NEW YORK – 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 20^th 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 40^th 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/arts/dance/constantine-p-cavafy-archive-of-desire.html?searchResultPosition=1

One of Cavafy’s most famous poems is Ithaka, about Odysseus’ return to his home island, referring to what’s learned during long journeys  so that, “As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,/ you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.”

Being a gay man during a time when it could be dangerous, he’s a hero to those today whose sexual preferences can bring ignorant scorn and  Tsioulcas wrote of learning his themes beyond Ithaka.

That included “His life as a queer man in Egypt in the early 20th Century, his writings about desire. His world-weary views on the passings of empires and power. His profound meditations on time.”

“Cavafy often thought about being of a place and also not of that place, a feeling that reverberated throughout my childhood. And I latched onto the sheer music of Cavafy’s words,” she wrote.

Paola Prestini, the curator of Archive of Desire,brought together creators for the festival to engage his writing and focus on his self-assessment as a poet not just of his time but of future generations, said the review.

DON’T DEGRADE YOUR LIFE

The nine-day festival opened April 28 at National Sawdust in Brooklyn with a performance from the visual artist Sister Sylvester and the Egyptian electronic musician and vocalist Nadah El Shazly. T

hey named their collaboration “Constantinopoliad,” after the journal that Cavafy began when he was 18, when his family moved briefly to his parents’ native city, Constantinople, to escape the British bombardment of Alexandria.

“The narrative deftly explored brief episodes from Cavafy’s life as well as musings on queerness, ethnic identity, migration and the tangled history of the Mediterranean region,” said the report.

That was followed by Days of 2023 at Columbia with stitched together poetry recitations with recent works by U.S. composers as well as older musical settings of Cavafy, which she said was awkwardly put together.

But a highlight was a complete performance of the groundbreaking Greek electronic musician Lena Platonos’s 2010 album Kavafis 13 Tragoudia, in which she set 13 of Cavafy’s poems to music, working with the Greek singer Giannis Palamidas.

“It was effective and moving, especially in a raucously percussive setting of one of Cavafy’s most famous poems, Waiting for the Barbarians,” said the writer, adding you could almost hear the hooves of horses.

It wasn’t all triumph. “Lamentably, the organizers presented no texts or translations at any of the musical performances. For the Platonos, the 13 poems’ titles weren’t even listed in the program.”

She asked that if the mission was to expand awareness of Cavafy’s work, “why leave out that information, essential for most in the New York audience?” (The festival’s creative director and the director of culture for the Onassis Foundation, Afroditi Panagiotakou, said the decision was a creative choice meant to spark audiences’ curiosity about Cavafy) was the answer.

Multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson gave a musical interpretation and she pointed out parallels between the US Congress and Cavafy’s imagined empire in decline with a do-nothing Senate.

She also declaimed Barbarians and Ithaka in English while layering her electric violin, two keyboards, synths and other electronics over the orchestra and chorus, putting the music to Cavafy’s words.

The program also included 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 beautiful counterpoint.”

Davis and Klampanis’ composition, Cavafy Ghost, featured Davis’ vocals across several octaves and collaged several Cavafy poems and in one section Davis read in English and Klampanis in Greek “to mesmerizing effect.” The way to Ithaka is long.