When I was about ten years old, the teacher at the Massachusetts Catholic school I went to asked the students to bring a poem from home to share with the class. Looking at our bookcases, I plucked out a thin book by Constantine P. Cavafy. Many of his poems were short, easy to read aloud, and beautifully simply spoken. I chose “I’ve watched so much…”:
I’ve looked at beauty so much
that my sight is flooded with it.
The lines of the body. Red lips. Sensual limbs
Hair as if stolen from Greek statues…
I knew who Cavafy was. Like our family, he came from the once large and thriving Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, which is now nearly extinct. Cavafy was a hero to us – and remains a hero in the Greek-speaking world. Many of his recurring motifs – of alienation, of strangeness, of suspicious certainties, of a life on the margins – still feel surprisingly modern, 90 years after his death, in 1933.
The Athens-based Onassis Foundation is advocating that Cavafy is a man of the moment with “Archive of Desire,” a nine-day New York City-wide celebration of the poet, ending Saturday. Coinciding with the 160th anniversary of Cavafy’s birth on April 29, the festival aims to draw a new audience to his work, filtered through the prisms of contemporary artists working in many media, including music, poetry, film and visual arts. art, featuring 25 newly commissioned works.
When I was still in school, my father persuaded me to read a much less explosive Cavafy poem, “Ithaka,” one of his most famous. At that young age I had completely missed most of Cavafy’s themes and their context.
I would come to taste them: his life as a queer man in Egypt in the early 20th century, his writings on desire. His world-weary views on the passing of empires and power. His profound meditations on time. The staggering gap between his rich inner life and his decades-long bureaucratic day job, in purgatory Third circle of irrigation office. His careful layering of three different forms of Greek in his work: the modern language; an artificially constructed, “sanitized” 19th century; and occasionally the old form.
Cavafy often thought of being of a place and not of that place, a feeling that echoed throughout my childhood. And I clung to the pure music of Cavafy’s words.
Many composers have also heard that music and written sets for his work — Greek artists such as Mikis Theodorakis, as well as foreign musicians, including Ned Rorem and John Tavener.
Paola Prestini, the curator of ‘Archive of Desire’, has brought together a new group of makers for the festival. They have engaged thoughtfully with his writing, resulting in works – sometimes illuminating and striking, sometimes more perfunctory – that collectively take Cavafy’s self-assessment as “an ultra-modern poet, a poet of the generations to come.”
Opening on April 28 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, the festival was an intimate project by visual artist Sister Sylvester and Egyptian electronic musician and singer Nadah El Shazly. They named their collaboration “Constantinopoliad,” after the diary Cavafy started when he was 18, when his family briefly moved to his parents’ hometown of Constantinople to escape the British bombardment of Alexandria.
Sister Sylvester led the audience through a communal reading of her intricately designed, handmade books, while El Shazly performed her score live, interspersed moody electronics and vintage Egyptian recordings with her own, smoky vocals. The story deftly explored brief episodes of Cavafy’s life, as well as musings on strangeness, ethnic identity, migration, and the confused history of the Mediterranean.
At Columbia’s Miller Theater on Monday, a meandering program called “Days of 2023,” clumsily stitched together poetry readings featuring recent works by American composers and older Kavafy musical settings, features musicians from the National Sawdust Ensemble, led by the cellist. Jeffrey Zeigler. A highlight was the complete performance of the 2010 album “Kavafy 13 Tragoudia” by the pioneering Greek electronic musician Lena Platonos, on which she set 13 poems by Cavafy, in collaboration with the Greek singer Giannis Palamidas.
For this version of Platonos’ work, the composer Hannah Ishizaki created an imaginative arrangement for the live instruments, with Palamidas singing passionately. It was effective and moving, especially in a raw percussive setting of one of Cavafy’s most famous poems, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” In this arrangement, the approaching hordes posed no threat to a long-dead kingdom; their horses’ hooves were here and now, thumping in a drum kit as the stage vibrated.
Unfortunately, the organizers did not present lyrics or translations for any of the musical performances. For the Platonos, the titles of the 13 poems were not even in the program. If the festival’s mission was to raise awareness of Cavafy’s work, why omit that information, which is vital to most of the New York public? (The festival’s creative director and the Onassis Foundation’s director of culture, Afroditi Panagiotakou, said the decision was a creative choice designed to pique the public’s curiosity about Cavafy.)
“Waiting for the Barbarians” was also the starting point for an even more spectacular musical interpretation by multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson, in a program Tuesday night at St. Thomas Church, co-presented with Death of Classical. During the performances, the sensitive Knights orchestra, conducted by Eric Jacobsen, played; and the exemplary Brooklyn Youth Chorus, led by Dianne Berkun Menaker.
Before she began, Anderson—whose sharp, sardonic tone perfectly matched Cavafy’s tone—pointed to political parallels between our own closed Congress and Cavafy’s imagined empire in decline with an idle senate (“This sounds familiar!”). She recited “Barbarians” and “Ithaka” in English as she laid her electric violin, two keyboards, synths, and other electronics over the orchestra and chorus.
Also on the program were works by Helga Davis and Petros Klampanis, as well as Prestini, whose setting of Cavafy’s poem “Voices” for the chorus offered dazzling textures and wonderful counterpoint. Davis and Klampanis’ composition, “Cavafy Ghost”, featured Davis’ virtuoso vocals across several octaves and made a collage of several Cavafy poems. In a striking section, Davis and Klampanis, who also played double bass, read “Barbarians” (again!) back to back, Davis in English and Klampanis in Greek, to mesmerizing effect.
For Greek-born Klampanis, Cavafy’s work is part of a common cultural lexicon; but it was clear from their writing and live performances how deeply Anderson, Prestini and Davis had each struggled with Cavafy’s themes of isolation and memory. “Voices,” the choristers solemnly chanted in Prestini’s piece: “beloved and idealized, of those who have died, or of those who have been lost to us like the dead.”
That side-by-side recitation was also reminiscent of Cavafy the polyglot: He grew up partly in Britain as a child and reportedly spoke Greek with an English accent. (Cavafy’s multilingual ease was common in Alexandria; my father spoke English as his fourth language, after Greek, Arabic, and French.)
Wednesday evening I returned to National Sawdust for ‘Archive of Desire’, a meditative collaboration between poet Robin Coste Lewis, composer and pianist Vijay Iyer, Zeigler (both composer and cellist here) and visual artist Julie Mehretu. As Lewis intertwined her own words with frequent quotes from and allusions to Cavafy, Iyer and Zeigler played arc melodies, sometimes in dialogue, and sometimes contained in individual sonic universes that corresponded to Cavafy’s sense of loneliness. Mehretu’s work, replete with her signature frolicking lines implying movement and displacement, was projected onto a screen behind the other artists.
At the end of the “Archive of Desire” performance, Lewis returned to the microphone and exclaimed, “Cavafy forever!” This festival was not about rediscovering a long-dead voice. Instead, it offered today’s artists a chance to learn about Cavafy’s ever-present future.
