A splendid piece in The New Republic by the always readable Peter Green on the Daniel Mendelsohn translation of the collected poems of Constantine Cavafy.
Every autodidact, someone once claimed, can be guaranteed to have a bee
in his bonnet somewhere, and this was certainly true of Cavafy, whose
bee (pursued in no less than a dozen poems, five of them unfinished)
was the improbable figure of Julian the Apostate. It might be thought
that a poet who glimpsed the old gods winging it over Ionia would
welcome an emperor who aimed to put them back officially on their
pedestals; but in fact Cavafy reveals a visceral distaste and contempt
for Julian. G.W. Bowersock, in two characteristically erudite and
incisive essays in his wonderful new collection From Gibbon To Auden: Essays on the Classical Tradition,
pinpoints exactly why. The poet was at some pains, on accepting his
homosexuality, to reconcile it with his Christianity by assuming a
tolerant world where "pagans and Christians could associate easily with
one another in unhindered pursuit of the sensual life. It was the
avowed aim of Julian, the ascetic pagan, to put an end to all that."
Exactly. Julian is skewered as humorless, pompous, hypocritical, and
ridiculous. But Cavafy is also, in an erotic sense, Sir Toby Belch
confronting Malvolio: "Dost think, because thou art virtuous, there
shall be no more cakes and ale?" It is enjoyable to see this
professional ironist, for once, shaken out of his ironic detachment and
going for the jugular.
Interesting that there is a mention of Lawrence Durrell, but no discussion of the fact that he did more than anyone else to popularise Cavafy to the English-speaking public in the late 1950s via the Alexandria Quartet and his translation of poems like "The City".
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