A ESFINGE DE ALEXANDRIA: C. P. CAVAFY (II)

Continuando o texto publicado aqui :

O "Interlude" do livro tem por título "Constantine's Reading" e debruça-se sobre as leituras de Cavafy, os seus comentários às obras que leu, quer em publicações, quer em notas pessoais, os seus livros, ainda que a importante biblioteca do Poeta tenha sido lamentavelmente dispersa após a sua morte. E também à forma como se foi construindo, através dos livros, a personalidade cultural de Cavafy.

Na impossibilidade de uma descrição pormenorizada, transcrevo o final deste capítulo:

«The poetic images he uses here recall the aesthetic propos found in many of his poems and prose poems and serve to soften the polemic tone that defined much of the language debate.

Beyond the world of art and poetry, Constantine possessed an assortment of twenty-five books that his first biographer, Michalis Peridis, classified as "unmentionable", the bulk of which did not enter in the surviving library. Much of this was risqué fin-de-siècle French literature that overlapped with his broader interest in literary decadence. A number of these texts, however, were more explicit in their sexual content. In his study of Constantine's sexuality, Dimitris Papanikolaou identifies the following books that effectively constitute a veritable queer reading list: Henri d'Agris, Sodome (1888), Robert Scheffer, Le Prince Narcisse (1897), Jean Rhodes, Adolescents: Moeurs collégiennes (1904), Jules Hoche, Moeurs d'exception: Le vice mortel (1904), Henry Gauthier-Villares (Willy et Ménalkas), L'ersatz d'amour (1923), Alphonse Daudet, Sapho. Moeurs parisiennes (1884) and Armand Dubarry, Les Déséquilibrés de l'amour. Les flagellants (1898). In general, these texts deal with alternative sexual practices and explore the desire for "pleasures even stranger" that Constantine had expressed in his note on Baudelaire.

We conclude this intellectual interlude on the poet's reading interests with a comment by Timos Malanos, who repeatedly stated that this onetime mentor had ceased to read anything new or process any recent ideas after 1900. The point Malanos wished to make was that the Cavafian corpus had become hermetically sealed and was impermeable to any new ideas or cultural stimuli. While there is some truth to this in terms of literary influences, Constantine continued to read up until his final days. But this debate does not detract from the more important fact that his poetry continually foregrounds the act of reading itself. As such, his own reading interests remain a fascinating point of entry into his mind, imagination, and creative life.» (pp. 277-278)

Hotel Metropole, ocupando o edifício do antigo Serviço de Irrigação, onde Cavafy trabalhou durante a sua vida

Passemos ao capítulo seguinte: "Art above everything". 

Ao princípio, Cavafy não sabia verdadeiramente se iria tornar-se um poeta.  Tanto quanto é possível sabermos, começou a escrever poesia entre os dezanove e os vinte e dois anos. «He had begun compiling a dictionary in 1881 precociously at the age of sixteen, which ended with the entry "Alexander". [Há aqui um erro dos autores: em 1881 Cavafy tinha dezoito anos] To his horror, it was one of the items destroyed in the bombardment of 1882.» (p. 283) E não parará de escrever, preocupando-se progressivamente com o estilo e também com os assuntos abordados. É encorajado pelo irmão John, que o apoia vigorosamente. Aliás, era John quem, em 1880,  parecia estar destinado à glória poética, mas com o tempo a situação inverteu-se: Constantine ficou famoso e John ignorado.

O célebre elevador do Hotel Metrópole

Regressado de Istanbul a Alexandria, depois do bombardeamento britânico da cidade, era plausível que Cavafy se dedicasse ao negócio do algodão, bastante rentável e familiar aos gregos da cidade. Mas preferiu ser jornalista e começou a trabalhar na Bolsa de Alexandria como jornalista do "Telegraphos". Enquanto colaborava com outras publicações como crítico cultural, fazia traduções e revisão de livros. Com trinta anos, Cavafy tem uma vida social preenchida, mas a sua verdadeira preocupação é a arte, que não sacrifica às mundanidades que todavia não rejeita. A sua poesia começa a revelar, desde muito cedo, ainda que de forma singularmente discreta, um carácter homoerótico.

Neste capítulo, os autores começam a analisar, de um ponto de vista literário, a sua poesia, o que extravasa os limites deste texto.

Durante a sua estada em Atenas, em 1901, Cavafy teve uma vida cultural intensa, que é descrita pelos autores. Foi uma etapa crucial da sua vida. O poeta começa a ser conhecido na Grécia. Regressado a Alexandria, em 1908, mudou-se, com o seu irmão Paulo, para o apartamento da Rue Rosette, 17. Mais tarde habitaria a Rua Lepsius, 10, hoje designada Rua Sharm el-Sheikh, 10.   

«During the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries, Constantine was developing a poetry that was unique in Greek and world literature. We can characterize these Cavafian poetics in the following way: rather than using either demotic or the purist language, he invented his own idiosyncratic mixture of both registers, while he often cited words from earlier Greek writing in his poems. Thus, a poem could contain elements of this long linguistic tradition: classical, late-antique, Byzantine Greek.  At the same time, he began to experiment with form, as many other modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, were doing at the time. Like Eliot, he remained a conservative modernist, never adopting radical techniques. Nevertheless, it was this deliberate flouting of poetic conventions that made his poetry feel strange and unpoetic, even to his early followers in Alexandria.» (pp. 304-305)

Talvez devido às sucessivas mortes na família, Cavafy não ria, nem sequer sorria. O diplomata grego Philippos Dragoumis, que se encontrou com Cavafy quando chegou a Alexandria em 1916 como, vice-cônsul da Grécia, descreveu o poeta como um homem com «"yellowish-green complexion, shaven, Jewish face, with intense dark eyes." He remarked that Constantine never smiled or laughed and spoke with an English accent. In the course of their conversations about Alexandria and the future of Hellenism in Egypt, Constantine made a few insightful revelations about himself, saying that "after the loss of a brother he loved deeply he withdrew from public life." Now "he lives isolated, like an ascetic, and recalls the past."» (p. 311)

Foram penosas as perdas. «His losses were heavy. By middle age, Constantine had experienced two decades of continual mourning. As noted earlier, his friend Stephen Schilizzi died in 1886 at nineteen, to be followed by Mikès Ralli three years later. His brother Peter died in 1891, his maternal grandfather in 1896, his mother in 1899, his brother George in 1900, Aristides in 1902, and finally Alexander in 1905. In "From Nine O'clock" (1917/1918), Constantine speaks of a man exactly like himself who faces the desolation in his life. It is past midnight and he has been sitting in his room, remembering tragic events: "Family bereavements, sepations,/feelings of my dear ones, feelings/of the dead so little cherished." Altough we can't quite determine the impact of these deaths on him personally, we do know that this decade of misfortune coincided both with his first period of poetic creativity in the 1890s and with his search for a new style. At this time, he abandoned many of the entertainments of his youth, gave up on tennis, and stopped his lavish expenditures on clothes. Sorrow and creativity went hand in hand. But did death force Constantine to become a recluse? How recluse was he?» (pp. 312-313)

Naturalmente, Cavafy não se retirou completamente da vida social. «Of course, this does not mean that he was free from internal conflict during this decade. In 1925, he composed an important erotic poem with the title "Days of 1896", about a young man of thirty who had "debased himself" through his "forbidden" sexual pleasures and lost his money and reputation. Obiously, this young man is a far cry from the thirty-three-year-old Constantine enjoying foie gras, Roquefort, and fine champagne that New Year's Eve with his friends. "Days of 1896" points to an internal sexual struggle taking place within Constantine.» (p. 314)

A poesia de Constantine Cavafy é toda ela impregnada de um espírito verdadeiramente helenístico. Escrevem os autores: «His original angle to Hellenistic history amazed his listeners, including an English scholar who had read his poems in tranlation. During a conversation, Constantine dazzled him and the other guests so much that one of them presciently said that "in the future we won't have to read about the Hellenistic period. Cavafy's poems are enough." [Michalis Peridis]» (p. 324)

«Of course, his fascination with postclassical Greece did not appear ex nihilo. In the works of the Victorian painters, such as Edward Burne-Jones ans George Frederic Watts, and decadent writers like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine, he found the themes of the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity. He also met people who shared his predilection for uncelebrated epochs. Robin Furness, as noted earlier, a British scholar and friend of E. M. Forster who worked in Alexandria's Egyptian civil service, had published translations of Hellenistic poetry. But nobody before Constantine had built Hellenistic Alexandria into a tower from which to examine civilizational decline, social marginalization, homosexuality, male beauty, and diasporic identities.» (p. 324)

Para a sua poesia, Cavafy procedia a minuciosas investigações históricas e linguísticas, como neste caso: «The scene enacted in "Caesarion" illustrates the copious research that went into his poems. Daily he pored over dictionaries to make sure he had the right word. We see this in comments he recorded in the poem "The Glory of Ptolemies", particularly his obsessive concern over the adverb "τελείωζ/teleios" (completely), including references to how this word was used by French authors of the seventeenth century.» (p. 327)

O Poeta era muito cuidadoso não só em ordenar tudo o que escrevia mas igualmente com os seus pertences: 

« This very act of going through catalogues was an almost ritual for Constantine. During his entire career, he kept a careful inventory of his poems, ytheir various revisions, emendations, and corrections, and lists of their recipients in Egypt and Europe. He also maintained lists of all kinds - of clothes, of his mother's jewelry, of kitchen articles as pots and pans, and household tasks. Between 1908 and 1914, he enumerated the contents of his house. He saved recipes and instructions on how to cook various foods, writing that "cutlets must be beaten". From 1887 until 1893, he worked on a register of games he enjoyed playing, such as dominoes, roulette, chess, heads or tails, tombola, and bridge, along a record of wins and losses. And he boarded everything - old bills, receipts from hotels, and various mementos such as printed menus. He preserved all the letters he received and often drafts of letters he sent to friends, family members, and acquaintances. Moreover, he stockpiled not only important documents, such as annual letters of appointment in the Office of the Irrigation Service, his baptismal and birth certificates, his residence permits issued annualy by the Greek General Consul of Alexandria, but also insignificant possessions such as his entry card to the Club Athénien and train tickets from his first trip to Athens in 1901, the receipt from the Grand Hotel Phaleron from that year, and from the Grand Hotel Splendid of Athens from July 29 of 1903. Like a young student on his first trip abroad, he endowed every admission ticket and receipt with major significance.

He even made lists of lists: "2.11.11. Lists of things I req. to take with me for a 2 day excursion...! Another list: "List of things I require to take with me for a comfortable [?] 10 days stay in Cairo during next May 14.4.07." After the death of his mother, he also had to manage the household affairs, as attested by the two-page summary he wrote of the domestic tasks. Here is a synopsis: Ahmed does the dishes while Hasan shines the silver. The clock is wound in the direction of the wall. You put two spoons of tea in the black teapot. Ahmed puts three and it becomes heavy. The house is cleaned thoroughly twice a year, once in the spring and the second time in the winter. An assistant comes to scrub the floor, beat the rugs and clean the windows. The baker comes at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and leaves a round loaf. For the evening, we get a straight loaf and, if necessary, an additional one. Ahmed knows the various shops in the neighborhood.

He kept detailed catalogues of his monthly expenses - for instance, from March 1 to December 31, 1899, noting the cost of various household articles and their repair. He was quite aware of the money he was spending for restaurants, cafés, groceries, and the servants' salaries. In an undated list, he enumerated the monthly outflow for "restaurant and coffe-houses expenses", "bread, milk, washing of clothes, rent", "candles and petroleum", "food for servants", "kitchen requirements". This tendency to maintain careful records about his finances was a lifelong trait, lasting well into adulthood. Even in 1932, he maintained a detailed record of his monthly cash flow.» (pp. 328-329)

[COMO EU ME REVEJO NAS PREOCUPAÇÕES QUOTIDIANAS DE CAVAFY!!!] 

 

Com o avançar da idade, o Poeta receava que a homossexualidade tivesse comprometido a sua capacidade de expressão e admirava os que não escondiam as suas inclinações.

«On the whole, Constantine remained faithful throughout his life to his aesthetics beliefs. He made compromises, given his precarious financial situation, and thus worked all his life as a civil servant. But he rarely changed lines of his poems to please anybody other than himself. At the same time, however, he feared that by middle age he had compromised the sexual freedom of his youth. In a note from 1905, he grumbled that the "wretched laws of society... have diminished my work. They have inhibited my expressiveness." This issue continued to trouble him all his life, as we can see in a conversation he had, twenty-five years later, and months before his death. In October 1932, the poet Napoleon Lapathiotis (1888-1944) and the Cavafy enthusiast Marios Vaianos (1905-75) came to visit him in his Athenian hotel just before he underwent cancer treatment. Durinf the course of their exchange, it became clear that Napoleon was very open about his homosexuality, in contrast to Constantine, who rarely addressed it in public. Envious that Napoleon had chosen to live in a manner true to his own convictions, Constantine said: "I am very jealous, Napoleon, of your freedom, of the life you lead... It is as you have your ideal Republic where you live and invite others for your company." And then he stopped. Napoleon, not wishing to impose on a sick man , responded, "But whoever wants to do something, Mr. Cavafy, can do something", adding that he tried to conduct the life he wanted and found in "Communism" the only understanding." Whoever followed communism was free, he said. Ignoring the political reference, Constantine responded that such a life was impossible in Alexandria: "People there are very conservative. One surveils the other, through windows and through keyholes. Because of a few poems, they characterize me as unlawful and stigmatized." He added thar he could not have led Napoleon's life in Alexandria, even though he wrote "daring poems which shocked but which people like and recite... without understanding their meaning and depth."» (pp. 339-340)

Ninguém sabia se Cavafy era feliz. A sua grande preocupação era a poesia e o reconhecimento público. No capítulo que estamos comentando, "The big poet change", os autores debruçam-se profundamente sobre a relação da Arte com a Vida em Cavafy, e da forma como mais ou menos subtilmente ele consubstanciou na poesia a sua vocação sexual.

«No one knew if Constantine was a happy person. He certainly derived joy from his poems. This was his principal preocupation after his forties, the point when he resolved to live for and write great work. A year before composing "Hidden", he recorded a note in which he expressed his resentment at not being sufficiently recognized and admired: "How injust it is for me to be such a genious and neither to be known everywhere nor get rewarded." As he gradually acquired a greater reputation, however, Constantine could no longer keep private his feelings about his self-worth and openly boasted of his outsize talents. When a group of students once asked him who he thought Greece's best poet was, he answered, "You mean after me..." (pp. 347-348)

Ao longo deste capítulo, os autores examinam alguns dos seus poemas mais importantes, aos quais nos referiremos mais tarde em post exclusivamente dedicado à poesia de Cavafy.

«At the age of forty, weighed down with memories of penury, facing the humiliation of working as a civil servant, unmarried and without any relations of intimacy, his only deliverance seemed to be his art. Without any other guardian angel in his life, he could not contemplate any reverseals to his grand plans. Quite simply, art became for him compensatory, making up for all of life's disappointments and deficiencies.» (p. 353)

A Parte V (e última do livro), "Cultivating Fame", compõe-se de dois capítulos: "The Quest for Glory" e "Constantine 's Literary Radius".

É inegável que Cavafy sempre procurou a fama e queixava-se da pouca difusão da sua obra, ainda que fosse sistematicamente avesso à tradução da sua poesia. Mas desejava verdadeiramente ser conhecido na Grécia e na Europa e não apenas em Alexandria, onde uma parte dos habitantes sabia muito bem quem era.

« From the shadows of his apartment, Constantine fed the lines to his supporters, rather like a ventriloquist. And by the last two decades of his life, his efforts had paid off. Never celebrated as a national poet, he had become instead a celebrity in his home city. Alexandrians knew him and heard of him, even if they had not necessarily read his poetry. He made his presence felt, often spreading rumors about himself to spark the interest of others. As a result, people recognized him on the streets or wished to meet him. "How is it possible for Alexandria to have such a great man and for us not to know him?" they would say. Ordinary people would ask Yiorgos Vrisimitzakis how they could meet the poet. One afternoon, sitting with Constantine and a friend in a café, Vrisimitzakis addressed himself in the vocative to the poet, "Mr Cavafy." At that point the waiter, his eyes beaming, asked if was indeed about to serve the real Cavafy. When Vrisimitzakis nodded in the ffirmative, the waiter stood stationary, in awe of the great man before him.» (p. 364)

Fiquei a saber por este livro que durante um certo período Cavafy dava aulas de história a alguns rapazes no seu apartamento. Não esclarecem os autores se as aulas eram pagas ou apenas devidas ao interesse do Poeta em transmitir os seus profundos conhecimentos. Creio que eram aulas individuais e suspeito que Cavafy sentiria prazer na companhia dos jovens, especialmente de alguns, ainda que daí não se possa inferir que existisse contacto físico. Glafkos Alithersis (1897-1965), nome literário de Michalis Chatzidimitriou, cipriota que viveu a maior parte da sua vida em Alexandria, foi um grande admirador embora mais tarde crítico da obra do Poeta, que conheceu em 1919, com 22 anos. Ao recordá-lo, descreve-o como um actor no palco, reclamando aplausos. Konstantinos Fytaras, que teve aulas semanais com Cavafy no fim dos anos 1920, descreve como ele e os outros rapazes o identificavam como um "strange being", impondo a sua personalidade, cheio de "gravitas". Yannis Sareyiannis (1898-1962), nasceu em Alexandria e estudou em França, tendo publicado mais tarde alguns ensaios sobre Cavafy, que conheceu em 1915, então com 17 anos. Frequentador da casa de Cavafy, e tendo publicado apenas dois poemas, o Poeta começou a referi-lo como perito no período helenístico. «One day, when he mentioned the historian Plutarch in Sareyiannis's presence, he added: "But why do I need to say anything about this. Yannis here knows these things better than me. Yanni, you should be saying these things. Am I not right here, Yanni?" This seemed disingenuous to those around them because Constantine knew Plutarch by heart.» (pp. 365-366). Memas Kolaitis, de nome literário Makis Antaios, foi um tradutor, crítico e apoiante da obra de Cavafy. O seu Cavafy as I Knew Him (1980) é um valioso retrato íntimo do Poeta. «Upon meeting Constantine in the offices of Grammata in 1926, the young Memas Kolaitis was taken by the poet's "labyrinthine thinking" which for the "attentive listener, had the flow of a passage from an ancient Greek text, where a long sentence never needs an asterisk referring to a footnote for an interpretative aside". And he could never forget Constantine's voice, "soft and suggestive as a liturgical chant then sharp and clear-cut as staccato bursts". Sareyiannis regrets not having written down his conversations with the poet. And he mourns that Constantine did not have his own Eckermann to record his thoughts. If we had these conversations, he writes, they would be lauded as being on a par with his poetry.» (p. 367)

«No one could challenge Constantine's grasp of Hellenistic history, not even experts. At the same time, he re-created historical periods for his listeners, allowing them to experience "the agonies and the problems of these epochs". Constantine's capacity to breathe life into ancient figures is what the young Fytaras remembered from his tutorials with the poet.» (p. 368)

Temos também o testemunho do grande escritor Stratis Tsirkas (1911-1980), nome literário de Ioannis Chatziandreas, autor de dois estudos sobre a vida e a poesia de Cavay: Cavafy and His Era e The Political Cavafy. «Even though his time with Constantine was quite limited to three or four encounters, the novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas soon realized that his life had changed. Having discovered Constantine's revolutionary poetry and novel conceptualization of history at the age of nineten, he immediately felt the calling. He later referred to his "good fortune" in getting to know the poet, and came to believe how unhappy or invalid his life would have felt without this mission. After Constantine's death, Tsirkas devoted himself to explicating his work, turning into one of the most influential of Cavafy's subsequent interpreters, with two major volumes and many articles on the poet. By the time Constantine met Tsikas in 1930, the poet had perfect his strategies of binding young men in a net persuasion. He made them feel, as Tsirkas himself confessed, blessed to have engaged themselves with his poetry.» (p. 370)

Continuando com a descrição dos amigos do Poeta:

«At the same time, of course, he enjoyed their company tremendously, as we see in his interaction with Napoleon Lapathiotis [1888-1944], who had come to Alexandria in 1917 at the age of twenty-nine, as second lieutenant, in the company of his father, the general and defense minister Leonidas Lapathiotis. In his autobiography, Napoleon writes how Constantine sought him out and then showered him with attention in his apartment, lighting his finely made "damask lamps" and serving his special cognac in his prized red glasses. He showed the same enthusiasm when Napoleon and Marios Vaianos paid him a visit in his Athens hotel room during the fall of 1932, days before his surgery. Clearly animated by their appearance at his door, Constantine exclaimed to Napoleon how "you were constantly in my mind and I conjured you alive, just like that time, whenever I came upon a poem of yours". He then took a seat at the foot of the bed and beckoned to Napoleon to come next to him, looking Napoleon straight in the eyes, "as if erotically". Gradually he placed "his left hand on his shoulders and with his right hand stroked his two thighs tenderly and playfully, constantly and with warmth". Feeling awkward, Vaianos withdrew onto the balcony. Upon his return, he found them both staring at the eyes of the other "in unbroken exultation". And then, as if to break the spell, Constantine reminded his guest of the pleasant time they had spent in Alexandria: "It was very lovely, when you came. Young, very young...But now you are the same, Dorian Gray - and even more young". In the narration of the story, Vaianos implied that the relationship between Napoleon and Constantine was sensual and flirtatious. But it was also bound by Napoelon's love of Constantine's poetry, which he praised and promoted.» (pp. 370-371)

«Christopher Scaife (1900-1988) [professor da Universidade Fuad I do Cairo e da Universidade Americana de Beirute e conselheiro do Governo do Iraque], the English poet and scholar, who met Constantine through E. M. Forster in 1929, sent gushing and effusive letters. On March 31, 1930, he wrote, "I can'y tell you how much I am looking forward to meeting you again - for to me, when I think of you, it seems only a day since the delightful period of our intimacy. If there is any strangeness or stifness, I warn you, it will be on your responsability, for I am, as I was, with much love. Your enthusiast, Christopher." He addressed Constantine as "Revered and Beloved Greek" and "Dearest and most-revered Poet". In one letter (September 29, 1930), he expressed his determination to translate some of Constantine's poetry, and indeed, the two entered into a translating collaboration, what Scaife playfully termed "a séance of dictation" (December 19, 1930)» (p. 371) 

«Dimitris Garoufalias [1913-?] too discovered how fragile Constantine appeared to the opinions of others and how eager he was to bear news about his work and to boast.  When Garoufalias arrived in Alexandria from Volos in 1931 at the age of eighteen, he met the poet at the apartment of Alekos Sengopoulos, his uncle's brother-in-law. During the initial conversation, someone asked if Constantine's poetry was widely known in Greece. Garoufalias responded that a newspaper in Volos recently had published one of his poems. Immediately Constantine pressed Garoufalias for details about the date and place of publication, something that stunned the young visitor, who had not expected the eminent poet to bother with provincial newspapers. Anticipating courtesy but also indifference, Garoufalias was further surprised hy warmth Constantine showed him during dinner, cleraly feeling that the poet "tried to capture my attention, to impress me"» (p. 374)

«Along with Vasilis Athanasopoulos, P. Alites, Nikos Santorinios, and a few others, Vrisimitzakis also formed in 1917 the literary society Apuani to promote Constantine's poetry. When Vrisimitzakis moved to Annecy, France, in 1926, he carried on his apostolic mission. "I am so much in touch with myself", he wrote to his idol, "when I support you that I don't have to think about it. Have faith in me. I have so much to say." And in a letter dated January 14, 1933, just months before the poet's death, Vrisimitzakis wrote: "Please don't cease your valuable work, Mr. Cavafy. Continue to give us the diamonds that you have been offering us until now... In time we will speak, and we will say and resay what we owe you." (p. 375)

«Marios Vaianos [1905?-1975] was such an individual, a zealot most poets could only dream of it. Although he only met Constantine in person when the poet arrived in Athens for cancer surgery, for ten years he had been spreading Constantine's fame by talking to journalists, placing articles and reviews in newspapers, and passing out copies of poems. He also devoted an entire issue of his journal Nea Techni (1924) to his work, the first such special issue of a Greek journal in Constantine's lifetime and a catalyst in the spread of his fame. Vaiano's promotion of Cavafy was so fervent and forceful that it provoked resistance on the part of those who disliked Cavafy's poetry.

Born in Cairo, Vaianos moved to Athens in 1922 after a stay in Chios, a time when he began to hear about Constantine. Having read the seminal essay by Xenopoulos and a more recent article (1923) by the poet and critic Tellos Agras (1899-1944), Vaianos summoned the nerve on November 15, 1923, to write to the great Cavafy, who responded immediately with copies of his poems. Vaianos described this initial letter as an "apocalyptic" moment, just as Tsirkas had, and from "then on Cavafy became a daily concern and intention".» (pp. 375-376)

«During his entire correspondence with Vaianos, Constantine never mentioned his health, not even in his last letter of March 17, 1931, even though he had begun to suffer worrisome pain in his throat a year earlier. For this reason, Vaianos was struck, as if by a "whip", to learn from reports in the press of Constantine's sudden arrival in Athens in July 1932. Even under normal circumstances, the young Vaianos would have been apprehensive about confronting his idol face-to-face. These understandable misgivings were inflamed by the betrayal Vaianos felt at having learned from others about the poet's illness and appearance in the Greek capital. His pain was so deep that for days he avoided the Hotel Cosmopolite in Omonoia Square, where the poet was lodging.» (pp. 377-378)

«Many of Constantine's early disciples are known today because of their association with the poet. Although they serve as footnotes to a longer and more widely celebrated story, they have "become a name", to cite Tennyson's "Ulysses". In the give-and-take between the star and his fans, this was no small victory. By advancing his career, Constantine's acolytes received enormous recompense - a poem, a handshake, an afternoon with their idol, and a measure of immortality.» (p. 380)

Sobre a edição da obra de Cavafy, os autores escrevem:

«In his early years, roughly up to 1904, apart from publishing poems in periodicals, he would often print them individually on broadsheets, which he would distribute among friends and relatives. First publication then for him meant either the appearance of a poem in a periodical or in a broadsheet form. In 1904, Constantine gathered fourteen of these broadsheets into a bound edition ("tefchos"), which he printed privately in one hundred copies. And in 1910, he had another bound edition made, now containing twenty-one texts, and printed in two hundred copies. Most of the recipients of these bound booklets were friends and relatives first in Alexandria and then beyond. With these booklets Constantine was created a small but appreciative audience, gradually offering members a limited supply of a desirable good. Like an entrepreneur, he was playing with the market and tilting it toward his favor, so to speak. And by sending people individual broadsheets with new poems, he reminded them constantly of his existence.

But around 1911, the year he himself considered a turning point in his career, he stopped circulating the bound booklets of 1904 and 1910 and even tried to retrieve some of them. Because he so regretted these early editions, he returned to his previous method of free circulation of broadsheets. He could remove a poem for circulation, make changes, and then recirculate it. By 1916, he preferred to disseminate his work privately. Constantine printed poems and then also circulated single copies of these texts. Or he often distributed copies before publication. But then he included these offprints in folders ("sylloges"), loosely held together by a clip, with a catalogue of titles written by hand. These folders then became an open work, always expanding and being revised. The archives contain copies of poems already published and included in a folder but that show the poet's corrections. In time, Constantine created booklets

Continuando o texto publicado aqui :

O "Interlude" do livro tem por título "Constantine's Reading" e debruça-se sobre as leituras de Cavafy, os seus comentários às obras que leu, quer em publicações, quer em notas pessoais, os seus livros, ainda que a importante biblioteca do Poeta tenha sido lamentavelmente dispersa após a sua morte. E também à forma como se foi construindo, através dos livros, a personalidade cultural de Cavafy.

Na impossibilidade de uma descrição pormenorizada, transcrevo o final deste capítulo:

«The poetic images he uses here recall the aesthetic propos found in many of his poems and prose poems and serve to soften the polemic tone that defined much of the language debate.

Beyond the world of art and poetry, Constantine possessed an assortment of twenty-five books that his first biographer, Michalis Peridis, classified as "unmentionable", the bulk of which did not enter in the surviving library. Much of this was risqué fin-de-siècle French literature that overlapped with his broader interest in literary decadence. A number of these texts, however, were more explicit in their sexual content. In his study of Constantine's sexuality, Dimitris Papanikolaou identifies the following books that effectively constitute a veritable queer reading list: Henri d'Agris, Sodome (1888), Robert Scheffer, Le Prince Narcisse (1897), Jean Rhodes, Adolescents: Moeurs collégiennes (1904), Jules Hoche, Moeurs d'exception: Le vice mortel (1904), Henry Gauthier-Villares (Willy et Ménalkas), L'ersatz d'amour (1923), Alphonse Daudet, Sapho. Moeurs parisiennes (1884) and Armand Dubarry, Les Déséquilibrés de l'amour. Les flagellants (1898). In general, these texts deal with alternative sexual practices and explore the desire for "pleasures even stranger" that Constantine had expressed in his note on Baudelaire.

We conclude this intellectual interlude on the poet's reading interests with a comment by Timos Malanos, who repeatedly stated that this onetime mentor had ceased to read anything new or process any recent ideas after 1900. The point Malanos wished to make was that the Cavafian corpus had become hermetically sealed and was impermeable to any new ideas or cultural stimuli. While there is some truth to this in terms of literary influences, Constantine continued to read up until his final days. But this debate does not detract from the more important fact that his poetry continually foregrounds the act of reading itself. As such, his own reading interests remain a fascinating point of entry into his mind, imagination, and creative life.» (pp. 277-278)

 

Passemos ao capítulo seguinte: "Art above everything". 

Ao princípio, Cavafy não sabia verdadeiramente se iria tornar-se um poeta.  Tanto quanto é possível sabermos, começou a escrever poesia entre os dezanove e os vinte e dois anos. «He had begun compiling a dictionary in 1881 precociously at the age of sixteen, which ended with the entry "Alexander". [Há aqui um erro dos autores: em 1881 Cavafy tinha dezoito anos] To his horror, it was one of the items destroyed in the bombardment of 1882.» (p. 283) E não parará de escrever, preocupando-se progressivamente com o estilo e também com os assuntos abordados. É encorajado pelo irmão John, que o apoia vigorosamente. Aliás, era John quem, em 1880,  parecia estar destinado à glória poética, mas com o tempo a situação inverteu-se: Constantine ficou famoso e John ignorado.

Regressado de Istanbul a Alexandria, depois do bombardeamento britânico da cidade, era plausível que Cavafy se dedicasse ao negócio do algodão, bastante rentável e familiar aos gregos da cidade. Mas preferiu ser jornalista e começou a trabalhar na Bolsa de Alexandria como jornalista do "Telegraphos". Enquanto colaborava com outras publicações como crítico cultural, fazia traduções e revisão de livros. Com trinta anos, Cavafy tem uma vida social preenchida, mas a sua verdadeira preocupação é a arte, que não sacrifica às mundanidades que todavia não rejeita. A sua poesia começa a revelar, desde muito cedo, ainda que de forma singularmente discreta, um carácter homoerótico.

Neste capítulo, os autores começam a analisar, de um ponto de vista literário, a sua poesia, o que extravasa os limites deste texto.

Durante a sua estada em Atenas, em 1901, Cavafy teve uma vida cultural intensa, que é descrita pelos autores. Foi uma etapa crucial da sua vida. O poeta começa a ser conhecido na Grécia. Regressado a Alexandria, em 1908, mudou-se, com o seu irmão Paulo, para o apartamento da Rue Rosette, 17. Mais tarde habitaria a Rua Lepsius, 10, hoje designada Rua Sharm el-Sheikh, 10.   

«During the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries, Constantine was developing a poetry that was unique in Greek and world literature. We can characterize these Cavafian poetics in the following way: rather than using either demotic or the purist language, he invented his own idiosyncratic mixture of both registers, while he often cited words from earlier Greek writing in his poems. Thus, a poem could contain elements of this long linguistic tradition: classical, late-antique, Byzantine Greek.  At the same time, he began to experiment with form, as many other modernists, such as T. S. Eliot, were doing at the time. Like Eliot, he remained a conservative modernist, never adopting radical techniques. Nevertheless, it was this deliberate flouting of poetic conventions that made his poetry feel strange and unpoetic, even to his early followers in Alexandria.» (pp. 304-305)

Talvez devido às sucessivas mortes na família, Cavafy não ria, nem sequer sorria. O diplomata grego Philippos Dragoumis, que se encontrou com Cavafy quando chegou a Alexandria em 1916 como, vice-cônsul da Grécia, descreveu o poeta como um homem com «"yellowish-green complexion, shaven, Jewish face, with intense dark eyes." He remarked that Constantine never smiled or laughed and spoke with an English accent. In the course of their conversations about Alexandria and the future of Hellenism in Egypt, Constantine made a few insightful revelations about himself, saying that "after the loss of a brother he loved deeply he withdrew from public life." Now "he lives isolated, like an ascetic, and recalls the past."» (p. 311)

Foram penosas as perdas. «His losses were heavy. By middle age, Constantine had experienced two decades of continual mourning. As noted earlier, his friend Stephen Schilizzi died in 1886 at nineteen, to be followed by Mikès Ralli three years later. His brother Peter died in 1891, his maternal grandfather in 1896, his mother in 1899, his brother George in 1900, Aristides in 1902, and finally Alexander in 1905. In "From Nine O'clock" (1917/1918), Constantine speaks of a man exactly like himself who faces the desolation in his life. It is past midnight and he has been sitting in his room, remembering tragic events: "Family bereavements, sepations,/feelings of my dear ones, feelings/of the dead so little cherished." Altough we can't quite determine the impact of these deaths on him personally, we do know that this decade of misfortune coincided both with his first period of poetic creativity in the 1890s and with his search for a new style. At this time, he abandoned many of the entertainments of his youth, gave up on tennis, and stopped his lavish expenditures on clothes. Sorrow and creativity went hand in hand. But did death force Constantine to become a recluse? How recluse was he?» (pp. 312-313)

Naturalmente, Cavafy não se retirou completamente da vida social. «Of course, this does not mean that he was free from internal conflict during this decade. In 1925, he composed an important erotic poem with the title "Days of 1896", about a young man of thirty who had "debased himself" through his "forbidden" sexual pleasures and lost his money and reputation. Obiously, this young man is a far cry from the thirty-three-year-old Constantine enjoying foie gras, Roquefort, and fine champagne that New Year's Eve with his friends. "Days of 1896" points to an internal sexual struggle taking place within Constantine.» (p. 314)

A poesia de Constantine Cavafy é toda ela impregnada de um espírito verdadeiramente helenístico. Escrevem os autores: «His original angle to Hellenistic history amazed his listeners, including an English scholar who had read his poems in tranlation. During a conversation, Constantine dazzled him and the other guests so much that one of them presciently said that "in the future we won't have to read about the Hellenistic period. Cavafy's poems are enough." [Michalis Peridis]» (p. 324)

«Of course, his fascination with postclassical Greece did not appear ex nihilo. In the works of the Victorian painters, such as Edward Burne-Jones ans George Frederic Watts, and decadent writers like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, and Paul Verlaine, he found the themes of the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity. He also met people who shared his predilection for uncelebrated epochs. Robin Furness, as noted earlier, a British scholar and friend of E. M. Forster who worked in Alexandria's Egyptian civil service, had published translations of Hellenistic poetry. But nobody before Constantine had built Hellenistic Alexandria into a tower from which to examine civilizational decline, social marginalization, homosexuality, male beauty, and diasporic identities.» (p. 324)

Para a sua poesia, Cavafy procedia a minuciosas investigações históricas e linguísticas, como neste caso: «The scene enacted in "Caesarion" illustrates the copious research that went into his poems. Daily he pored over dictionaries to make sure he had the right word. We see this in comments he recorded in the poem "The Glory of Ptolemies", particularly his obsessive concern over the adverb "τελείωζ/teleios" (completely), including references to how this word was used by French authors of the seventeenth century.» (p. 327)

O Poeta era muito cuidadoso não só em ordenar tudo o que escrevia mas igualmente com os seus pertences: 

« This very act of going through catalogues was an almost ritual for Constantine. During his entire career, he kept a careful inventory of his poems, ytheir various revisions, emendations, and corrections, and lists of their recipients in Egypt and Europe. He also maintained lists of all kinds - of clothes, of his mother's jewelry, of kitchen articles as pots and pans, and household tasks. Between 1908 and 1914, he enumerated the contents of his house. He saved recipes and instructions on how to cook various foods, writing that "cutlets must be beaten". From 1887 until 1893, he worked on a register of games he enjoyed playing, such as dominoes, roulette, chess, heads or tails, tombola, and bridge, along a record of wins and losses. And he boarded everything - old bills, receipts from hotels, and various mementos such as printed menus. He preserved all the letters he received and often drafts of letters he sent to friends, family members, and acquaintances. Moreover, he stockpiled not only important documents, such as annual letters of appointment in the Office of the Irrigation Service, his baptismal and birth certificates, his residence permits issued annualy by the Greek General Consul of Alexandria, but also insignificant possessions such as his entry card to the Club Athénien and train tickets from his first trip to Athens in 1901, the receipt from the Grand Hotel Phaleron from that year, and from the Grand Hotel Splendid of Athens from July 29 of 1903. Like a young student on his first trip abroad, he endowed every admission ticket and receipt with major significance.

He even made lists of lists: "2.11.11. Lists of things I req. to take with me for a 2 day excursion...! Another list: "List of things I require to take with me for a comfortable [?] 10 days stay in Cairo during next May 14.4.07." After the death of his mother, he also had to manage the household affairs, as attested by the two-page summary he wrote of the domestic tasks. Here is a synopsis: Ahmed does the dishes while Hasan shines the silver. The clock is wound in the direction of the wall. You put two spoons of tea in the black teapot. Ahmed puts three and it becomes heavy. The house is cleaned thoroughly twice a year, once in the spring and the second time in the winter. An assistant comes to scrub the floor, beat the rugs and clean the windows. The baker comes at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and leaves a round loaf. For the evening, we get a straight loaf and, if necessary, an additional one. Ahmed knows the various shops in the neighborhood.

He kept detailed catalogues of his monthly expenses - for instance, from March 1 to December 31, 1899, noting the cost of various household articles and their repair. He was quite aware of the money he was spending for restaurants, cafés, groceries, and the servants' salaries. In an undated list, he enumerated the monthly outflow for "restaurant and coffe-houses expenses", "bread, milk, washing of clothes, rent", "candles and petroleum", "food for servants", "kitchen requirements". This tendency to maintain careful records about his finances was a lifelong trait, lasting well into adulthood. Even in 1932, he maintained a detailed record of his monthly cash flow.» (pp. 328-329)

[COMO EU ME REVEJO NAS PREOCUPAÇÕES QUOTIDIANAS DE CAVAFY!!!] 

Com o avançar da idade, o Poeta receava que a homossexualidade tivesse comprometido a sua capacidade de expressão e admirava os que não escondiam as suas inclinações.

«On the whole, Constantine remained faithful throughout his life to his aesthetics beliefs. He made compromises, given his precarious financial situation, and thus worked all his life as a civil servant. But he rarely changed lines of his poems to please anybody other than himself. At the same time, however, he feared that by middle age he had compromised the sexual freedom of his youth. In a note from 1905, he grumbled that the "wretched laws of society... have diminished my work. They have inhibited my expressiveness." This issue continued to trouble him all his life, as we can see in a conversation he had, twenty-five years later, and months before his death. In October 1932, the poet Napoleon Lapathiotis (1888-1944) and the Cavafy enthusiast Marios Vaianos (1905-75) came to visit him in his Athenian hotel just before he underwent cancer treatment. Durinf the course of their exchange, it became clear that Napoleon was very open about his homosexuality, in contrast to Constantine, who rarely addressed it in public. Envious that Napoleon had chosen to live in a manner true to his own convictions, Constantine said: "I am very jealous, Napoleon, of your freedom, of the life you lead... It is as you have your ideal Republic where you live and invite others for your company." And then he stopped. Napoleon, not wishing to impose on a sick man , responded, "But whoever wants to do something, Mr. Cavafy, can do something", adding that he tried to conduct the life he wanted and found in "Communism" the only understanding." Whoever followed communism was free, he said. Ignoring the political reference, Constantine responded that such a life was impossible in Alexandria: "People there are very conservative. One surveils the other, through windows and through keyholes. Because of a few poems, they characterize me as unlawful and stigmatized." He added thar he could not have led Napoleon's life in Alexandria, even though he wrote "daring poems which shocked but which people like and recite... without understanding their meaning and depth."» (pp. 339-340)

Ninguém sabia se Cavafy era feliz. A sua grande preocupação era a poesia e o reconhecimento público. No capítulo que estamos comentando, "The big poet change", os autores debruçam-se profundamente sobre a relação da Arte com a Vida em Cavafy, e da forma como mais ou menos subtilmente ele consubstanciou na poesia a sua vocação sexual.

«No one knew if Constantine was a happy person. He certainly derived joy from his poems. This was his principal preocupation after his forties, the point when he resolved to live for and write great work. A year before composing "Hidden", he recorded a note in which he expressed his resentment at not being sufficiently recognized and admired: "How injust it is for me to be such a genious and neither to be known everywhere nor get rewarded." As he gradually acquired a greater reputation, however, Constantine could no longer keep private his feelings about his self-worth and openly boasted of his outsize talents. When a group of students once asked him who he thought Greece's best poet was, he answered, "You mean after me..." (pp. 347-348)

Ao longo deste capítulo, os autores examinam alguns dos seus poemas mais importantes, aos quais nos referiremos mais tarde em post exclusivamente dedicado à poesia de Cavafy.

«At the age of forty, weighed down with memories of penury, facing the humiliation of working as a civil servant, unmarried and without any relations of intimacy, his only deliverance seemed to be his art. Without any other guardian angel in his life, he could not contemplate any reverseals to his grand plans. Quite simply, art became for him compensatory, making up for all of life's disappointments and deficiencies.» (p. 353)

A Parte V (e última do livro), "Cultivating Fame", compõe-se de dois capítulos: "The Quest for Glory" e "Constantine 's Literary Radius".

É inegável que Cavafy sempre procurou a fama e queixava-se da pouca difusão da sua obra, ainda que fosse sistematicamente avesso à tradução da sua poesia. Mas desejava verdadeiramente ser conhecido na Grécia e na Europa e não apenas em Alexandria, onde uma parte dos habitantes sabia muito bem quem era.

« From the shadows of his apartment, Constantine fed the lines to his supporters, rather like a ventriloquist. And by the last two decades of his life, his efforts had paid off. Never celebrated as a national poet, he had become instead a celebrity in his home city. Alexandrians knew him and heard of him, even if they had not necessarily read his poetry. He made his presence felt, often spreading rumors about himself to spark the interest of others. As a result, people recognized him on the streets or wished to meet him. "How is it possible for Alexandria to have such a great man and for us not to know him?" they would say. Ordinary people would ask Yiorgos Vrisimitzakis how they could meet the poet. One afternoon, sitting with Constantine and a friend in a café, Vrisimitzakis addressed himself in the vocative to the poet, "Mr Cavafy." At that point the waiter, his eyes beaming, asked if was indeed about to serve the real Cavafy. When Vrisimitzakis nodded in the ffirmative, the waiter stood stationary, in awe of the great man before him.» (p. 364)

Fiquei a saber por este livro que durante um certo período Cavafy dava aulas de história a alguns rapazes no seu apartamento. Não esclarecem os autores se as aulas eram pagas ou apenas devidas ao interesse do Poeta em transmitir os seus profundos conhecimentos. Creio que eram aulas individuais e suspeito que Cavafy sentiria prazer na companhia dos jovens, especialmente de alguns, ainda que daí não se possa inferir que existisse contacto físico. Glafkos Alithersis (1897-1965), nome literário de Michalis Chatzidimitriou, cipriota que viveu a maior parte da sua vida em Alexandria, foi um grande admirador embora mais tarde crítico da obra do Poeta, que conheceu em 1919, com 22 anos. Ao recordá-lo, descreve-o como um actor no palco, reclamando aplausos. Konstantinos Fytaras, que teve aulas semanais com Cavafy no fim dos anos 1920, descreve como ele e os outros rapazes o identificavam como um "strange being", impondo a sua personalidade, cheio de "gravitas". Yannis Sareyiannis (1898-1962), nasceu em Alexandria e estudou em França, tendo publicado mais tarde alguns ensaios sobre Cavafy, que conheceu em 1915, então com 17 anos. Frequentador da casa de Cavafy, e tendo publicado apenas dois poemas, o Poeta começou a referi-lo como perito no período helenístico. «One day, when he mentioned the historian Plutarch in Sareyiannis's presence, he added: "But why do I need to say anything about this. Yannis here knows these things better than me. Yanni, you should be saying these things. Am I not right here, Yanni?" This seemed disingenuous to those around them because Constantine knew Plutarch by heart.» (pp. 365-366). Memas Kolaitis, de nome literário Makis Antaios, foi um tradutor, crítico e apoiante da obra de Cavafy. O seu Cavafy as I Knew Him (1980) é um valioso retrato íntimo do Poeta. «Upon meeting Constantine in the offices of Grammata in 1926, the young Memas Kolaitis was taken by the poet's "labyrinthine thinking" which for the "attentive listener, had the flow of a passage from an ancient Greek text, where a long sentence never needs an asterisk referring to a footnote for an interpretative aside". And he could never forget Constantine's voice, "soft and suggestive as a liturgical chant then sharp and clear-cut as staccato bursts". Sareyiannis regrets not having written down his conversations with the poet. And he mourns that Constantine did not have his own Eckermann to record his thoughts. If we had these conversations, he writes, they would be lauded as being on a par with his poetry.» (p. 367)

«No one could challenge Constantine's grasp of Hellenistic history, not even experts. At the same time, he re-created historical periods for his listeners, allowing them to experience "the agonies and the problems of these epochs". Constantine's capacity to breathe life into ancient figures is what the young Fytaras remembered from his tutorials with the poet.» (p. 368)

Temos também o testemunho do grande escritor Stratis Tsirkas (1911-1980), nome literário de Ioannis Chatziandreas, autor de dois estudos sobre a vida e a poesia de Cavay: Cavafy and His Era e The Political Cavafy. «Even though his time with Constantine was quite limited to three or four encounters, the novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas soon realized that his life had changed. Having discovered Constantine's revolutionary poetry and novel conceptualization of history at the age of nineten, he immediately felt the calling. He later referred to his "good fortune" in getting to know the poet, and came to believe how unhappy or invalid his life would have felt without this mission. After Constantine's death, Tsirkas devoted himself to explicating his work, turning into one of the most influential of Cavafy's subsequent interpreters, with two major volumes and many articles on the poet. By the time Constantine met Tsikas in 1930, the poet had perfect his strategies of binding young men in a net persuasion. He made them feel, as Tsirkas himself confessed, blessed to have engaged themselves with his poetry.» (p. 370)

Continuando com a descrição dos amigos do Poeta:

«At the same time, of course, he enjoyed their company tremendously, as we see in his interaction with Napoleon Lapathiotis [1888-1944], who had come to Alexandria in 1917 at the age of twenty-nine, as second lieutenant, in the company of his father, the general and defense minister Leonidas Lapathiotis. In his autobiography, Napoleon writes how Constantine sought him out and then showered him with attention in his apartment, lighting his finely made "damask lamps" and serving his special cognac in his prized red glasses. He showed the same enthusiasm when Napoleon and Marios Vaianos paid him a visit in his Athens hotel room during the fall of 1932, days before his surgery. Clearly animated by their appearance at his door, Constantine exclaimed to Napoleon how "you were constantly in my mind and I conjured you alive, just like that time, whenever I came upon a poem of yours". He then took a seat at the foot of the bed and beckoned to Napoleon to come next to him, looking Napoleon straight in the eyes, "as if erotically". Gradually he placed "his left hand on his shoulders and with his right hand stroked his two thighs tenderly and playfully, constantly and with warmth". Feeling awkward, Vaianos withdrew onto the balcony. Upon his return, he found them both staring at the eyes of the other "in unbroken exultation". And then, as if to break the spell, Constantine reminded his guest of the pleasant time they had spent in Alexandria: "It was very lovely, when you came. Young, very young...But now you are the same, Dorian Gray - and even more young". In the narration of the story, Vaianos implied that the relationship between Napoleon and Constantine was sensual and flirtatious. But it was also bound by Napoelon's love of Constantine's poetry, which he praised and promoted.» (pp. 370-371)

«Christopher Scaife (1900-1988) [professor da Universidade Fuad I do Cairo e da Universidade Americana de Beirute e conselheiro do Governo do Iraque], the English poet and scholar, who met Constantine through E. M. Forster in 1929, sent gushing and effusive letters. On March 31, 1930, he wrote, "I can'y tell you how much I am looking forward to meeting you again - for to me, when I think of you, it seems only a day since the delightful period of our intimacy. If there is any strangeness or stifness, I warn you, it will be on your responsability, for I am, as I was, with much love. Your enthusiast, Christopher." He addressed Constantine as "Revered and Beloved Greek" and "Dearest and most-revered Poet". In one letter (September 29, 1930), he expressed his determination to translate some of Constantine's poetry, and indeed, the two entered into a translating collaboration, what Scaife playfully termed "a séance of dictation" (December 19, 1930)» (p. 371) 

«Dimitris Garoufalias [1913-?] too discovered how fragile Constantine appeared to the opinions of others and how eager he was to bear news about his work and to boast.  When Garoufalias arrived in Alexandria from Volos in 1931 at the age of eighteen, he met the poet at the apartment of Alekos Sengopoulos, his uncle's brother-in-law. During the initial conversation, someone asked if Constantine's poetry was widely known in Greece. Garoufalias responded that a newspaper in Volos recently had published one of his poems. Immediately Constantine pressed Garoufalias for details about the date and place of publication, something that stunned the young visitor, who had not expected the eminent poet to bother with provincial newspapers. Anticipating courtesy but also indifference, Garoufalias was further surprised hy warmth Constantine showed him during dinner, cleraly feeling that the poet "tried to capture my attention, to impress me"» (p. 374)

«Along with Vasilis Athanasopoulos, P. Alites, Nikos Santorinios, and a few others, Vrisimitzakis also formed in 1917 the literary society Apuani to promote Constantine's poetry. When Vrisimitzakis moved to Annecy, France, in 1926, he carried on his apostolic mission. "I am so much in touch with myself", he wrote to his idol, "when I support you that I don't have to think about it. Have faith in me. I have so much to say." And in a letter dated January 14, 1933, just months before the poet's death, Vrisimitzakis wrote: "Please don't cease your valuable work, Mr. Cavafy. Continue to give us the diamonds that you have been offering us until now... In time we will speak, and we will say and resay what we owe you." (p. 375)

«Marios Vaianos [1905?-1975] was such an individual, a zealot most poets could only dream of it. Although he only met Constantine in person when the poet arrived in Athens for cancer surgery, for ten years he had been spreading Constantine's fame by talking to journalists, placing articles and reviews in newspapers, and passing out copies of poems. He also devoted an entire issue of his journal Nea Techni (1924) to his work, the first such special issue of a Greek journal in Constantine's lifetime and a catalyst in the spread of his fame. Vaiano's promotion of Cavafy was so fervent and forceful that it provoked resistance on the part of those who disliked Cavafy's poetry.

Born in Cairo, Vaianos moved to Athens in 1922 after a stay in Chios, a time when he began to hear about Constantine. Having read the seminal essay by Xenopoulos and a more recent article (1923) by the poet and critic Tellos Agras (1899-1944), Vaianos summoned the nerve on November 15, 1923, to write to the great Cavafy, who responded immediately with copies of his poems. Vaianos described this initial letter as an "apocalyptic" moment, just as Tsirkas had, and from "then on Cavafy became a daily concern and intention".» (pp. 375-376)

«During his entire correspondence with Vaianos, Constantine never mentioned his health, not even in his last letter of March 17, 1931, even though he had begun to suffer worrisome pain in his throat a year earlier. For this reason, Vaianos was struck, as if by a "whip", to learn from reports in the press of Constantine's sudden arrival in Athens in July 1932. Even under normal circumstances, the young Vaianos would have been apprehensive about confronting his idol face-to-face. These understandable misgivings were inflamed by the betrayal Vaianos felt at having learned from others about the poet's illness and appearance in the Greek capital. His pain was so deep that for days he avoided the Hotel Cosmopolite in Omonoia Square, where the poet was lodging.» (pp. 377-378)

«Many of Constantine's early disciples are known today because of their association with the poet. Although they serve as footnotes to a longer and more widely celebrated story, they have "become a name", to cite Tennyson's "Ulysses". In the give-and-take between the star and his fans, this was no small victory. By advancing his career, Constantine's acolytes received enormous recompense - a poem, a handshake, an afternoon with their idol, and a measure of immortality.» (p. 380)

Sobre a edição da obra de Cavafy, os autores escrevem:

«In his early years, roughly up to 1904, apart from publishing poems in periodicals, he would often print them individually on broadsheets, which he would distribute among friends and relatives. First publication then for him meant either the appearance of a poem in a periodical or in a broadsheet form. In 1904, Constantine gathered fourteen of these broadsheets into a bound edition ("tefchos"), which he printed privately in one hundred copies. And in 1910, he had another bound edition made, now containing twenty-one texts, and printed in two hundred copies. Most of the recipients of these bound booklets were friends and relatives first in Alexandria and then beyond. With these booklets Constantine was created a small but appreciative audience, gradually offering members a limited supply of a desirable good. Like an entrepreneur, he was playing with the market and tilting it toward his favor, so to speak. And by sending people individual broadsheets with new poems, he reminded them constantly of his existence.

 

But around 1911, the year he himself considered a turning point in his career, he stopped circulating the bound booklets of 1904 and 1910 and even tried to retrieve some of them. Because he so regretted these early editions, he returned to his previous method of free circulation of broadsheets. He could remove a poem from circulation, make changes, and then recirculate it. By 1916, he preferred to disseminate his work privately. Constantine printed poems and then also circulated single copies of these texts. Or he often distributed copies before publication. But then he included these offprints in folders (“sylloges”) , loosely held together by a clip, with a catalogue of titles written by hand. These folders then became an open work, always expanding and being revised. The archives contain copies of poems already published and included in a folder but that show the poet’s corrections. In time, Constantine created booklets of the poems that circulated along with the folders. Upon his death, there existed two sewn booklets of sixty-eight poems in thematic order and a folder of sixty-nine poems of more recently published poems arranged in order of their first publication. What contemporary readers identified as Cavafy’s work were these loose collections he had bound at home and circulated privately, each one seemingly unique though drawing on the same number of poems. The Cavafy oeuvre was material and immaterial at the same time, dispersed throughout Egypt, Greece and Europe, held together by interpersonal relations, friendships, and alliances.» (pp. 383-384)

«It is no coincidence that the first complete edition of his poems in Greek was published in 1935, two years after his death, by Alekos and Rika Sengopoulos, in a deluxe, expensive, illustrated volume. Rika undertook the editorial work and Takis Kalmouchos, an artist whose work Constantine had known, created the typographic illustrations. The publisher was listed as “Alexandrini Techni, 10 Rue Lepsius, Alexandrie” even though the periodical had ceased to exist. The book was actually published in Athens. All 2,030 copies were sold with the profits going to Rika and Alekos.» (pp. 385-386)

Foi esta edição póstuma, conhecida como o Canon de Cavafy, que permitiu as primeiras traduções da sua poesia. Em vida, o Poeta foi insistentemente desafiado a publicar a sua obra em língua estrangeira, mas sistematicamente recusou. Cavafy gostava de discutir as traduções de poesia inglesa efectuadas por Memas Kolaitis mas nunca as suas. Por isso, este ficou surpreendido quando soube que John Cavafy já tinha feito traduções para inglês da poesia do irmão. E Cavafy referia-se às traduções de George Valassopoulo como tendo constituído um parêntese. «When Kolaitis mentioned that he had finally been able to secure a copy of Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide, which was published in 1922 and, to his delight, contained a translation of “The God Aandons Antony”, Constantine did not wish talk about it.» (p. 386)

 

«E. M. Forster was equally frustrated by Constantine’s evasiveness about foreign translation. Forster had been so awestruck by Constantine’s poetry that, when he returned to England, he sought the poet’s permission to publish an edition of his poems translated by George Valassopoulo, the only translator into English the poet had approved of, apart from John. » (p. 387)

Na verdade, Forster envidou todos os esforços para que a poesia de Cavafy fosse conhecida em Inglaterra, Mobilizou mesmo nesse sentido os seus conhecimentos pessoais. «In the meantime, Forster had been placing poems in periodicals like The Nation and making inquiries with the Hogarth Press. In fact, he got Leonard Woolf to send Constantine an offer of publication on September 17, 1923, something extraordinary for a poet living in Alexandria and writing in Greek. “Our books find their way to a small public who would, I think, appreciate your poetry”. What an astonishing proposal this must have been from one of the avant-garde literary presses in the English-speaking world. Most poets would have flattered by such a prospect. Yet implausibly there was only silence from Alexandria. Rather than giving up, Forster sent more anxious inquiries, begging his friend permission to publish. He even wrote to T. S. Eliot, editor of The Criterion, for assistance. And in addition to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Forster dispatched translated poems to Arnold Toynbee, Robert Graves, and T. E. Lawrence.» (pp. 388-389)

A primeira edição inglesa da obra de Cavafy, em tradução de John Mavrogordato, só foi publicada em 1951, quase duas décadas depois da morte do Poeta.

«Their lively communication shows that Constantine was not opposed to translation that he could oversee but felt anxious about a process taking place abroad with publishing houses he could not supervise. It is therefore no surprise that the first English translation of his complete oeuvre would not appear until 1951, nearly two decades after his death, published by the Hogarth Press as The Poems of C. P. Cavafy and translated by John Mavrogordato. Indeed, six years earlier, Leonard Woolf  had written to Forster with the news: “I have just had one of the great triumphs of my life. I have received from Singopoulo a signed agreement giving me the right to publish Cavafy in Mavro’s translation. I shall do it complete. The triumph would be complete if you would write an introduction to it”. It was not by chance that Forster too used this very word, “triumph”, to describe his own part in the spread of Cavafy’s fame. In a letter to George Savidis, he wrote, “How very proud I am, George, that I ever got to know him; it is certainly one of my “triumphs”. (p. 392)

Importa referir que em oposição ao entusiasmo de Forster se encontravam não só muitos intelectuais de Alexandria mas igualmente muitos críticos gregos, incluindo Ioannis Psycharis, o primeiro campeão da linguagem demótica, que escreveu contra os jovens da Nea Techni, cujo editor era Vaianos, chamando-lhes “youngsters”. «But he saved his last insult for Constantine himself, casting him as the “karagiozis” of the Greek language – that is, the clownish protagonist of Greek shadow puppetry, a beloved form of popular folk culture.» (p. 393)

«Among the most notorious were the defamatory articles the physician and journalist Socrates Lagoudakis (1864-?) wrote about him, calling him, in one instance, the “new Wilde”. Lagoudakis was renowned in Alexandria for his exploits as a volunteer in the Cretan War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire in 1899, his war correspondence for a Parisian newspaper, and his participation as an athlete in the first modern Olympics in Athens (1896). He tended to circulate alone in the streets of Alexandria, dressed in black as if returning from a funeral. Malanos writes that the conflict between them originated trivially over Constantine’s decision to accentuate the Greek translation of the word “York” (from New York) with a smooth breathing mark rather than the rough mark preferred by Lagoudakis. In April 1924, Lagoudakis gave a slanderous lecture about the poet. Ware of his malicious columns, Constantine’s friends and supporters went to the lecture expecting trouble. But they were shocked to hear this Greek hero make insulting insinuations about the poet’s personal life with references to “secret bedrooms” and “unnatural and unlawful loves”. Horrified by what they were hearing, some asked Lagoudakis to stop, interrupting his talk with shouts of “down with the libeler”. When he refused, “supporters and friends of the poet, amongst the first of whom was Malanos,… moved threatening towards the podium, topped him, led him down, and escorted him out of the hall”. In the words of Vaianos, Constantine understood at this moment the affection and support he had from his followers and friends.» (p.395)

Apesar da controvérsia gerada pela sua poesia, especialmente nos meios gregos, a popularidade de Cavafy foi crescendo. Em 1926 foi galardoado com a Ordem da Phoenix por Theodoros Pangalos, ditador grego que governou como primeiro-ministro de Junho 1925 a Julho 1926 e como presidente de Abril a Agosto 1926. Numa carta escrita em 8 de Setembro de 1926, o cônsul-geral da Grécia em Alexandria informou Cavafy que a distinção lhe fora concedida em reconhecimento da sua obra poética. Muitos dos amigos sugeriram-lhe que recusasse a condecoração concedida por um ditador. Mas Cavafy, sempre sequioso do aplauso público, recusou fazê-lo, dizendo que ela lhe fora atribuída pelo Estado grego e que a rejeição seria um insulto ao governo.

«What was perhaps predictable is that foreigners came to value Constantine’s poetry so early on. Not beholden to Greek aesthetic tastes not strangled in the country’s ideological and linguistic tensions, they could appreciate his stylistic and thematic innovations. Rika was among the first to realize this. From her own perch in Alexandria, she understood that Constantine posed a threat to traditional poets and critics in Greece who, in reaction, tried actively to marginalize his work. She was one of the first people to proclaim Cavafy a “great poet” in the 1927 dedication of her poem “Dejection”. It’s doubtful, however, that this loyal and indefatigable friend could have foreseen Cavafy’s current international stardom. Not even Constantine Cavafy himself, the man who always believed in the majesty of his own talents, could have imagined, as he shuffled through the streets of Alexandria, that one day he would conquer the globe as few other modern poets have done.» (pp. 401-402)

Chegámos ao “Epílogo” do livro, que abre com versos de Virginia Woolf (“The New Biography”) em epígrafe:

Nor can we name the biographer whose art is

subtle and bold enough to present that queer

amalgamation of dream and reality, that

perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow.

 

Como já escrevemos, Cavafy teve todo o cuidado em conservar a sua documentação pessoal, incluindo cartas, bilhetes de teatro, menus de restaurantes, convites, facturas de compras domésticas, etc., e muito naturalmente as várias versões dos seus poemas. E nos últimos anos da sua vida terá organizado essa documentação, não só por desejo próprio mas também por sugestão de Rika que foi, por assim dizer, o seu primeiro biógrafo, intenção manifestada logo após a morte do Poeta. 

«If there was anyone who might have come close to understanding the poet’s own “queer amalgamation”, what Virginia Woolf identified as the very essence of biography with its ingenious division of dream and reality into rainbow and granite, it was the subtle and sensitive Rika. She remained a steadfast supporter who attended to Constantine’s needs to the very end. Although married to Alekos, Rika was in reality Mrs. Cavafy, the poet’s de facto spouse – his editor, critic, secretary, nurse, and errant-runner – the sole woman in his life. She had made his world and his art her own. In his final days, many people came to ask about the type of person he was. So did she. Was he the egocentric, self-involved poet who could not see past his own fame, as so many in Alexandria insisted? Or was the real Constantine the man with the tender heart who had revealed himself to her in his final weeks?» (pp. 403-404)

«Rika was probably the only person who knew that in his final months the poet felt terrified of being alone, that he feared loneliness more than death. While in the hospital, he insisted on the company of Alekos and Rika, his niece Eleni Coletti and Giorgos Paputsakis. Over the years, Rika had come to understand how the anxiety of isolation haunted him. She remembered how, when walking along the street to their building, he would point up to his apartment and say of himself – “alone up there, hero and victim”.  Knowing his dread of being abandoned, Rika took confort that at the end he felt himself closer to her than to anyone else, finding in her much understanding and love.» (pp. 404-405)

«What, for instance, was the status of the final draft of “On the Outskirts of Antioch”, the poem he was revising up through his final days?  Of course, it had not surprised her or anyone who knew him that he was working on corrections of this poem, hoping to get the finished text to the printers before he died. He had brought his poems with him to the hospital, keeping them on his bedside table, next to his medications. […] Even, at the very end, he never ceased thinking of his work; “the poetic idea continued to come and go”, as he wrote in his great poem “Darius”.» (pp. 406-407)

 

«But before setting herself to address any of this, there was much to be done. There were the many telegrams she and Alekos were receiving, notable among which was one from Antonis Nenaki in Athens: “Condoléances sincères”. She and Alekos had to plan the funeral and then face the complex and overwhelming reality of how to handle and manage the tributes and testimonials that would be forthcoming. Much of this had to be approached with an eye toward editing the poems and launching the first published collection, the centerpiece of their promotional strategy. All would come to hinge on this mighty endeavor, and in the process, Rika’s marriage would undergo tremendous strain, buckling and ultimately dissolving under the weight of her having to manage Cavafy’s growing reputation.

The funeral was solemn enough and predictable, as were the accompanying tributes. At the conclusion of the religious ceremony, Pericles Skeferis, the consul general of Greece in Alexandria, offered a eulogy. “As a representative of Hellenism” in Alexandria, he declaimed, he had come to honor “the extraordinary poet and rare artist” who, expressing the spirit of Alexandria, was proud “to have deserved such a city”, referring here to Constantine’s popular poem “The City”. With his illustrious poetry, Skeferis continued, Cavafy “created a poetic school and brought about a new blossoming of the Hellenic spirit in Alexandria”. And he concluded with these words: “Poet, the nation bids you farewell with sorrow as does Alexandria which loses you”. The casket, covered by a cross of laurel, an offering from Alexandria ‘s poet and intellectuals, was transported along the customary path to the Chatby cemetery for burial at the family grave site. The procession was led by Metropolitan Theofanis and priests from Saint Savas. Present were many of the prominent culturati of Alexandria. Once through the gates of the cemetery, the casket and mourners passed into what amounted to a little city itself, a Greek necropolis characterized by many grand monuments, some resembling small temples in their own right.  Similar to other famous Greek cemeteries of the diaspora cities of Vienna, Trieste, London, and Istanbul, Chatby contained impressive tombs, notably the opulent monuments of the Salvago, Benaki, Ralli, Rodocanachi, Zervoudaki, and Averoff  families. By comparison, the Cavafy grave site was modest. Surronded by an iron rail a few feet in height, the plot contained one tall rectangular monument that was more imposing than its other two and on top of which rested a marble cross. On the sides of this monument were listed the names of Haricleia, Peter John, and the brothers Peter, George, Aristides, and John. The gravestone for Constantine was separate, and on it Rika and Alekos would have the word “poet” inscribed, lest there be any doubt in the minds of future mourners:

CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY

POET

DIED IN ALEXANDRIA

29 APRIL 1933

 

Before the casket was interred, Constantine’s friend Apostolos Leontis delivered the final eulogy. Like the consul general, he too alluded to the poetry, specifically to “The God Abandons Antony”. Addressing Constantine in the second person, Leontis said that, as the footsteps of death became louder, “you, peaceful and collected, prepared yourself to receive death … and faithful to your immortal verses you did not receive yourself, saying that this was all a dream, that your ears had fooled you”. It seemed appropriate, somehow, that everyone would cite this same poem at the end. The funeral was covered by the press in Alexandria and also in Athens. The tributes and planned commemorations would now begin in earnest. Just a few weeks after the funeral, the journal Panaigyptia devoted a special issue o Cavafy’s work.  Gaston Zananiri suggested that the city of Alexandria erect a bust of Cavafy in a public space, an idea seconded by Papoutsakis.» (pp. 407-408-409)

 

[AQUANDO DAS MINHAS VISITAS A ALEXANDRIA, DESLOQUEI-ME DUAS VEZES AO CEMITÉRIO GREGO ORTODOXO PARA ME RECOLHER JUNTO AO TÚMULO DE CAVAFY]

 

Nos tempos posteriores à morte de Cavafy sucederam-se numerosas evocações da sua obra, com a participação de importantes personalidades gregas e egípcias.

Em casa, Rika Sengopoulos começou a preparar a glória póstuma do poeta.

«Rika in turn would commemorate Constantine’s death by recording a series of observations in preparation for her projected biography. In the introduction to this project, she admitted that “I am the only person who could do this [write the biography]. I lived next to him for ten whole years. In his final years he had no family near him”. And she pointed to the fact that she possessed all his papers, his correspondence, his private notes, his autobiographical remarks, in short, a full archive. She felt quite confident that “having lived in the same house with him” and having spent so many hours on his papers, she had formed a clear picture of the poet in her mind. At the same time, however, she was uncertain about the project, feeling perhaps that she should let time pass so that she could avoid being influenced by his “charm”. She also recognizes how “difficult is the task that I am assuming”. But in the end “it is my duty to present Cavafy”. She composed many pages of notes, with comments on the poet’s life and work, all evidence that she had carefully studied the material in her possession. She resolved to create an “honest” portrait, to capture the complexity of the man, even if this was “beautiful or ugly”. Curiously enough, her proposed title for the book was in French, “Cavafes en pantoufles” (Cavafy in slippers), an intimate portrait of a man few people, if any, had actually known». (pp. 411-412)

«Rika continued with her plans to compose a biography, a project she was uniquely placed to execute. Sadly, for reasons we will never know, she never went beyond this initial stage. In fact, nothing more this project remains in the Cavafy archive than these preliminary remarks. And she failed to publish anything on Cavafy beyond the few essays after his death and deluxe edition of his collected work. But after decades of silence, she finally gave a lecture on Cavafy in Alexandria on March 20, 1956. She intended to offer the same presentation in Athens a couple of months later at the invitation of an Athenian cultural organization, having arrived with her second husband, Vangelis Karagiannis, with plans of traveling farther to Spain. But she died of complications arising from an acute pulmonary edema on May 20, 1956, in the Athenian suburb of Nea Smyrni. The Athenian public never got a chance to hear this lecture, which was published only in 1970 in Orizontes, an obscure journal. Her talk, written with intelligence and sensitivity that demonstrated her talents as a literary critic, did try to explain the sphinx of Alexandria. Unlike the hagiographic portrayals she offered immediately after his death, this is fuller and more balanced, a text that attempts to disentangle the poet’s many contradictions. It serves as a taste of what her biography might have been like». (pp. 413-414)

Para concluir, transcrevemos o ultimo parágrafo do livro:

 

«Readers around the world today are indeed moved by his “notions of beauty”, exacted as he predicted in “Vary Rarely”.

[Transcrevemos o poema “Very Rarely”, publicado em 1911:

He is an old man. Exhausted and hunched,

broken by time and debauchery,

he crosses the alley with a sluggish gait.

But when he enters his house to conceal

his disheveled age, he reflects

On what he still keeps of his youth.

 

Young men now recite his lines.

His visions appear before their lit-up eyes.

Their healthy, sensual minds,

their firm flesh

are stirred by his notion of beauty.]

 

Only someone loftily convinced of his own genius and powers of persuasion could have composed these lines. Constantine was the man who recklessly risked it all and won. In terse, disciplined verse, he provided readers beyond Alexandria and his own time with situations, characters, and vignettes they would find applicable in their own lives. From the confines of his whimsical apartment, stuffed with memories of loss, trauma and deprivation, he foresaw the modern world as an interconnected expanse of ethnic, racial and national groups. And though he did not live long enough to experience the “more perfect society” where people “made like him” would act and move freely, he fashioned  for generations of marginalized queer people images, words, and ideas of self-representation. Moreover, by looking unsparingly into his family’s experience with dispossession and into Hellenism’s own history of decline and survival, he created poetry that transcended the limits of the Greek language and the Hellenic world. At the same time, he made this language into the subject of his poems. By writing in a mix of the vernacular and the purist registers and by incorporating words and phrases from other historical periods into his poems he made the Greek tongue seem strange to Greek readers, giving them the impression that they were translating from their own language.  Cavafy the poet lives on through the energy and aesthetic pleasure that others bring to and take from his poetry. Translation, that practice he so dreaded in an almost superstitious way, paradoxically has given him a tenacious afterlife. The man in his slippers ventured out of his house a luminary.» (pp. 417-418)

 

O texto é precedido por uma Cronologia da vida e da obra de Cavafy e inclui em apêndice uma lista das pessoas importantes na vida de Cavafy, de Notas ao texto, e de Bibliografia.

 

Neste extenso comentário ao livro optei, por uma questão de precisão, pela transcrição de vários períodos e pela inclusão de fotografias feitas por mim ao longo dos anos.

Espero ter contribuído, ainda que modestamente, para o conhecimento do livro Alexandrian Sphinx, obra essencial para a prossecução da divulgação daquele que podemos considerar o último dos Helenistas.