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Cavafy's world
Word and image
Constantine Cavafy is the leading poet of modern Greek, although
he never published a book in his lifetime or lived in Greece. He
lived mostly in Alexandria, Egypt, a member of the Greek-speaking
minority that was one of the last enclaves of the great Greek
diaspora of the age of the conqueror Alexander.
Cavafy has gained a wide audience since his death in 1933. He
is known in this country by his poem "Ithaka," which was
read at the funeral of Jacqueline Onassis. Referring to the
wanderings of Odysseus, the poem reminds us that the journey is
more important than the arrival. Cavafy wrote about history
(particularly Hellenic history), about homosexual love, and about
the power of art to mediate between the individual and the historical
moment.
Three exhibits at the U-M combine Cavafy's poetry with the
visual arts. The Poet in the Library at the Hatcher Graduate
Library includes manuscripts, hand-printed broadsides, and copies
of the pamphlets Cavafy assembled for his friends. A series of
1960s etchings that David Hockney created to accompany Cavafy's
erotic poems hangs in the U-M Museum of Art.
The largest of the shows, the Kelsey Museum's Ancient
Passions, offers poems mounted next to period photographs of Cavafy
and his world and objects of the classical, Hellenic, or Byzantine
worlds that the poet mentions or that might have inspired him.
For instance, in one of his famous short poems, "For the
Shop," Cavafy creates an artisan so in love with his work he
chooses not to let anyone see it, let alone buy it:
He wrapped them up carefully, neatly,
in expensive green silk.
Roses of rubies, lilies of pearl,
violets of amethyst: according to his taste, his will
his vision of their beauty — not as he saw them in nature
or studied them. He'll leave them in the safe,
examples of his bold, his skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the shop,
he brings out other things to sell — first-class ornaments:
bracelets, chains, necklaces, rings.
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Accompanying this poem is the Kelsey's Mummy Portrait of a
Woman from Egypt in the second century A.D. This portrait, executed
in encaustic — a process fusing hot wax with pigment —
shows a beautiful young woman with jewel-encrusted gold necklaces
and earrings. Almost realistic, her face is slightly elongated,
much like the women in some of Modigliani's paintings. She
looks calm, and her heavily lidded eyes are languid, even sensual.
This woman becomes the customer in the shop Cavafy imagined in
Alexandria, in a new relationship created by the curators'
imaginations. Similarly, the other objects do not illustrate the
poems. Rather, they provide a context that changes our reading of
the poem and our impression of the art. The three exhibits are on
display until May 5.
—Keith Taylor
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