The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Daniel Mendelsohn

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 world in a lucidly presented form; it bears the title chosen by Savidis, by which it will hereafter be known: Ateli piimata, the “Unfinished Poems.” (The adjective ateli in Greek suggests, too, a state of “imperfection.”) Thanks to the generous cooperation of the Cavafy Archive, I have the privilege of making this vitally important addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets available to English speakers for the first time.

      The Unfinished Poems are unusual in at least one crucial respect. More often than not, when previously unknown manuscripts by major authors unexpectedly come to light, the material in question is juvenilia: immature work from the earliest phase of the artist’s career, which he or she has discarded or repressed and which, either through the dogged detective work of dedicated scholars or through happy accidents, suddenly sees the light of day once more. The discovery, in 1994, of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, which languished in the Harvard University Library until it was discovered by a pair of professors researching Alcott’s papers, and the 2004 discovery of the complete draft of an early novel of Truman Capote among some papers and photographs that had passed into the hands of a former house sitter, are but two recent examples. And yet as exciting and dramatic as these revelations can be, such work tends, inevitably, to be interesting less for any inherent artistic value it possesses than for the light it can shed on the writer’s creative development.

      The thirty Unfinished Poems of Cavafy, by contrast, represent the last and greatest phase of the poet’s career: the decade and a half from 1918, when Cavafy was fifty-five—and when, too, he published the first of his “sensual” (or “aesthetic”) poems that were explicitly homosexual in nature—until the year before his death at the age of seventy. For this reason they are of the deepest significance not merely inasmuch as they illuminate the existing works—the Published, Unpublished, and Repudiated Poems—but as serious works of art in themselves, the deeply wrought products of a great poetic consciousness at its peak.

      The publication of a writer’s unfinished work is, inevitably, an enterprise that raises complicated questions. This is particularly true in the case of a writer like Cavafy, who ruthlessly culled his own work every year, suppressing anything that did not meet his exacting standards—a process that suggests a stringent adherence to the very highest criteria of polish and perfection. But there is persuasive evidence that Cavafy considered the thirty drafts presented here as work he eventually meant to be recognized and published. The Cavafy Archive contains two lists that the poet made of work in progress: one dates to 1930, and the other was kept and constantly revised between 1923 and 1932. The former contains the titles of twenty-nine poems, of which twenty-five are all of the Unfinished drafts he’d composed by that time, and the latter records the titles of fifty poems, a figure that includes all thirty of the Unfinished drafts. All of the other poems listed in these indices are works Cavafy eventually sent to the printer. Hence the lists strongly indicate that the poet—who, as we know from the manuscripts of his Unpublished Poems, was perfectly willing to mark a finished poem with a note declaring that it “need not be published. But it may continue remaining here. It does not deserve to be suppressed”—made no distinction between those poems that he published and the ones he did not, in the end, have time to complete and publish. It was only time, and finally death, that consigned them, for a while, to obscurity.

      “Light on one poem, partial light on another.” Cavafy’s 1927 remark is perhaps nowhere more apt than in the case of the Unfinished Poems. Readers encountering these works will immediately see how fully they partake of Cavafy’s special vision as I have described it