Konstantinos Kavafis

Kavafis was born in Alexandria on 29 April 1863, the youngest of nine children of a wealthy Greek merchant family from Constantinople. His father died in 1870 and the business collapsed, and the family spent the years 1872 to 1877 in England, in Liverpool and London, where the boy learned English so well that he kept a slight English accent in Greek all his life. After a few years in Constantinople in the 1880s, he returned to Alexandria and never really left it again.

From 1892 to 1922, thirty years, he worked as a clerk at the Irrigation Service of the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works, and supplemented his salary by working as a broker on the cotton exchange. He lived with his mother until her death in 1899, and then alone, in a second-floor flat on the Rue Lepsius, above a brothel and next to a hospital and the Greek church of Saint Sabbas, a setting he liked to joke about. He was homosexual, and the love poems he wrote after about 1910, discreet but unmistakable, are among the first in modern literature to speak of it openly.

He refused to publish a book. Instead he had poems printed on single sheets and in small pamphlets, which he gave to friends and visitors, revising them constantly. E. M. Forster, who met him during the First World War, introduced him to English readers. Kavafis was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx in 1932, lost his voice after an operation in Athens, and died in Alexandria on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday.

Kavafis divided his poems into three groups: historical, philosophical and erotic. The historical poems rarely visit classical Athens; they prefer the Hellenistic kingdoms, Byzantium and the Greek cities of the Roman East, and they are small dramas of vanity, defeat and irony. In Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους (Waiting for the Barbarians, 1904) a whole city prepares to surrender to invaders who never come, and the last line asks what we will do now without them. In Απολείπειν ο θεός Αντώνιον (The God Abandons Antony, 1911) Mark Antony is told to say goodbye to Alexandria with dignity as the city slips from him.

The philosophical poems are the ones people quote. Η Πόλις (The City, 1910) warns that you cannot escape your life by changing towns: «Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί» (the city will follow you). Ιθάκη (Ithaca, 1911) turns Odysseus's journey into a lesson about living: the island is the excuse, the voyage is the point. Θερμοπύλες (Thermopylae, 1903) honours those who guard their post knowing that in the end the Persians will get through, and Κεριά (Candles, 1899) counts the days of a life as a row of lit and burnt-out candles. The erotic poems, such as Θυμήσου, σώμα (Remember, Body) and Μέρες του 1903 (Days of 1903), recall brief encounters in cheap rooms with tenderness and no apology. His language is a deliberate mix of demotic and old-fashioned katharevousa, flat, exact and unlyrical, which makes it unusually easy to translate and which is why Cavafy sounds like Cavafy in every language.

The best introduction is to hear Ithaca read aloud, in Greek or in English; it was read at the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994, and it is printed on countless graduation cards. Greek pupils read Ιθάκη, Η Πόλις, Θερμοπύλες and Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους in lyceum, and lines like «Σα βγεις στον πηγαιμό για την Ιθάκη» or «Η πόλις θα σε ακολουθεί» are quoted in newspaper headlines and everyday talk. The flat on the former Rue Lepsius in Alexandria is the Cavafy Museum, run by the Onassis Foundation, which also holds his archive in Athens. Leonard Cohen's song «Alexandra Leaving» is a free version of The God Abandons Antony, and several Greek composers have set the poems to music. The site has a C2 listening tribute and a C2 speaking exercise about translating him.

• He was born and died on the same date, 29 April, in 1863 and 1933.
• He never published a book for sale; his poems circulated on printed sheets he distributed himself, and the first collected edition appeared in 1935, two years after his death.
• His canonical body of work is just 154 poems; he rejected or hid many more, which were published later as the «hidden» and «unfinished» poems.
• He worked for thirty years as a clerk in the Irrigation Service and described himself to visitors as a poet-historian rather than a civil servant.