on Cavafy

Cavafy’s Dullness

Introducing his translations of Constantine Cavafy, Daniel Mendelsohn called the poet’s life ‘unexceptional’ and spoke of its ‘relative uneventfulness’ (adding a parenthetic nod to Emily Dickinson). You might hope that the first new biography in English since Robert Liddell’s in 1974 would argue otherwise. Yet Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis (for brevity, J+J hereafter) throw in the towel in their Preface, speaking of Cavafy’s life’s ‘predictability and unremarkable nature’, and adding, a few pages later, that the biographical facts are ‘unremarkable and very straightforward’. What do they want? Car chases?

To declare yourself bored from the start is a peculiar strategy. If the life is so dull, why not stick to the poetry? Yet here, J+J try to zhoosh things up by complicating the ‘straightforward’ sequence of the life: ‘We have chosen, therefore, to start and finish his life story with his death and then tell a circular narrative through various thematic sequences’. The outcome is, although scholarly in its research, and supported by more evidence than we have previously seen, utterly confused in the telling. Reading the book twice, once as a PDF and once in hard proof, and checking the final proofs from both publishers, I’ve often felt completely lost.

The authors speak of their ‘discomfort with traditional narrations of life stories’ (that is, the birth-to-death chronological approach). They don’t actually explain this aversion, but spend the rest of the book providing its counter-argument, ‘moving forward, backward, and sideways’, often forgetting what they’ve already said, either repeating or contradicting themselves. A typical consequence ...