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You’ll always end up in this city.” This bleak invocation of “the city” as a symbol of the weight of history and habit reaches a grim climax: “Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this / small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.” Poems 1905⁠–1915 begins, famously, by asking the reader to enter the published work through twin portals: the first two poems in the collection are “The City,” and “The Satrapy.” “The City” is an ostensibly contemporary poem, addressed to an anonymous “you” who is eager to leave behind the unnamed “city” of the title (which may or may not be Alexandria, but could be any city, any civilization, any history) in his resigned wisdom, the narrator admonishes his anonymous interlocutor that “you’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.

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Chose, I should add, not only to include it, but to foreground it: “Ithaca” appears ninth in a series of forty poems-part of the crucial introductory sequence, that is to say, of his entire published oeuvre, a sequence none of whose other elements, we can safely say, is characterized by sentimentality.Īnd indeed, if we return to my opening question-“How did Cavafy get to ‘Ithaca’?”-one answer is to analyze the route charted by the poet himself: that is, to examine the rigorously deliberate ordering of poems that lead up to “Ithaca” at the beginning of Poems 1905⁠–1915, which constitutes a “corridor” of verse through which the reader is meant to proceed as he approaches, absorbs, and then passes “Ithaca.”

And yet Cavafy himself, who ruthlessly purged his own work-he repudiated twenty-seven of his early published works, precisely, one could argue, because they were in fact cheaply sentimental each year very little of what he wrote survived his winnowing process-Cavafy himself chose to include “Ithaca” in the first of the three published collections that he carefully curated and organized: the so-called Poems 1905⁠–1915.

Deservedly, Cavafy’s mature work has earned a reputation as being expressive of a dry-eyed, even world-weary realism about the human condition: if not outright disillusioned then certainly illusion-less, whether the aspect of the human condition under examination is the wide sweep of history writ large, or the narrow space of our most intimate erotic yearnings. It is hard not to think that Kaiser dislikes “Ithaca” not because it is so popular, but because-at least, as he understood it-it exhibits few of the qualities that so many prize in this poet. In a review of the 1975 English translation of the poet’s work by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, my late friend Walter Kaiser, a Harvard professor and far-ranging critic as well as a keen Neo-hellenophile, was referring to “Ithaca” when he swiped at “one or two overrated poems in inadequate translation” in the poet’s oeuvre that were likely to be have been known to English-speaking audiences, before the appearance of Keeley and Sherrard’s landmark translation made “the Alexandrian” better known than he had ever been. The sentimentality of this apparent “message,” as it is now often read, has not endeared “Ithaca” to some of Cavafy’s most ardent admirers. Certainly “Ithaca” is the poet’s most famous and beloved work, at least in the anglophone world and particularly in America, where a reading of it at Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ funeral in 1994 briefly made Cavafy a bestseller.Īnd how not? Its apparent message-that in life, the journey is more important than the destination-nicely dovetails with a certain strand in American popular culture, which goes to frenetic lengths to avoid thinking about death (for this, of course, is what “the destination” is, in Cavafy’s poem), focusing instead, and with equal franticness, on filling “the journey” (which is to say, life itself) with as much activity as possible. How did Constantine Cavafy get to “Ithaca”? Not the island, of course, but the 1911 poem that is Cavafy’s most famous and best-loved work, which begins by admonishing its nameless second-person addressee-who may be Homer’s Odysseus, but could also be us, the reader-to “hope that the road is a long one, / filled with adventures, filled with discoveries” as he “sets out on the way to Ithaca”: the hero’s island home, the all-important destination in the myths that Homer’s poems adapted, perhaps the most famous destination in world literature.

Shifty eyes homer