A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets, Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis, captures the complexities of Cavafy’s life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In rich detail, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys chronicle the young poet’s life with his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty after they left Egypt and moved successively to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. The biography then centers on Constantine’s adulthood in his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor for modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography looks closely at Cavafy’s artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.
Reading Greece spoke to Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis about their decision to write a new biography of Cavafy, the challenges they faced in reconstructing his life, how they contextualized the themes he delved into within his modern cosmopolitan setting, as well as how their biography situates Cavafy in a global literary context.
What initially inspired you to write a new biography of C. P. Cavafy, given that he has been extensively studied already? Considering that the book is the “first major biography in English in nearly fifty years,” what gaps in previous scholarship did you aim to fill?
Peter Jeffreys: Given that the last biography was written in 1974, it was long overdue to revisit the question of a relevant biography, one that would account for Cavafy’s current global status and speak to a contemporary readership where memoir and life stories have become the post popular genre. We aimed not so much to fill the gaps in scholarship (although full access to the main archive and its subsequent digitization have allowed for a more expansive engagement with sources) but rather to demystify the poet and move beyond the standard catalogue of Cavafy’s eccentricities and the cliches about his personality. We strove to probe the depths of Constantine the human subject and to reveal a man who struggled not only with his craft and art but with his humanity. We discovered a person who possessed the capacity to be intimate with people who mattered to him emotionally as well as artistically and professionally. Thus we sought not to chronicle a life but rather to bring our subject to life.
What was the greatest challenge you faced in reconstructing Cavafy’s life, particularly given the scarcity or opacity of certain personal records?
Gregory Jusdanis: One of the main challenges we faced in reconstructing Cavafy’s life was the paucity of information. Much of the material and written record was lost in many moves of the family to Liverpool, London, back to Alexandria, and then Istanbul to escape the British bombardment of 1882 and the final return home, and the many relocations within Alexandria itself. When the young Cavafy was in Istanbul, he discovered that an oil portrait of his father was destroyed in the bombing, along with his notes and books. As a result, we have far fewer information about his life that the biographers of, say, Alexander von Humboldt, who lived a century earlier. While we can read Oscar Wilde’s school report card, we don’t know where Cavafy was educated in Liverpool. Although we have a record of Tennyson’s voice, a poet born 50 years earlier, we don’t know what Cavafy’s voice sounded like. Finally, whereas he was open about his homosexuality in his poetry and personal life, little exists in the archive about his sexual identity.
Your narrative structure reportedly begins at Cavafy’s death and moves backward or thematically rather than strictly chronologically. What motivated that decision?
Gregory Jusdanis: Our biography breaks new ground in following a thematic rather than a biographical approach. We chose this route for three reasons. First, it made it practical to divide our labor into thematic chapters rather than time periods. Second, his life seemed uneventful. For this reason, we felt we could generate a more interesting narrative arc for the reader through themes. We could thus shape the direction and tension of the story ourselves rather than having chronology determine it for us. I personally find long, detailed biographies dull. I don’t want, for instance, to know the type of jacket someone wore do dinner. While I want sufficient details to imagine the person and the place, I would like insights into the self. A biography must have a balance between the external and the internal.
What role did the city of Alexandria play in Cavafy’s interior life and in your narrative of him? How has the fact that Cavafy lived in multiple cities (Alexandria, Liverpool, London, Istanbul) shape his poetic identity and worldview in your interpretation?
Peter Jeffreys: Alexandria would in time become the site of Cavafy’s dreams, recollections and aesthetic re-creations, after serving more pedestrianly as the practical site of his family’s commercial and social transactions. The urban landscape remained central to his poetic sensibility, and he was in many ways a poet in the decadent tradition of Baudelaire, a flâneur and urban strollerwhose urbanity was integral to his creative powers. He created his own urban epistemology that spanned cultures and geographical topoi, and the richness and uniqueness of his verse is directly related to his intense identification with the urban setting. It is thus not surprising that in one of his most powerful poems, “The City,” the city stalks the poet in an ironic way, creating an inverse flânerie. He profoundly understood the price one had to pay for such an urban dependency.
You describe Cavafy as someone who “sacrificed love for art.” Can you expand on how that tension manifested in his life and work?
Gregory Jusdanis: One of the major insights of the biography is that Cavafy sacrificed love for art. This means that, as a young man, he seemed to strive for personal happiness: family get-togethers, excursions with friends, trips to Greece and Europe, the possibility of intimate relationship. Love gave his life meaning as can be seen in the diaries he kept about the deaths of his childhood friend Mikés and his mother. But in middle age, he began to change. I feel that he was disenchanted in failing to find true, satisfying love. At the same time, he experienced the constant knock of death at his door, having lost close friends, his parents, and then all his brothers. Finally, he dedicated himself completely to his craft, believing that he would become a great artist one day. This is why he gradually converted art into a mode of salvation. Whereas love illuminated his earlier life, from middle age on, poetry gave him purpose and direction.
Cavafy often engages with history, Hellenistic and Byzantine themes. How did you contextualize those within his modern cosmopolitan setting?
Gregory Jusdanis: Cavafy foresaw our modern globalized world of ethnic and religious mixing. In his pursuit of poetic originality, he moved away from the celebrated periods of Homer and fifth-century Athens to the less-known Hellenistic epoch and the time of late antiquity. He felt freer in these epochs. More important, he was obsessed with the diffusion of Hellenism to North Africa, the Near East and all the way to India. And in his poems he explored the interaction between Hellenic culture and local traditions. This was the globalized world of Alexander the Great and of the Roman Empire. Today we confront similar phenomena: racial, religious, ethnic blending; hybrid identities; the tension between the cosmopolitan and the particular; the fascination with cultural fusion, and the struggle to protect the uniqueness of home from the images and sounds beamed from the sky. In this Cavafy was a century ahead of his time.
In what ways do you think Cavafy’s legacy is evolving in the 21st century, and how does your biography situate him in a global literary context?
Peter Jeffreys: Cavafy currently enjoys an astonishing global popularity, one he surely hoped for and believed he was capable of achieving. Undoubtedly, he would be astonished by the broad sweep of his current readership. We attempted to position the biography in a way that would take into account and satisfy both his traditional but also his increasingly diverse readers, being cognizant that poets, Hellenists, classicists, and historians are gradually being supplemented by his burgeoning queer, transnational and multicultural devotees. We situate him in a way that speaks to this multifarious base of readers and hope the biography proves satisfying to his current expansive reputation and fame.
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The book was recently translated into Greek by Mihalis Makropoulos and was published by Metaichmio Editions. Reading Greece spoke to the translator about the challenging aspects of translating the book, how he navigated translating culturally specific references, especially those rooted in Hellenistic, Byzantine, or colonial Alexandria contexts, and whether he expects that this biography will shed new light on the life and work of Cavafy.
What drew you to take on the translation of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography into Greek? What was the most challenging aspect of translating the book?
I was offered the translation by the publishing house Metaixmio, but at the same time it was an intriguing prospect, to dive into the world of Constantine Cavafy and Alexandria at the beginning of 20th century. A translation in its entirety is always challenging; but the most difficult part in this case was to find the Greek sources of each and every reference. I was lucky to have the aid of an excellent philologist and Cavafy scholar, Ilias Malevitis.
The original authors often shift between biography, literary analysis, and historical commentary. How did you maintain clarity and flow in Greek while preserving that layered structure?
After having translated authors as disparate as Hemingway, Henry James, Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Golding, among many others, my instinct in register and tonal differences is adequately honed, to face a multitonal text; and, of course, I had the advantage of using, instead of translations in English, the original Greek references that give a polyphonic charm.
How did you navigate translating culturally specific references, especially those rooted in Hellenistic, Byzantine, or colonial Alexandria contexts?
By resorting to search, search, and even more search; it’s the only way.
Did you feel a particular responsibility when translating a biography about Cavafy, one of the most iconic figures in modern Greek poetry?
Two responsibilities: factual accuracy and lingual exactitude.
How do you think a Greek audience will receive this biography? Do you expect it to shed new light on Cavafy even for Greek readers?
With great interest, I think. And, since there isn’t really available in Greek such a detailed biography of Cavafy, drawing facts from so many sources, it is a more than welcome addition in the bibliography, and a revealing one, too.
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Gregory Jusdanis is Distinguished Humanities Professor at The Ohio State University and the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, The Necessary Nation, Fiction Agonistes, and A Tremendous Thing. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Peter Jeffreys is Associate Professor of English Literature at Suffolk University in Boston. He is the author, translator, and editor of several books on C. P. Cavafy, including Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster and C. P. Cavafy, C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works, Approaches to Teaching the Works of C. P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster – C. P. Cavafy: Friends in Slight Divergence (Ikaros, 2013), and In the Frame of Decadence: The Imaginary Portraits of C. P. Cavafy (University of Crete Press, 2024). He serves on the Scholarly Committee of the Cavafy Archive at the Onassis Foundation and has acted as curatorial consultant for the Cavafy House in Alexandria and the Cavafy Archive in Athens.
Mihalis Makropoulos was born in Athens in 1965 and studied biology in the University of Athens. He works as a translator of fiction and non-fiction, having translated, among others, Patrick Leigh Fermor (Mani, Roumeli, A Time to Keep Silence),Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, Complete Short Stories), Truman Capote (In Cold Blood), Henry James (The Bostonians, The Golden Bowl), Joseph Conrad (The Heart of Darkness), Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), Robert Macfarlane (Underland, Is a River Alive?). As an author, he has published fourteen books for adults (novelettes, short story collections, a travelogue in Epirus) and four books for children. His novelette Mavro Nero (Black Water, 2019) was awarded with the National Literature Award and the prestigious “Anagnostis” prize for literature.
*Interview by Athina Rossoglou
TAGS: LITERATURE & BOOKS | READING GREECE
