it, I have included, before this final section of the Published Poems, a list of the poems giving the order in which they appeared in the Notebook.
Because they were works about which the poet had mixed feelings, I have decided to place the remaining poems, some of which are very early, after those that the poet approved for publication. These appear in roughly chronological order. First come the twenty-seven Repudiated Poems, originally published between 1886 and 1898 and subsequently renounced by the poet. These are followed by the Unpublished Poems. The latter is a group of seventy-seven texts (including three written in English) that Cavafy completed but never approved for publication, and which he kept among his papers, many of them bearing the notation “Not for publication, but may remain here.” The first of these was written when the poet was around fourteen; the last was written in 1923, when he was sixty. Thirteen found their way into print after World War II, and a complete scholarly edition of the entire group, edited by George Savidis, was published in Athens, in 1968. A subsequent edition, published by Mr. Savidis in 1993, gives to them a new name, “Hidden Poems,” but I have retained the old designation, “Unpublished,” both in my text and in my notes, since I believe that “unpublished” adequately suggests the poet’s attitude toward those works without introducing speculative psychological overtones. In the present volume I have included translations of all seventy-four of the Unpublished Poems that were written in Greek, as well as the texts of the three poems Cavafy wrote in English, since they are original works; I have omitted from the present translation the poet’s five translations into Greek of works in other languages, of which three are from English. Readers will also find translations of the three remarkable Prose Poems among the Unpublished Poems.
The fourth and final section of this volume contains the Unfinished Poems, drafts that Cavafy had begun between 1918 and 1932 (see the discussion below).
A final word, about the appearance of the poems on the page. As we know, the dates of composition and subsequent publication of Cavafy’s poems is often suggestive: it surely meant something that he spent fifteen years returning to and polishing “The City” before he chose to publish it. According to Sarayannis,
Cavafy himself told me that he never managed to write a poem from beginning to end. He worked on them all for years, or often let them lie for whole years and later took them up again. His dates therefore only represent the year when he judged that one of his poems more or less satisfied him.
Given the importance of those dates, I have chosen to note them at the bottom of the page(s) on which the poems appear in the main portion of this text, rather than cluttering the notes at the back with one-line items (“Written in 1917, published in 1918”). To do so, I have adopted the following system of notation. When known, the year of original composition (and of subsequent rewriting, if there was one and if we know when it occurred) appears in italics; the year (or years) of publication appear in roman type. Hence, for example, in the case of the Published Poem “Song of Ionia,” of which an early version was written at some point before 1891 and then published in 1896, only to be subsequently revised in 1905 and published in its final form in 1911, the notation reads as follows: [1891; 1896; 1905; 1911].
In the case of the Unpublished Poems—the date of whose first publication, long after the poet’s death, does not, by contrast, shed any light on his feelings or intentions—I have merely added the year of composition, in parentheses, after the title of each poem. In the case of the Unfinished Poems, the year that appears in parentheses refers to what George Savidis, who discovered the drafts, called “the date of first conception,” which Cavafy noted on the dossier for each draft. In both cases, the addition of the date to the title has, I think, the virtue of making those poems visually distinct from the ones that Cavafy himself chose to publish—however he may have subsequently felt about them. Readers today are, indeed, likely to find more to admire, or at the very least to learn from, in the poems that Cavafy suppressed than the poet himself would have suspected.
5
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1932, at the end of a four-month sojourn in Athens that also marked the beginning of the end of his life, Cavafy revealed with some agitation that he had important unfinished business to attend to. “I still have twenty-five poems to write,” he declared to some friends, in the distorted whisper to which his famously mellifluous and enchanting voice had been reduced following the tracheotomy that was meant to save him from throat cancer, and which was the reason he’d come to Athens from Alexandria. “Twenty-five poems!”
The conversation, recalled by one of the friends to whom he’d spoken that day and reported after Cavafy’s death in April of the following year, was merely the first of what turned out to be several tantalizing references to a body of unfinished work that the poet was desperately trying to complete as death closed in. Ten years later, in 1943, someone who’d been engaged in compiling Cavafy’s bibliography during the very year in which the poet had traveled to Athens seeking medical help revealed that Cavafy had made it plain to him that the bibliography was far from complete. In 1963, on the thirtieth anniversary of Cavafy’s death, someone else wrote in to a newspaper claiming that, during those last months, the dying poet had written him to say that he still had fifteen poems to finish.
The mysterious texts to which these various hints alluded were finally identified, also in 1963, by the scholar George Savidis, Cavafy’s great editor, after an inspection of the Cavafy Archive, which Savidis himself eventually came to possess after acquiring it from Cavafy’s friend and heir, Alexander Sengopoulos. A year later, in an article about material in the Archive that had yet to be published (some of which—those poems that Cavafy had completed but did not approve for publication—he would publish in 1968 as “The Unpublished Poems”), Savidis revealed, with the deep emotion of an archaeologist making a great discovery, the existence of a cache of incomplete drafts, composed between 1918 and 1932, that the poet had left, meticulously labeled and organized, among his papers:
More interesting still are the sketches of 25 poems that Cavafy was unable to finish, and on which he was working, with great difficulty, during the last months of his life. Carefully wrapped by him in makeshift envelopes, each with its provisional title and the date, I imagine, of its first conception, they proceed from 1918 to 1932, and along with the very full drafts of some of the published work (like “Caesarion”) and some of the unpublished but completed poems, they give us a unique, unhoped-for, and tremendously moving look at the stages of Cavafian creation.
Closer inspection eventually revealed that there were, in fact, thirty drafts in all, along with a handful of fragmentary texts. In time, Savidis entrusted the task of editing these drafts, some of them awaiting the most minor of finishing touches, others apparently in the final stages of preparation but complicated by various textual problems, to the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini. A professor of Modern Greek at the University of Palermo and member of the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici (the Sicilian Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, founded by her father, the great Byzantinist and Neohellenist Bruno Lavagnini), she is both an authority on the literary aspects of Cavafy’s work and a meticulous philologist. As a specialist in textual criticism, Professor Lavagnini was particularly well equipped to tackle the technical problems associated with editing a mass of manuscript drafts into coherent texts—although, as she herself would be the first to emphasize, these texts must always remain, at best, hypothetical; something the reader must bear in mind.
The heroic task of sifting through these sometimes illegible sketches, of teasing out, from crossed-out lines and scribbled-in insertions, each discrete stage (or, as the poet called it, morfí, “form”) in the evolution of a given poem, of arriving at the likely last form taken by each work, and of meticulously annotating textual issues, as well as providing a thoroughgoing literary and historical commentary, took decades, but there can be no doubt that the result was worth the wait. The fruits of Professor Lavagnini’s labor, published as a scholarly Greek edition in 1994, gives this important body of poetic work to the
