The title of this essay seems as a fake dilemma or almost sacrilege, since it is well known how Cavafy did not love the "weak" sex, how he rejected the post romantic voluptuousness of his time and how he wasn’t inspired by passions and mythical separations. But how and from what poetic passage Cavafy slips, even "imperceptibly" in the ontological cosmology of Women ? How and by what virtue women gain a place in Cavafy’s ritual of historical construction, how do they fit in this highly erotic gay scenery?
3. C.P. Cavafy (1924)
I am Constantinopolitan by descent, but I was born in Alexandria– in a
house on Cherif Street ; I left when I was very young, and spent much
of my childhood in England. I visited that country later, when I was
older, but for a short while. I have also lived in France. […] I have not
been in Greece for many years now. My last employment was that of a
worker at a government office belonging to the Ministry of Public Works
of Egypt. I speak English, French and a little Italian.
7. Cavafy in Japan
Hisao Nakai, “Cavafy, C.P., C.P. Cavafy Complete Poems”,
Misuzu Shobo, 1991
C. P. CAVAFY IN TOKYO
TWENTY-ONE ANIMATED MOVIES BASED ON C. P.
CAVAFY’S POETRY Student Workshop
of the Musashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan, 2013
8. From late romanticism to poetic maturity:
Cavafy’s three categories of poems
Philosophical poems (« poems which, though not precisely
philosophical, « provoke thought »)
Historical poems (Hellenistic age «particularly fitting for his
characters »)
« Hedonistic » (aesthetic) poems in realistic settings
9. Desire and the strategy of (homosexual)
liberation
The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with
time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes
Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge
between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of
deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings,
but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy’s poems, in
dealing with that Hellenic “special love,” and touching en passant upon
conventional broodings and longings, are attempts—or rather recognized
failures—to resurrect once-loved shadows.
Joseph Brodsky, « On Cavafy’s side », 1977
10. Art without Woman
A problem which has arisen in front of me at the beginning of my poetic
creation was: Is art without Woman possible at all? I mean, as a
“sensual” factor. The woman, you see, is everywhere in all events: in
novels, in cinema, in theater, in everything. Even the most trivial things
of the everyday life. Lets say, in a soap advertising or a tooth paste, or
of a bottle of cognac, they will put a woman on it in order to attract
attention. In those cigarettes here you see, they have a woman.
Everywhere ... Yet I concluded that art can be made without a woman.
C.P.Cavafy, 1924
12. Woman and the ancients
Little more than a slight acquaintance with the writings of the authors of
antiquity equally sacred and profane, is necessary to convince the
student how greatly the ancients were deficient in that spirit of gallantry
which is considered in our times an essential part of men’s behaviour
towards the fair sex. They have heaped upon women the bitterest
invectives and described marriage in colours so black and forbidding
that one of the Christian Fathers has gone to the length of terming it an
“incongruity”! We have only to congratulate the venerable authority
upon his parents’ thinking another way else humanity would run little
chance of receiving his teaching.
13. Euripides, as one of the sex’s most severe accusers –having won
during life the honourable appelative of μισογύνης or the « woman-
hater »– claims with justice the place of honour at the head of the rest.
« Terrible » says the tragic poet « is the violence of the wars that raiseth
a tempest in the sea, terrible is the breath of fire, terrible is the vortex of
the torrents, terrible is poverty, and terrible are a thousand other evils;
but none is more terrible than woman.
14. Dunÿa Güzeli
Since in this hateful harem I am immured
who can see my beauty, in all the world?
The jealous foe who casts her poisoned look
at me, or vile eunuchs; and the blood
freezes in my veins when my contemned
husband draws near. Prophet, Master mine,
forgive my heart that cries aloud in pain,
If only I were Christian!
Had I been born a Christian I should be free
to show myself to all, both night and day;
the men in wonder, women jealously
would behold my beauty and agree, –
Nature won’t again produce my like.
When I set out in my calèche to ride
the crowds would fill up Stamboul’s streets
15. Veizades and his mistress
I love thee….but if thou art a humble fisher’s lass,
are thine eyes bright, for that, a whit the less,
is thy hand not whiter still than milk is white,
is thy body with amorous graces not replete?
Lineage, name, I utterly forget them all,
a slave before you I, the prince’s son, do fall!
16. Horace in Athens
In the bedchamber of the hetaera Leah,
Where all is style and wealth, a downy bed
a youth, with jasmine upon his hands, is speaking.
His fingers are adorned with many gems.
and he wears a snow-white silk himation
picked out in scarlet, in the eastern fashion.
His speech is Attic of the purest strain
but a gentle stress in his pronunciation
betrays a trace of Tiber and of Latium.
The young man is avowing his adoration,
and silently she listens, the Athenian,
to her lover Horace, so mellifluent;
and stupefied, she sees new worlds of Beauty
within the passion of the great Italian.
18. Oedipus
Top of the sphinx is low
with teeth and claws stretched
and with olin life the wildness.
Oedipus fell in the first momentum,
the tromaxen first appearance -
such a form and such a group
He had never imagined until then.
But although he akkoumpa both legs
Monster stou Oedipus chest,
he held fast - and not at all
now not afraid anymore, because it has
lysis ready and will conquer.
Yet, it does not rejoice over this victory.
His gaze full of melancholy
the Sphinx not I look, looks beyond
the narrow road that goes Stas Thebes,
and at Colonus will apoteleiosi.
And clearly forebode his soul
that there will tighten the talk again
with more difficult and bigger
riddles that have no answers. Gustave Moreau, « Oedipus and The
Sphinx », 1864
19. Salomé
Upon a golden charger Salome bears
the head of John the Baptist
to the young Greek sophist
who recoils from her love, indifferent.
The young man quips, “Salome, your own
head is what I wanted them to bring me.”
This is what he says, jokingly.
And her slave came running on the morrow.
holding aloft the head of the Beloved,
its tresses blond, upon a golden plate.
But all his eagerness of yesterday
the sophist had forgotten as he studied.
He sees the dripping blood and is disgusted.
He orders the bloodied thing to
be taken from him, and he continues
his reading of the dialogues of Plato.
20. ΣΑΛΩΜΗ /Salome, 1896
Σκηνοθεσία: ΜΑΤΣΟΥΜΟΥΡΑ Σάε / Directed by MATSUMURA Sae Διάρκεια
/ Running time: 30”
I focused on the sensation created in the last scene, on the contrast
between the quiet and intense love of Salome and the cool indifference of
the Sophist.
I think Salome wanted him to feel her love.
So her sacrificed head remains nobly beautiful.
I hope that her absence at least makes the Sophist feel bad.
Love, Salome.
22. Anna Dalassene
In the royal decree that Alexios Komninos
put out especially to honor his mother—
the very intelligent Lady Anna Dalassini,
noteworthy in both her works and her manners—
much is said in praise of her.
Here let me offer one phrase only,
a phrase that is beautiful, sublime:
“She never uttered those cold words ‘mine’ or ‘yours.’
”
23. Anna Dalassene
In the royal decree that Alexios Komninos
put out especially to honor his mother—
the very intelligent Lady Anna Dalassini,
noteworthy in both her works and her manners—
much is said in praise of her.
Here let me offer one phrase only,
a phrase that is beautiful, sublime:
“She never uttered those cold words ‘mine’ or ‘yours.’ ”
24. Anna Komnene
In the prologue to her Alexiad,
Anna Komnina laments her widowhood.
Her soul is all vertigo.
“And I bathe my eyes,” she tells us,
“in rivers of tears.... Alas for the waves” of her life,
“alas for the revolutions.” Sorrow burns her
“to the bones and the marrow and the splitting” of her
soul.
But the truth seems to be this power-hungry woman
knew only one sorrow that really mattered;
even if she doesn’t admit it, this arrogant Greek woman
had only one consuming pain:
that with all her dexterity,
she never managed to gain the throne,
virtually snatched out of her hands by impudent John.
25. Unfaithfullness
The First Princess, his mother, the leading Hebrew woman,
weeps and laments:
Alexandra weeps and laments over the tragedy.
But the minute she is alone, her lamenting disappears.
She howls, rails, swears, curses.
How they’ve fooled her, how they’ve cheated her,
how they’ve finally had their way,
devastating the house of the Asmonaeans!
How did he pull it off, that crook of a king,
scheming, crafty, vicious,
how did he do it? A plot so fiendish
that even Mariamme didn’t sense a thing.
Had she sensed something, had she suspected,
she would have found a way of saving her brother:
she is a queen after all, she could have done something.
How those spiteful women, Kypros and Salome,
those sluts Kypros and Salome—
how they’ll crow now, gloating in secret.
And to be powerless,
forced to pretend she believes their lies,
powerless to go to the people,
to go out and shout to the Hebrews,
to tell them, tell them how the murder was carried out.
26. Aristobulus
At the marriage of Thetis and Peleus
Apollo stood up during the sumptuous wedding feast
and blessed the bridal pair
for the son who would come from their union.
“Sickness will never visit him,” he said,
“and his life will be a long one.”
This pleased Thetis immensely:
the words of Apollo, expert in prophecies,
seemed to guarantee the security of her child.
And when Achilles grew up
and his beauty was the boast of Thessaly,
Thetis remembered the god’s words.
But one day elders arrived with the news
that Achilles had been killed at Troy.
Thetis tore her purple robes,
pulled off her rings, her bracelets,
and flung them to the ground.
And in her grief, recalling that wedding scene,
she asked what the wise Apollo was up to,
where was this poet who holds forth
so eloquently at banquets, where was this prophet
when they killed her son in his prime.
And the elders answered that Apollo himself
had gone down to Troy
and together with the Trojans had killed her son.
27. 27th of June
1906
When the Christians brought him to be hanged,
the innocent boy of seventeen,
his mother, who there beside the scaffold
had dragged herself and lay beaten on the ground
beneath the midday sun, the savage sun,
now would moan and howl like a wolf, a beast,
and then the martyr, overcome, would keen
“Seventeen years only you lived with me, my child”.
And when the took him up the scaffold’s steps
and passed the rope around him and strangled him,
the innocent boy, seventeen years old,
and piteously it hung inside the void,
with the spasms of black agony –
the youthful body, beautifully wrought–
his mother, martyr, wallowed on the ground
and now she keened no more about his years :
« Seventeen days only, » she keened,
« seventeen days only I had joy of you, my child ».
28. Prayer
The sea engulfed a sailor in its depths.
Unaware, his mother goes and lights
a tall candle before the ikon of our Lady,
praying for him to come back quickly, for the weather to be good—
her ear cocked always to the wind.
While she prays and supplicates,
the ikon listens, solemn, sad,
knowing the son she waits for never will come back.
29. Cavafy’s diary
Over the last 10 or 15 days before she died, lets say the 15th of January, after Alekos and
John were gone and Paul was going to sleep, I had the habit to read with one or two
candles for ½ hour or ¼ till the time goes to 10 1/2. While he was leaving, Alecos was
putting out the lamp from the dining room. And my poor mother was always taking notice
as I was going to bed and she would say to me from her room "are you going to sleep,
Kosti, have you extinguished the candle?" …
Horrible is the remorse of my conscience. What torment had become for her going out.
Paul was sulking when he would take her out and myself I was avoiding to do so. It
seemed ridiculous to be together. Myself so young (a man of 34 years old) with his mother
–even more having into view the various other peculiarities of the character on which its
needless to expand. ... But I never desired her death. How many times I was staying awake
for a long time, pondering her possible death, and I was even going to her door to make
sure she was alive and I would just abstain myself from waking her up to be sure.
