A few days ago I decided to read the modern Greek poet Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) again – the Collected Poems translated by Rae Dalven, and published by the Hogarth Press.

The experience was interesting in all sorts of ways, not all of them to do with the poetry. Like the fact that I got the volume as a present on my 21^st birthday – I’d forgotten that. And the fact that it contained a cutting from the TLS of a letter from my friend Michael Schmidt, complaining about Roy Fuller’s first lecture as Professor of Poetry.

That was ironic because later Michael published Fuller’s poems at Carcanet Press – by which time they’d both probably forgotten the episode.

Anyway let’s get on to Cavafy! I’ve loved him ever since the 1960s, because of his relaxed, personal tone, his ironies, his readiness to write about illicit sex in his more private poems (he was gay; I’m not), the modesty of his work. And the fact that his poems come over so well in English.

This last point baffles me. I love his poems, and I’m sure I’ve even been influenced by them, yet I don’t know a word of modern Greek. How is this possible? Somehow a tone and atmosphere come through. Auden said the same thing:

‘This perplexes and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry, I have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be translated and poetry cannot.

‘But if it is possible to be poetically influenced by work which one can read only in translation, this belief must be qualified.’

Auden decides that what ‘survives translation and excites’ in Cavafy is ‘Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech.’ To Auden’s comment, I would add: his imagery, and some of the situations he describes – very few poets actually describe intimate scenes (even as a novelist might do). Most sexual love in poetry is either idealised or given in extreme closeup – or from a great distance.

Cavafy conveys things like passing someone on the stairs and fancying them; or hanging about for hours in a café hoping a particular person will come in – but they don’t. Not many poets have really written about that.

And of course there are the great ironic historical poems most readers know, like ‘Expecting the Barbarians’, where all a city’s dignitaries are ‘assembled in the public square’, because ‘The barbarians are to arrive today.’ It’s a big deal, and a rather frightening one also. But by evening the barbarians haven’t shown up. And rumours have come that actually there aren’t any barbarians. The poem ends in a kind of disorientation: ‘And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.’

Cavafy is, as E.M. Forster said, ‘Standing at a slight angle to the universe.’ I like that. Another extraordinary writer who has a similar slant is Fernando Pessoa – maybe I’ll write about him one day.

Meanwhile, to end, here’s a poem of mine (from my book Playing With Fire, first published 2006) – a poem about the experience of Cavafy:

TAKING DOWN CAVAFY

Taking down Cavafy today, I recognised

how books from that era have a certain look –

from that era of my life, I mean:

from perhaps 1966 to ’77.

There’s something fermented about them, a kind of patina:

browned like autumn bracken by natural

process of acidity, damp

and foxing like rainspots on the paper,

they are also often thick

with a furry dust along the tops, dust which survived

the subsequent moves, a mulch compounded

of ash from the incense I ceaselessly burned,

from the housedust of tawdry, wornout bedsits

and student flats, and perhaps from the cigarettes

I haven’t touched now for nearly thirty years

as well as the bedroom (often there was no bedroom) motes

from the blankets, the moulting pillows,

the dying mattresses where I made love

with a series of girls as remote and unbelievable

now as Pompeian frescoes. And there’s something else

on the pages. What is there when I open the book

is not the poems I recall but other readings,

poems another person laid on the surface

of the words, expectations and ideas

incomprehensible now. They were spread there

often at 3 a.m. or on dull afternoons,

to a soundtrack of Mahler or the Grateful Dead,

when nothing (and more importantly, nobody)

was happening. They are made of unfulfilled

desires – which Cavafy says look like

the beautiful dead, shut in their mausoleum

‘with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet’.

But they are the desires of someone else

who has left the books to me. I’m glad to have them –

the books, that is – and read the poems now

trying to clear, yet guiltily tasting, the old readings that persist,

as I wiped – half reluctantly – the dust from the head of this book,

and savour the encroaching brown, the foxing,

the acidity nothing will take away.

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