As a young gay man growing up closeted in a Mexican household, I had to find my queer role models in books. In high school I heard that Federico García Lorca was gay, and that so was Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, and Walt Whitman. Though their works weren’t necessarily queer—I really had to read into them sometimes—knowing that the literature was the artistry of a gay man was enough. I had yet to discover John Rechy, Francisco X. Alarcón, and Arturo Islas (my gay Chicano role models, none of them taught at my high school) but I did come across during my senior year, the verse by the Greek poet Cavafy (1863-1933).
It was the poem “The City” that did it for me: “As you have destroyed your life here/ in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.” (I’ll be quoting from the Rae Dalven translations, y’all.) A simple assertion, but with such resonance: you cannot escape your baggage. True, that. I could leave my oppressive home, but would that make it all better. Well, it was certainly a start.
Anyway, I liked the poem enough to look for others. Already I was associating Greekness with homoeroticism and homosexuality. It was hard not to because all of the Greek male gods were hotties, as per the representations in Greek art and on the covers of my mythology texts. And male-to-male relationships were not frowned upon: there was the philosopher lineage of Socrates and Plato, Plato and Aristotle; there was that funny little fellow Ganymede, a favorite of Zeus, pouring the wine over at Mt. Olympus. Such different attitudes from my Catholic training and its accusatory biblical narratives like the ones about Sodom and Gomorrah.
To continue, it wasn’t long into Cavafy’s poetry that I began to figure out who I was dealing with. Imagine my surprise when I came across poems like “The 25th Year of His Life”:
He goes regularly to the tavern,
where they had met each other the night before.
He inquired; but they had nothing precise to tell him.
From their words, he had understood that he had made the acquaintance.
of some entirely unknown person,
one of the many unknown and suspicious
youthful figures that used to go by there.
But he goes to the tavern regularly, at night,
and he sits and looks toward the entrance;
he looks toward the entrance to the point of weariness.
He may walk in. He may still come tonight.
For almost three weeks he does this.
His mind has grown sick from lust.
The kisses have stayed on his mouth.
All his flesh suffers from the persistent desire.
The touch of that body is over him.
He longs for union with him again.
Naturally he tries not to betray himself.
But sometimes he is almost indifferent.
Besides, he knows to what he is exposing himself,
he has made up his mind. It is not unlikely that this life
of his may bring him a disastrous scandal.
Wait? What just happened? Did I just read that in my high school library? Did it show on my face? My hands must have been shaking. It was like the time I accidentally stumbled into my uncle’s collection of muscle magazines. I checked the back jacket. Nothing dramatic. Only praise and appreciation. I read the E.M. Forster had been such a champion of his work. I sought out Forster’s books, and lo! Maurice. The introduction was by one W. H. Auden. I wondered if he too was gay. He wrote in the intro, with such flair: “Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal that fact.”
Mercy, mercy, me. Because I knew that feeling of fear and longing and despair, I had connected with Cavafy. Me, this gay Mexican kid, son of migrant farmworkers, young man who had a clandestine affair with another young man. I feel you, C.
Their Beginning
The fulfillment of their deviate, sensual delight
is done. They rose from the mattress,
and they dress hurriedly without speaking.
They leave the house separately, furtively; and as
they walk somewhat uneasily on the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
into what kind of bed they fell a little while back.
But how the life of the artist has gained.
Tomorrow, the next day, years later, the vigorous verses
will be composed that had their beginning here.
You go. It would be years before I encountered the more contemporary queer poetry scene, where it was no holds barred all the way. But I’ll be forever grateful to Cavafy, poetess from Alexandria, who gave me a glimpse of fabulousness back then when I needed it the most. And, by immediate association, I’ll always be grateful to translators of poetry.
When I talk about a poet’s identity, ethnic or sexual, I inevitably get one hater or another telling me, “What does it matter what they are! They’re writers and that should be enough!” This bothers me, because it shows the disconnection and disregard to that experience I had in adolescence, feeling lonely and isolated, seeking solace in the words of writers whose identities validated mine, whose mere existence on the page made me less invisible, less vulnerable. That’s why I declare, loud and proud, that I’m a gay Chicano writer. There’s room for me, just as I have always had to make room for those who are not gay or Chicano.
Dear Rigoberto,
Cavafy was very important to me too in high school and college (in the Dalven and later the Keeley and Sherrard translations), though his furtive, doom-laden sense of homosexuality was rather alien to me–from a fairly young age, for me being gay, choosing to be gay, was a psychological way out of the Bronx ghetto (and, later, of the stifling racism and conservatism of Macon, Georgia), an opportunity to escape. But the sense of loneliness, longing, and the near-impossibility of connection in his work was vividly familiar.
I think, though, that it’s possible to distinguish between personal interest and poetic interest. All the translations I’ve read make Cavafy sound like prose broken into lines–well-written, sensitive, insightful prose, but prose nonetheless. Reading the introductions to the translations and other work about Cavafy, I understand that Cavafy was an obsessive poetic craftsman, obsessively revising and refining each line. I also understand that much of the verbal power of his poems comes from his mingling of the refined and stilted Greek called Katharevusa, inherited from the Byzantines, which was the standard literary language of his time, with Demotic, vernacular, spoken Greek, which was not considered acceptable for literature. None of this comes across in any of the translations I have read. This absence, combined with the relative paucity of figurative language–as I recall, Cavafy has vivid imagery, but few metaphors and similes–contributes to the prosaic feel of his poetry in the translations I’ve read.
A writer’s social identity is far from irrelevant (poems are written and read by people, after all), and can certainly matter hugely in terms of the identifications (and repudiations) readers make and the impact that the work has on them. But that identity is irrelevant to the quality of the poetry as poetry, and with Cavafy in translation, I get no sense of that quality.
Take good care, and thanks for this post.
all best,
Reginald
Mr. Gonzalez, You blog artfully about the lives and contributions of others. You consistently blog pointing the way to things of interest that I, for one, am grateful pleased to be lead to. It is refreshing in a field of self-serving bloggers… even some on Harriet who are only self referential and sel-advertising! Thanks for your intelligent and generous restraint. Thanks for all.
Rigoberto,
I didn’t know about Cavafy before. Thank you for recommending his work.
I also think it is beautiful that one poet’s work can give another the courage to be authentic. This is a story of poetry at its most personal.
Thanks, Rigoberto, for this. My real response is in my new post! But I wanted to answer Reginald’s comment on diction here:
I also understand that much of the verbal power of his poems comes from his mingling of the refined and stilted Greek called Katharevusa, inherited from the Byzantines, which was the standard literary language of his time, with Demotic, vernacular, spoken Greek, which was not considered acceptable for literature.
It is true that literary Greek has two distinct registers–the demotic, or spoken Greek, and Katherevousa, Purified Greek, which is a purely invented and literary language. It has not only its own vocabulary, derived from ancient Greek, but is different even grammatically. There is some great literature written in it, though Katherevousa was never actually spoken. Nor was Katherevousa handed down from Byzantine Greeks–it was a later invention by diaspora Greeks to purge the Greek language of Turkish “borrowings”, so that the new independent Greek State would not have a “corrupt” language. To give you an idea of how different it is from spoken modern Greek, literary works written in Katherevousa (such as Papadiamantis) are actually translated now into modern Greek.
Greek poets thus do have access to at least two highly distinct registers (not to mention ancient Greek), which is a huge problem for translators.. But the idea that Cavafy writes in a mix of the two has been greatly exaggerated in my opinion. His words and word forms are occasionally slightly archaic by modern standards (as Victorian poets may seem in English), but this is arguably as much a quaint Alexandrian flavor as anything else. Cavafy writes in the Demotic.
When I talk about a poet’s identity, ethnic or sexual, I inevitably get one hater or another telling me, “What does it matter what they are! They’re writers and that should be enough!” This bothers me, because it shows the disconnection and disregard to that experience I had in adolescence, feeling lonely and isolated, seeking solace in the words of writers whose identities validated mine, whose mere existence on the page made me less invisible, less vulnerable. That’s why I declare, loud and proud, that I’m a gay Chicano writer.
I feel exactly the same way, Rigoberto. Thanks for posting this beautiful Cavafy. I grew up poor in rural New Jersey, halfway between New York and Philadelphia. I had my great moment of solace and revelation around 1973, when I found Jill Johnston in The Village Voice. I managed to get my hot little hands on Johnston’s book, Lesbian Nation, but one book wasn’t enough to sustain my whole life. I slogged through college and graduate school, lesbianless in the poetry department, for all I knew. I’ll never forget the feeling of literary isolation and loneliness. Sure, things are much better now, but there are a still so many books and poems that need to be written – we have a lot of catching up to do!