As much as you can

By Hala Halim

This near-inaccessibility, ironical and tantalising though it was, seemed nevertheless a posthumous extension of the reclusive, fastidious life that was Cavafy's ("And if you cannot make your life as you want it,/ at least try this/ as much as you can: do not disgrace it/ in the crowding contact with the world,/ in the many movements and all the talk..." As Much As you Can). But beyond the poetic seemliness of this state of affairs, it was undoubtedly a pity that while in Athens Cavafy's central place in the pantheon of modern Greek poets was assured, in his native city, the Alexandria he had devoted his oeuvre to refashioning into myth, he was little known.

All this seemed set to change when in the mid-80s the first annual "Cavafia" festival, as it was then called, was held in Alexandria under the aegis of the Greek Consulate. The festival brought key-figures in "Cavafology", art exhibitions related to Cavafy and/or Alexandria, concerts and much else. Then, about eight years ago, Mr Kostis Moskof, the cultural counsellor of the Greek Embassy in Cairo, himself a poet, undertook to transform the "Cavafia" into an annual "Cavafy International Symposium", with a view to making of the event a forum for Greek-Egyptian, and at an extension, Greek-Arab, cultural dialogue. Cavafy, who in E M Forster's words, stood "at a slight angle to the universe" metamorphosed into a sort of patron saint, or more prosaically, a point-of-departure for all manner of scholarship, whether on perspectives opened up in his work or in broadly cross-cultural dialogue tenuously linked to the poet.

In the revamped event, various measures were taken to ensure Egyptian participation. Awards for Egyptian and Arab poetry were appended to the event. A not negligible portion of papers read in past rounds of the symposium were by speakers from Egyptian universities. Although Cavafy had long since had a seminal presence in Egyptian poetry through the translations of clusters of his poems, the symposium also functioned as a launch for Arabic translations of more complete Cavafy collections commissioned and/or sponsored by the Greek Embassy. The inauguration of Cavafy's flat as a museum during the 1993 symposium, while it insured that the place would be safeguarded, also provided a "site" for literary tourists.

All this said, however, the 7th Cavafy International Symposium, held from 1-5 May, confirmed the paradox that has attended the event in recent years. The symposium barely draws an audience outside the circle of speakers, this despite all its potential, the effort and funds invested in it, and the quality of many of the papers read. Nor can it be claimed that the topics addressed are inaccessible to the general public.

Among a number of papers tackling aspects of Greek-Egyptian cultural issues, was that on "Mariana 'The Greek Woman' in Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz", given by Professor Azza Kararah of Alexandria University. Reiterating the point often made about the parallelism between the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the Ptolemies and that of the 19th and 20th centuries, Kararah addressed the "abrupt change [that] occurs with the advent of the 1960s" as seen in Naguib Mahfouz's Autumn Quail and Miramar, which "illustrate the tail end of an era". In the former novel, set in the early '50s, Kararah explained, Mahfouz "still saw Alexandria as a live cosmopolitan, more or less foreign city", hence, she argued, the fact that the brow-beaten protagonist of the novel moves from Cairo to the Alexandrian quarter of Ibrahimieh, "often dubbed 'Little Athens' because it was the home of a large Greek community." He thus finds "solace" and a "refuge" in Ibrahimieh, as "an alien among aliens".

With Miramar, set in Alexandria in the early '60s, "after the nationalisation laws came into effect" with their impact on the foreign communities, "Mahfouz captures this specific epoch in the history of Egypt which finds its most obvious expression in Alexandria". Analysing the faded gentility of Pension Miramar's interior as an image of "the Alexandria of that time", Kararah turns to the pension's Alexandrian Greek proprietess, Madame Mariana, now exiled in her own city, but never having been to Greece. In an imaginative tour de force, Kararah compares the Umm Kulthoum concert that Mariana listens to on the radio once a month to the defeated Antony's "invisible choir" in Cavafy, concluding that "Mariana is Naguib Mahfouz's Antony and like him, but to the strains of Souma's [Umm Kulthoum's] songs that echo like a requiem throughout the story, she bids farewell to the Alexandria of her youth..."

Classicist vice-president of Cairo University, Prof Hamdi Ibrahim, who had in 1992 translated a Cavafy collection sponsored by Mr Moskof, introduced his current project of an anthology of Modern Greek Poetry that he has selected and translated into Arabic. The project had its inception, he explained, in the early '70s when he "translated a number of patriotic Greek poems glorifying valour and calling for sacrifice and martyrdom. This was during the year 1973 and the glorious October War [when these] poems were broadcast on the Cultural Radio Program."

The anthology, he said, drew on works by 65 modern and contemporary Greek poets, every effort having been made to include a fair number of women poets. Rather touchingly, this scholar who has been working with the Greek language for "almost 40 years" vouched that it was his hope "that by publishing this anthology I will have repaid part of the debt due, being one of those who studied the culture of Hellas, enjoyed its pure thought, drank to exhalation from the stream of Castalia in the precinct of Apollo, the Greek god of poetry and art."

In "C P Cafavy as a Forerunner of [the] Multiculturalism Ideal", Michalis Pieris, tackled the link between the poet's native city as a "'multi-ethnic', 'multi-lingual' and 'multi-cultural' cosmopolis" and the theme of ethnic and cultural hybridity that runs through his work. Cavafy, claimed Pieris, "adopted the mix[ed] character... as a modern and progressive concept with which he reached the ideal and values of the cosmopolitan culture and the rejection of ethnic and religious fanaticism". Hence, suggested the speaker, the choice of setting for many of Cavafy's poems, of greater Greece, of the diaspora, of the formula "'partly the one' and 'partly the other'" of the racial hybrid as opposed to the thorough-bred -- as seen in poems such as "Returning Back Home from Greece" and "In a Town of Osroini".

Another thought-provoking paper was that read by Oxford professor Peter Mackridge, entitled "For Love or Money? Eros, Art and the Market-place in Cavafy's Poetry". Through his analysis of poems centring on artisans and art objects, as well as those where money binds or separates lovers, Mackridge concludes that "love, like art, should be a purely private matter, exempt from the public sphere. Yet, much as Cavafy might have preferred the temple of art to be free of vendors and money-changers, art and love are inevitably implicated in the socio-economic world... In his poems he presents these two contradictory but co-existing world-views, the idealistic and the realistic, and explores the ironies that arise from their co-existence."

The above were among a few of the symposium papers read in English, the vast majority of the talks being in Greek. Although Mr Samuel Bishara does a good job giving off-the-cuff brief synopses in Arabic, there is no doubt that low attendance of the event owes itself not a little to the language barrier. English abstracts of the papers delivered in Greek, distributed in advance -- a suggestion previously made on these pages -- would surely make for more dialogue, as would devoting at least 15 minutes to discussion at the end of each session. Likewise, the frequent last-minute changes to the printed programme also need to be addressed. Minor problems though these are, compared to the tremendous amount of energy invested in bringing about the event, they certainly need to be solved before the Cavafy International Symposium can fulfil the promise it no doubt possesses.