It was an honour to be invited to speak at the Cavafy International Symposium which was held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The symposium, Cavafy: Polis & Politics; Civitas & Civilization, brought together scholars, intellectuals, writers and poets from Egypt, Greece, the Greek diaspora, and elsewhere to discuss the many ways C. P. Cavafy’s work lives on in the city in which he lived and wrote. “Fragments of Cavafy’s Alexandria,” was my contribution for the Cavafy and Criticism session.
There are two words that I chose to focus on: “implication” and “real” to understand Cafavy’s relationship to Alexandria, and the Alexandria he imagined.
Cavafy came to represent a moment in the city’s life, while, at the same time, his poems brought Alexandria’s past into the present. Like the rare perfect marriage, Cavafy gave the city a new mythology, and Alexandria gave the poet a history and a setting in which he could ground his poems and hear his voice.
A visiting British critic Bonamy Dobree, speaks of Cavafy’s conversation in tones:
“I have met an Alexandrian—with all that implies. Implication, that word is important when thinking of Mr. Cavafy, for his poems are like his conversation, his conversation like Alexandria, and Alexandria is all implication. . . . He may talk of the Alexandrian tram-service, of the Ptolemies, of the use of a certain word in seventeenth-century English: one scarcely knows what it is that one has talked to Mr. Cavafy about . . . both his talk and his poems leave you with a flavour, something you have never quite met before, a sound that remains in the ear. . . .”
“Only the city is real,” said Durrel, “Real,” the only word, as Nabokov has said, that requires quotation marks. While Cavafy’s Alexandria is a mythical land, but it is Alexandria; her landscape and her peoples, the spirit of place, had, perhaps more than any other city of the 20th century, the power to excite mythic visions, and in order to know those visions fully we must examine the spot on which they grew.
One of Cavafy’s achievements went beyond his beautiful poetry. I would dare to say that his unintended achievement was to show how a city can continue to exist, even after so much has disappeared, through what remains implied. He turned his face to the streets and half-forgotten conversations rather than the monuments and cliched grandeur of the city.
That is what interested me in thinking about Cavafy and Alexandria, imagining the city in fragments in a place that unfortunately does not generously yield its archives and records.