Yearning for home

Review, The Weekend Australian

6 October 2009

To describe Greek poet C.P. Cavafy as a nostalgiste is to risk understatement.

Constantine Cavafy, whose collected works have just been issued in a fine new translation by classicist Daniel Mendelsohn (a regular essayist in The New York Review of Books), was the fortunate inheritor of a tradition inaugurated by Homer and the mythic cycle that threads through the classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine Christian eras. Though ruptured by the violence of the centuries and the predations of the invaders - Romans, Franks and Ottomans ­- Cavafy's mytho-poetic inheritance is reforged and somehow made new in his verse.

The remaking is not without its erotic subtleties, its barbs and knowing ironies, for Cavafy is not some unimpassioned observer of the past but a partisan poet with an antiquarian bent. The emperor Julian the Apostate died in AD363 with his dream of restoring paganism to an empire Christianised by Constantine the Great largely unfulfilled. You would think a writer such as Cavafy, whose own homosexual desires often took the classical world as their erotic reference point ("The body's lines. Red lips. Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues") would approve of Julian's urge to re-establish a beautiful pagan order. Not so. Julian's campaign stirs in the cosmopolitan poet an instinctive loathing for rigidity, austerity and intolerance. Cavafy mocks:

His airy prattle concerning the false gods,
his wearisome braggadocio;
his childish fear of the theatre;
his graceless prudishness;
his ridiculous beard.

Mendelsohn's edition of Cavafy's life work, the first to include poems unpublished at his death in 1933, brings to mind by way of contrast the tonal awkwardness that so often disfigures the scripts of movies such as Troy and Alexander. Perhaps out of reverence for the deep past the characters of Hector, Achilles and Ptolemy are given in these celluloid retellings an elevated tone and creaking pseudo-classical diction. In fact, this inhibiting reverence for antiquity is difficult to avoid. Even a writer as prodigiously supple as Shakespeare seemed to stiffen when he penned Julius Caesar.

Cavafy manages in these translations to animate a range of antique characters in a poetic idiom that seems for the most part to avoid the taint of anachronism. He evokes not so much the pastness of the past as its presence.

The subject of ‘The Year 31BC in Alexandria’ is Mark Antony and Cleopatra's defeat at Actium, in the Ionian sea of western Greece, by the forces of Octavian (later Caesar Augustus); and Cleopatra's attempt to conceal the humiliation from the Alexandrian citizenry. But the theme is timeless:

From his little village near the city's outskirts,
still dusted with his journey's dirt, the peddler arrives.
He hawks his wares --
"Incense!", "Gum!", "The finest oil!" "Scent for your hair!" --
through the streets. But the tremendous stir
and the music, and parades, won't let him be heard.
The mob shoves him, drags him, knocks him down.
And at the height of his confusion, when he asks "What on earth is going on?"
someone tosses him the palace's
gargantuan lie:
that victory in Greece belongs to Antony.

Like rowers with their eyes fixed on the receding horizon the modernist poets W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound worked the ancient world for their artistic purposes, as did Heinrich Heine and Rainer Maria Rilke. Cavafy and fellow members of the modern Greek revival, such as George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, are naturally drawn to the glorious and inglorious history of the Mediterranean and its literary inheritance: epic, lyric, chorus, ballad, liturgy, folk song.

But they are writers born into this antique landscape, working in a language that still carries Homer and Hesiod's distant echoes, and much more besides. The legacy of Greece is universal. It is also, for these poets, intensely local and filial. This proximity -- linguistic, cultural and visual -- to a living tradition seems to protect their rhapsodies from the excesses of both romanticism and rationalism. Seferis, for example, believed modern Greek poets needed to "regard Greek reality without the prejudices that have reigned since the Renaissance".

Cavafy is probably best known for his wise and warm-toned poem Ithaca, which has become a kind of traveller's anthem, a hymn to ceaseless peregrination coloured by the memory of Odysseus and his much delayed homecoming.

The shaggy Homeric hero wanders 10 years across the Mediterranean in search of his island home, his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. But at the much anticipated moment of landfall, the hero fails to recognise Ithaca with its barren peaks tilted in the sea. Perhaps it is this idea of a homeland beyond reach that encouraged Cavafy to counsel his reader, in this slightly avuncular tone, to take his pleasures along the way for the arrival is nothing when compared with the journey:

Always in your mind keep Ithaca.
To arrive there is your destiny.
Better not to hurry your trip in any way
Better that it lasts for many years;
That you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you've gotten along the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

The poet who wrote these lines was so imaginatively engaged with the ancient Greek and Byzantine worlds -- pagan and Christian -- that he seems to have taken root there. A cast of historical characters moves through his poetic dreamscape, including Mark Antony, Apollonius of Tyana, the aforementioned Julian, Byzantine emperor John VI Cantacuzenus, and many of Alexander's heirs. Mendelsohn's delightful character studies are valuable guidance, and his notes on the poems indispensable.

Nostalgia, by strict definition, is a kind of homesickness (nostos in Greek is home while algos denotes pain). But Cavafy so comfortably inhabited the Greek world of his remote ancestors, whom he traced to Constantinople, that he seems almost beyond nostalgia.

We lack a word in English to register this backward-looking yet vital and creative energy. Homer, who sings of the deeds of Bronze Age warrior heroes who fought and loved beneath the gaze of the gods, is the first nostalgiste. His children, the forward-looking Greeks of classical Athens, were acutely aware of the past and communed with it nightly in their theatre. The European Renaissance and Enlightenment were revolutions built on rehabilitations of the past.

Cavafy's retrospective vitality is instructive. Perhaps it's time to shake nostalgia free of its pejorative baggage. A species of nostalgia, certainly, betokens a melancholic flight from life; an impulse to which Cavafy was not entirely immune. But then nostalgia in moderation is an indispensable element of cultural health and creative drive.

The longing for a better world is also, in a sense, a longing for home. For Ithaca. *