In 1894, a team of French archaeologists discovered near the temple of Apollo, in Delphi, a splendid statue of Antinous, the lover of the Emperor Hadrian, drowned in strange circumstances in the waters of the Nile around the year 130 AD. Konstandinos P. Cavafis felt a strong attraction for this boy, who died in the prime of his age – the theme, on the other hand, is very Cavafian – to the point that, during the first trip he made to Athens in 1901 In the company of his brother Alexandre, he only mentions the bust of this ill-fated young man on the page of his diary corresponding to the visit to the Archaeological Museum of the Greek capital: “This morning we went to the Archaeological Museum, very beautiful. The bust of Antinous seemed especially beautiful to me.”
This fact alone would justify the choice of the photograph that shows the discovery of this statue to illustrate the first volume – which brings together the 154 canonical poems – of the new unabridged version in Catalan of Cavafy’s poetry that will be published in the next few days, but there is another detail that should not go unnoticed by the reader: just as the statue seems to emerge from the bowels of the earth, this new version – which is complemented by a second volume that brings together the reserved poems, the rejected , the unfinished ones, the prose poems and a couple of narratives – also emerges from a fund that was inaccessible to researchers until a few years ago: that of the poet’s papers, locked away until their acquisition by the Onasis Foundation ten years ago. years.
As has been said more than once, there is no better guide to understanding the inner workings of the poetic phenomenon than the roles of a writer. In the case of Cavafy, this statement is especially true. A lot of anecdotes are explained about him that present him as a man and, above all, as an extremely scrupulous poet. I cannot avoid the temptation to relate here a very illustrative one: the day he decided to eat chicken, he sent his Egyptian servant to the market and made him bring to his office the best chicken he could find (naturally, live), which he examined carefully. If he did not meet his expectations, the operation was repeated as many times as necessary until the bird that deserved to end up on his plate was found.
The reader will forgive me for this excursus, which is so unpoetic, but I think it serves perfectly to depict, even in an approximate way, Cavafy’s disposition, which often bordered on eccentricity. We will understand, then, that such a person revised his poems to the point of exhaustion and that he never accepted the offer to publish his complete work in book format, even when the proposal came from abroad and from dear friends, such as the English writer E.M. Forster, who had offered himself as his translator into Shakespeare’s language.
Thus, the editio princeps of all his recognized poetry – which until then had appeared only in loose sheets or very sporadically in magazines especially Alexandrian, Athenian and Constantinopolitan – took until 1935 (when the poet had already been writing for two years). had died), and was in charge of his executors, Alekos and Rika Sengópulos, the neighbors and friends who took care of him in the final phase of the illness that would take him to the grave on the same day he turned seventy, the early morning of December 29. April 1933.
The poet’s archive, then, is revealed to us as an inexhaustible quarry, which illustrates what he himself said in the poem Oculto, which, as the title indicates, appeared hidden in a drawer of his archive: “it is only for the most imperceptible, / by the most secret writings, / that will know me as I am.” All this rich material (mostly unpublished) constitutes the basis of this new version in Catalan of the complete poetry of Cavafis and allows the reader to follow the trail of many poems, many years before their publication, in loose papers, as well as discover new compositions and comments by the poet himself on already known poems that reveal his ultimate intention at the time of writing them.
Many of these new texts have erotic content and we have to assume that the poet ended up rejecting them when he considered that they exceeded the narrow moral limits of the society of his time. Some left no trace, except the sheet on which they were copied and which has been preserved in his archive, sometimes crossed out with a large cross and preceded by a note advising against publication. Others, however, years later served as outlines for well-known poems, although much less daring, in moral terms, validating a phrase by the poet himself, also located in his archive, according to which “the light of a new poem gently crosses the penumbra of an older one (light in one, penumbra in another, but never at random, but always in accordance with a very careful poetic economy).”
This is the case, for example, of El cotxe tancat (1907), Mig embriac (1913) and Estima’l més (1915), some verses of which we will find again in later erotic poems that are less erotically explicit, but which, in As a whole, they are unpublished and we reproduce them with this article for the first time in Catalan. They are, after all, a good example of the balance that the poet tried to maintain throughout his life between two symplegades: the puritanism of his society and “beds that current morality calls depraved,” as he himself says in the poem In an old book.
No less interesting are the comments (in Greek or English) that he makes to his poems and that have been preserved, usually written in such a tight handwriting and full of abbreviations that sometimes it is almost unintelligible, but which are of enormous interest in knowing the meaning. last of many of his compositions. Here are a couple of examples:
Along with the manuscript of the poem Al plaer, with only four verses, a note appeared, in English, which I immediately reproduce in the Catalan version along with the poem:
“ Joy and perfume of my life has been the memory of the hours / in which I enjoyed the pleasure and made it my own, just as I wanted. / Jewel and perfume of my life has been this memory for me, / that I have always detested the joy of routine loves.”
“[The poem] does not refer to all kinds of love, but only to routine loves. Here the word pleasure is equivalent to voluptuousness”.
One of Kavafis’ best-known compositions is Un vell [An old man], precisely because it was set to music in a very free version by Lluís Llach (together with Ítaca) with the new title of A la taverna del mar and included on side B from his LP Campanades a morts (1977). In a few poems the contrast between lasciviousness – the driving force of most literary works, according to the poet – and physical decrepitude – one of his great obsessions – reaches a greater and more disturbing force. In case there was any doubt in the interpretation of the poem, Cavafis, in an unpublished note from his archive, is very explicit: “A young man, faced with situations of contempt, has the hope of freeing himself, of being able to act to overcome it, if conditions become worse.” They show him favorably. But an old man does not have this door open, and that is why he himself has to endure these situations resignedly, because, if he objects, he runs the risk of making things worse and the contempt becoming even greater […]. A young man in bed with another young man is a beautiful thing, but there is something disgusting about an old man […]. Some things can be said by young people, but not by old people. Maybe that also happens the other way around, but it is normal for the old man to think […] about everything he lacks.”
All this new material and a complete version for the first time of the Alexandrian’s poetry in a Catalan that strives to avoid “the Gothic, refrigerated, precious and microbe-free style of the Noucentistas” of which Pla spoke and which has inspired a good part of the preceding translations, provides a unique opportunity for the Catalan reader to read or reread a poet who continues to be one of the greats among the greats. His evocation of the past, both intimate and historical – which is reflected in two specific themes: eroticism and moral attitudes that have universal validity – has decisively influenced European poetry in the second half of the 20th century (and is has become crucial for Catalan poetry after 1960). In poets such as Gabriel Farrater, Maria Àngels Anglada, Joan Margarit, Francesc Parcerisas, Manuel Forcano, Enric Sòria or Jordi Julià his influence is perfectly recognizable.
But that is not all. From an apartment that today would seem démodé to us, without electric lighting and full of furniture and junk from other times, Cavafis reflected on the great human problems and showed himself as a man ahead of his time, in a similar way to the protagonists of his poem. The wise perceive what is approaching (1915), to whom “the secret rumor of approaching events reaches.” His opposition to the death penalty or the so-called social Darwinism – which defended the right of supremacy of the strong over the weak – and the very modern and uninhibited vision he had of love between men – which made him a precursor of the change of perspective in the medical, social and literary consideration of homosexuality – give him the category of classic, ultra-modern poet, poet of future generations as, after all, he had defined himself on some occasion.