He wasn’t fully appreciated or published during his lifetime, much of it spent in Alexandria, but the works of Constantine P. Cavafy, widely acknowledged as the most important Greek poet of the 20th Century, still resonate.
Unlike peers George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis, whose works came mostly after his and won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Cavafy didn’t, much of his brilliance not written until after his 40th birthday and not fully recognized.
He was back across sites in New York through the Archive of Desire festival sponsored by the Onassis Foundation, written about in the New York Times by Anastasia Tsioulcas, who recalled reading him when she was only 10.
She said that Cavafy, who died in 1933 and now recalled 90 years later, was well-known to her family which also came from the once-thriving Greek community in Egypt that is now almost all gone.
“Cavafy was a hero to us — and continues to be a hero across the Greek-speaking world. Many of his recurring motifs — of alienation, of queerness, of distrusting certitudes, of a life shaped in the margins — still feel startlingly modern,” she wrote, apt as he considered himself ultra-modern.
The festival, timed to coincide with the 160th anniversary of Cavafy’s birth on April 29, was aimed at bringing new audiences to his work,” filtered through the prisms of contemporary artists working in many mediums, including music, poetry, film and visual art, with 25 newly commissioned works,” said the piece.
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