routine character of decay weakens the very sentiment of regret. In a way, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 did more to dim Alexandria's luster than had Roman domination, the emergence of Christianity, and the Arab conquest together: most of the shipping, the main source of Alexandria's commercial existence, was shunted to Port Said. Cavafy, though, could view this as a distant echo of the time, eighteen centuries earlier, when the last ships of Cleopatra escaped by the same route after losing the battle of Actium.
He called himself a historical poet, and Keeley's book, in its tum, represents some sort of archaeological undertaking. We should keep in mind, however, that the word "history" is equally applicable to the endeavors of nations and to private lives. In both cases it consists of memory, record, and interpretation. Cavafy's Alexandria is a kind of upward- reaching archaeology because Keeley is dealing with the layers of an imagined city; he proceeds with the greatest care, knowing that such layers are apt to be intermingled. Keeley distinguishes clearly at least five of them: the literal city, the metaphoric city, the sensual city, mythical Alexandria, and the world of Hellenism. He finally draws a chart indicating into which category each poem falls. This book is as marvelous a guide to the imagined Alexandria as E. M. Forster's is to the real one. (Forster's book was dedicated to Cavafy, and Forster was the first to introduce Cavafy to the English reader.)
Keeley's findings are helpful, so is his method; and if one disagrees with some of his conclusions, this is because the phenomenon is, and was, still larger than his findings can suggest. Comprehension of its size, however, rests on Keeley's fine performance as a translator of Cavafy's work. If Keeley doesn't say certain things in this book, it is largely because he has done them in translation.
One of the main characteristics of historical writing— and especially of classical history—is, inevitably, stylistic ambiguity caused either by an abundance of contradictory evidence or by firm contradictory evaluations of that evidence. Herodotus and Thucydides themselves, not to mention Tacitus, sometimes sound like latter-day para- doxicalists. In other words, ambiguity is an inevitable byproduct of the struggle for objectivity in which, since the Romantics, every more or less serious poet hr.s been involved. We know that as a stylist Cavafy was already moving in this direction; we know also his alfection for history.
By the tum of the century Cavafy had acquired that objective, although properly ambiguous, dispassionate tone that he was to employ for the next thirty years. His sense of history, more precisely his reading tastes, took hold of him and supplied him with a mask. Man is what he reads, and poets even more so. Cavafy in this respect is a library of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine ( Psellus, above all). In particular, he is a compendium of documents and inscriptions pertaining to the Greco-Roman inteiplay during the last three centuries n.c. and the first four centuries a.d. It is the neutral cadences of the former and the highly formal pathos of the latter that are responsible for the emergence of Cavafy's stylistic idiom, for this cross between a record and an epitaph. This type of diction, whether it is applied to his "historical poems" or to properly lyrical matters, creates an odd effect of genuineness, saving his raptures and reveries from verbosity, staining the plainest utterances with reticence. Under Cavafy's pen, sentimental cliches and conventions become—very much like his "poor" adjectives—a mask.
It is always unpleasant to draw boundaries when you are dealing with a poet, but Keeley's archaeology requires it. Keeley introduces us to Cavafy at about the time that the poet found his voice and his theme. By then Cavafy was already over forty and had made up his mind about many things, especially about the literal city of Alexandria, where he had decided to stay. Keeley is very persuasive about the difficulty of this decision for Cavafy. With the exception of six or seven unrelated poems, the "literal" city does not come to the surface in Cavafy's 220-poem canon. What emerges first are the "metaphoric" and mythical cities. This only proves Keeley's point, because utopian thought, even when, as in Cavafy's case, it turns toward the past, usually implies the unbearable character of the present. The more squalid and desolate the place, the stronger one's desire becomes to enliven it. What prevents us from saying that there was something extremely Greek about Cavafy's decision to remain in Alexandria (as if he had chosen to go along with Fate, which had put him there, to go along with