ALEXANDRIAN SYNDROME

So, he was a Greek from Egypt
and critics say he was able
to bring the past to life
in his poems.
It does not necessarily follow
that Constantine Cavafy
(29.4.1868-29.4.1933)
who adored the tragic
in the broadest sense of the word
really was an 'historical poet', as he declared himself to be:
rather, he was a poet who was deeply filled
with the breath of life.

His choice, arrived at after anxious and extended vigils
was the Graeco-Roman world which he peopled
with individuals and episodes which bridged the gap
between historical fact and truth,
beyond the paradoxes of fate
and the theatre of pulsating life.
He knew: it's not a matter of objective description
neither is it that the ineffable and personal
can ever be objective.
There are things outside the ordinary view
that etch themselves into the third
(and as it were the poetic) mind.

Also, as the biographers note, he never lived
at home: what a perfect excuse
for writing poems. To endure continually
in the dusk of what has been said
so as to capture it in glimpses. The mirror's other side.
In the bipolarity of the tongue, Byzantine and popular
male and female
in the rift with tradition, or rather
in losing the sense of continuity with
kin, style, rhythm. Aesthetics of horror.

Alone, with someone else's past for his own
with his own belonging to someone else,
with the "hundred and twenty five voices"
humming over and over again to induce him
to leap beyond the reality of life
he turns the irretrievable
into an abyss. Some depths cannot be explained
even when you are a survivor.

This way he recreates freely
the half-alive words and images
of poetry.

Translated by Ilija Casule and Thomas Shapcott

© Katica Kulavkova, 2001-2007.
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