For those who lead a provincial life, life and happiness are always to be found elsewhere, in another city, in another country. But for us provincials, this other place is perpetually out of reach. Cavafy’s wisdom is in the dignity and introspective sensibility with which he approaches this sad truth. And finally, with the same linguistic restraint and philosophical simplicity, he concludes by revealing that we have wasted our lives in that city. We come to realize that we have all been wasting our lives, and that the problem lies not in being provincial, but in the very nature of life itself. Great poets can tell their own stories without once saying “I,” and in doing so, lend their voice to all of humanity.

Kierkegaard once said that the unhappy person lives either in the past or in the future. There are many old men in Cavafy’s poems; not trusting in the future is, for him, another kind of wisdom. So he fashions for himself a new past, one based on books, history and Greek mythology. Some of the narrative poems he based on the myths of ancient Greece are so intense and powerful that reading them feels like reading a particularly eventful novel.

I was in Alexandria a year before the events now known as the Arab Spring began. I went to visit Cavafy’s house, which has been turned into a museum. His actual family home was destroyed by British cannons. They had used a different house for the museum. It was a Friday. Everyone was at the mosque for prayers. The pavements were empty. The only people in the museum were tourists. The shuttered shops, the handful of old pine trees, the run-down buildings, the narrow streets, the squares, all helped me realize that versions of the Istanbul of my childhood still survive in cities all over the Mediterranean. I love Cavafy’s poetry not just as a reflection of his exemplary life, but also for the landscape it depicts, for its crumbling buildings, and because I immediately identify with the texture of Mediterranean life.

Every now and then I reread some of Cavafy’s poems, all of which fit comfortably in a slim volume. A longtime friend once published a selection in Turkish, working from Edmund Keeley’s translations, and took his title from the poem “Waiting for the Barbarians.” For many years thereafter, whenever we met, we greeted each other with the same joke: “How are you?” “Oh, you know — waiting for the barbarians.” What we meant was that — from a political perspective — we were, as usual, expecting even darker days ahead. Those darker days did actually come, and after the nationalist uprisings in Egypt, Alexandria’s Greek minority abandoned the city altogether. But the final twist in this brilliant, storylike poem suggests an entirely different ending. Cavafy will never cease to surprise and move his readers.

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“The City” by C. P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,

find another city better than this one.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong

and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,

I see the black ruins of my life, here,

where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”