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Cavafy: A Critical Biography
Robert Liddell's acclaimed life of the great modern Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), reissued here with an introduction and updated bibliography by Peter Mackridge, remains the only biography available in English. Written with unprecedented access to the Cavafy archive, the book gives a detailed account of Cavafy's work and the effect of his difficult life on his development as a poet.
Cavafy's reputation was championed by some of the greatest writers in English, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden - and his work was introduced by a new audience by Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet.
Cavafy's reputation was championed by some of the greatest writers in English, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden - and his work was introduced by a new audience by Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet.
222 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
Robert Liddell
65 books3 followersEnglish literary critic, biographer, novelist, travel writer and poet.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
June 3, 2020
I dearly love Cavafy, but this biography is a train wreck! I have purchased Cavafy's Alexandria by renowned translator Edmund Keeley, which looks like it is far more up to the task.
January 1, 2011
I'm not sure if I like this translation more than Rae Delven's (think I spelled that right), but this one definitely has more poems. Besides Pessoa and along with Milosz and Celan, the greatest 20th Century poets. (Many would say Neruda, Parra, Vallejo, Herbert, Bachmann, Einzenbergr, Ahkmatova, and Hikmet I guess)
January 28, 2024
I read this again recently as research for a project and needed to recall the timelines of the poet, Cavafy’s life, and some of the themes. A few years ago I had read the Cavafy-EM Forster letters for research, too. Also, recently, I was reminded of something James Joyce wrote about how he hated that he had to work in the English language of Johnson, as a colonising language, which drove him to re-imagine English and repurpose it for his Irish sensibility. Cavafy too felt the need to refashion the Greek language for the purposes of a contemporary poetry, of his Greek self (though it could've gone in another direction, see below). At the time he started writing, the Greek language was going through a purification phase, yet as a poet, he needed it to speak to the everyday, even though he often set his poems in the historical. Despite that, really, his poems were always deeply moving, little human vignettes, even when dramatised by figures or moments in history.
During his life, Cavafy carefully controlled his publication and reworked his poems endlessly. He rarely published, being perhaps mistrustful, or meticulous. He kept folders of poems moving them back and forth between the categories: final, unfinished and unwanted. He kept a little bindery in the second bedroom of his Alexandrian apartment for his self-funded printing efforts. He distributed the works he chose as final to people he wanted to read them, without telling them, they simply appeared. If he chose to repudiate a final version, he’d go about trying to get back the old printings from people. Despite his small publication history – in the Criterion and an Oxford literary journal I forgot the name of and not mentioned here in this biography – and a few little journals in Alexandria and Athens – he developed quite a following. EM Forster, who I mentioned earlier, desperately tried to get him to release his poems for publication. TS Eliot wanted more, as did Leonard Woolf for the Hogarth Press. Cavafy resisted. (Forster in several letters begs for more poems not known here for this work) And I’ve always wondered why. This biography answers it, but not directly.
Robert Liddell, the biographer here, like Forster, Lawrence Durrell, and the early translators Keely and Sherrard were all English and from everything I’ve read about them: a type, a kind of English classically schooled thinker who wanted to adopt this quirky Greek writer who reinterpreted the classical world as his world. So what Cavafy seems to me to have resisted is his appropriation by the English literary world. He wrote only in Greek. Yet he was himself a British citizen, through his Greek father (after the father died, Cavafy spent formative years from around 7-14 years in England living here and there in Liverpool and London, so he read and wrote English well). He could’ve written in English, but chose not to, preferring to work the Greek language into something that expressed his poetic and peculiar historical, geographical moment – an Alexandrian, of Constantinople origins, living, writing on the outskirts of a number of historical and linguistic versions of the Greek world. Just like the dramatic personas he uses to speak his poems. The history is actually quite interesting, but I’ll bore you. So there he was, looking at the past, refashioning the language for his purposes, resisting the English need to appropriate his work for their own fetishistic needs. You have to love the modernists like Cavafy and Joyce!
As a biography, the research is pretty good, except that it’s so bloody English and at times the segues are unclear. Some of the authorial intrusions are like strange grudges against the early Greek holders of the Cavafy archive who published their own views on the poet; and, at other times, I couldn’t tell where a view by a contemporary started and the biographer’s opinion resumed. That lack of clarity at times disturbed me. Let alone the god-awful biographer’s own translations that riddle the book with banality. He had the audacity to critique Cavafy’s own friend’s translations that first appeared in English (Valassopoulos).
Anyway, I doubt many will be interested in this, but the poet himself, is worth reading and I’ll say that the Mendelsohn translations may be the best of the lot. There are some woeful ones. It’s very hard to get the dramatic tone right in English with these poems and keep the rhythm and sound of the original. I’ve tried many times myself. So I can see why he resisted. English would’ve butchered the poetry further and imposed an obligation on the poet to see his work contained by the version of that other language. And therefore lose his own poetic direction. The poet himself said that writing for a readership:
”When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought, he obtains a great freedom in his creative work.”
In terms of where his reputation ended, he was right to pursue his independence.
ADDIT 2-1-24
I gave the book three stars for no other reason than while it's valuable, I feel another bigger, deeper, biography may be due. I felt its englishness very strongly, and the author is dismissive of certain contemporary sources.
____
Funny how life and one's reading intersect. I finished this on Sunday, Cavafy died aged 70. I lost a dear friend recently, funeral previous Friday, the same age, whose life may have been a Cavafy dramatis personae. A lover of words, an English jew who settled here, his family went to England from Poland early 20thC. Also a character who fiercely defended his intellectual independence, settling at a periphery of the linguistic world he grew up, like the poet. So, my head is stuck for a while making sense of the past.
During his life, Cavafy carefully controlled his publication and reworked his poems endlessly. He rarely published, being perhaps mistrustful, or meticulous. He kept folders of poems moving them back and forth between the categories: final, unfinished and unwanted. He kept a little bindery in the second bedroom of his Alexandrian apartment for his self-funded printing efforts. He distributed the works he chose as final to people he wanted to read them, without telling them, they simply appeared. If he chose to repudiate a final version, he’d go about trying to get back the old printings from people. Despite his small publication history – in the Criterion and an Oxford literary journal I forgot the name of and not mentioned here in this biography – and a few little journals in Alexandria and Athens – he developed quite a following. EM Forster, who I mentioned earlier, desperately tried to get him to release his poems for publication. TS Eliot wanted more, as did Leonard Woolf for the Hogarth Press. Cavafy resisted. (Forster in several letters begs for more poems not known here for this work) And I’ve always wondered why. This biography answers it, but not directly.
Robert Liddell, the biographer here, like Forster, Lawrence Durrell, and the early translators Keely and Sherrard were all English and from everything I’ve read about them: a type, a kind of English classically schooled thinker who wanted to adopt this quirky Greek writer who reinterpreted the classical world as his world. So what Cavafy seems to me to have resisted is his appropriation by the English literary world. He wrote only in Greek. Yet he was himself a British citizen, through his Greek father (after the father died, Cavafy spent formative years from around 7-14 years in England living here and there in Liverpool and London, so he read and wrote English well). He could’ve written in English, but chose not to, preferring to work the Greek language into something that expressed his poetic and peculiar historical, geographical moment – an Alexandrian, of Constantinople origins, living, writing on the outskirts of a number of historical and linguistic versions of the Greek world. Just like the dramatic personas he uses to speak his poems. The history is actually quite interesting, but I’ll bore you. So there he was, looking at the past, refashioning the language for his purposes, resisting the English need to appropriate his work for their own fetishistic needs. You have to love the modernists like Cavafy and Joyce!
As a biography, the research is pretty good, except that it’s so bloody English and at times the segues are unclear. Some of the authorial intrusions are like strange grudges against the early Greek holders of the Cavafy archive who published their own views on the poet; and, at other times, I couldn’t tell where a view by a contemporary started and the biographer’s opinion resumed. That lack of clarity at times disturbed me. Let alone the god-awful biographer’s own translations that riddle the book with banality. He had the audacity to critique Cavafy’s own friend’s translations that first appeared in English (Valassopoulos).
Anyway, I doubt many will be interested in this, but the poet himself, is worth reading and I’ll say that the Mendelsohn translations may be the best of the lot. There are some woeful ones. It’s very hard to get the dramatic tone right in English with these poems and keep the rhythm and sound of the original. I’ve tried many times myself. So I can see why he resisted. English would’ve butchered the poetry further and imposed an obligation on the poet to see his work contained by the version of that other language. And therefore lose his own poetic direction. The poet himself said that writing for a readership:
”When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought, he obtains a great freedom in his creative work.”
In terms of where his reputation ended, he was right to pursue his independence.
ADDIT 2-1-24
I gave the book three stars for no other reason than while it's valuable, I feel another bigger, deeper, biography may be due. I felt its englishness very strongly, and the author is dismissive of certain contemporary sources.
____
Funny how life and one's reading intersect. I finished this on Sunday, Cavafy died aged 70. I lost a dear friend recently, funeral previous Friday, the same age, whose life may have been a Cavafy dramatis personae. A lover of words, an English jew who settled here, his family went to England from Poland early 20thC. Also a character who fiercely defended his intellectual independence, settling at a periphery of the linguistic world he grew up, like the poet. So, my head is stuck for a while making sense of the past.
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April 4, 2022Liddel cosntruye la biografía de este gran poeta alejandrino, para lo cual reconstruye la vida de sus padres y sigue el recorrdio vital de Cavafis, desde su nacimiento hasta su muerte el día en que cumplió setenta años. Ofrece un panorama de la Alejandría de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX y cómo se integraba en esa ciudad el poeta, así mismo da muestras de cómo fue su desarrollo vital, todo lo cual en relación a su obra, la poesía de Cavafis.
April 30, 2021
Great poet. This 1974 biography is "okay."
I would have given three stars if it had included a decent map of Alexandria. A good biography of Cavafy really should have a decent map! (I read the 1976 edition published by Schocken.)
I would have given three stars if it had included a decent map of Alexandria. A good biography of Cavafy really should have a decent map! (I read the 1976 edition published by Schocken.)
March 23, 2023
Harto interesante, sobre todo, descubrir que toda la plétora hallada en la creación literaria de este insigne poeta es fruto de la propia introspección, más que de una vida rica en experiencias espectaculares o extraordinarias.
Read
October 20, 2020A good start but a long way off from the definitive biography of a remarkable poet. Liddell 'raised the torch that others may follow'.
February 18, 2013
I finished Robert Liddell's "Cavafy: A Biography," (the original version--not the updated one listed here) which I believe was the first full-length biography of the poet in English. The author did a good, workmanlike job of analyzing Cavafy's poems and his life (which included decades of shabby gentility, hobnobbing with the Greek literati and socialites in Alexandria, Egypt, occasional travel, a boring government job, and a secret gay life on the seedy side of town), but as much as anything it seemed that Liddell wrote the book to refute an earlier Cavafy biography, which, if Liddell is to be believed, was full of outrageous errors, wrong-headed conclusions, and silly interpretations.
February 19, 2025
La biografía de Robert Liddell resulta imprescindible para conocer la vida y obra del poeta. Algún autor, sin embargo, ha acusado cierta parcialidad de Liddell por estar basada principalmente en los testimonios del escritor, poeta y ensayista, Timos Malanos (1897-1984), quien mantuvo cierta animadversión con el poeta. Aún admitiendo dicho inconveniente, a día de hoy resulta un pilar de consulta básico. Todavía se puede localizar en alguna librería de viejo.
Artículo sobre Kavafis incluyendo una antología de sus poemas más representativos:
https://queridobartleby.es/tag/kavafis/
Artículo sobre Kavafis incluyendo una antología de sus poemas más representativos:
https://queridobartleby.es/tag/kavafis/
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews