Constantine Cavafy: A New Life by Gregory Jusdanis & Peter Jeffreys

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography

By Gregory Jusdanis & Peter Jeffreys

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2025

Right at the start of their new book about the great Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys offer the same kind of caution that Robert Liddell offered 50 years ago in his own Cavafy biography: a great heaping mound of the poet’s letters apparently don’t survive. Jusdanis, a professor at Ohio State, and Jeffreys, a professor at Suffolk, remind their readers that although we have Lord Tennyson’s voice on recording, we don’t even have audio of Cavafy in his widely-mentioned accented English.

This isn’t to say there’s a paucity, far from it. Cavafy squirreled away every bit of scrap quotidia imaginable; as Jusdanis and Jeffreys point out, he certainly acted like he was expecting biographers to come along and comb through all that stuff. And yet, our authors are almost grim in assessing their own book’s likelihood of success. “The vagaries of the history of the archive should warn us against presuming that it allows untainted access to the mind and life of C. P. Cavafy,” they write. “That the archive offers tangible, visible, and quantifiable material about the poet does not mean it yields a picture of a man waiting to be discovered.”

Luckily, it does indeed yield the picture of a man waiting to be discovered, and Jusdanis and Jeffrey’s discover that man with vivid if occasionally funereal precision. We may not have all the letters in Cavafy’s voice that we could wish, but we still hear his voice everywhere in accounts of his friends and acquaintances, and we hear plenty of what he thought of others. “As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest,” wrote Auden. “He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles.” And this grand, oddly level-headed view of the world permeates both the archive and this book. Readers will come away from Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography very much feeling they know the man (Auden was much less sanguine about ever knowing the man’s poetry, calling almost all of it essentially untranslatable, but Auden could be silly that way).

Jusdanis and Jeffreys periodically make a point of stressing Cavafy’s groundedness. We often see him meeting friends, going on strolls where “he would stop and chat with shop owners, exchanging views about daily events.” And they very effectively juxtapose this ordinary daily existence with occasional neat observations about the poetry that is the claim of Cavafy’s immortality. Our authors discuss this poetry comparatively seldom, but they understand it thoroughly. “As he violated poetic conventions and naturalistic imagery, Constantine [so we chummily refer to him throughout, alas] deliberately avoided the broad topics expected of a major Greek poet, such as the fall of Constantinople or social justice,” they write. “Rather than evoking the public space of national identity or class struggle, he spoke of closed rooms, fleeting encounters between men, veiled desires, guilt and pleasure.”

Cavafy grew slower, gloomier, and more griping as he grew older, and our authors not only foreshadow this but pursue it so assiduously that a curious shadow seems to gather about the book. Long before the poet has begun to lose that special spring in his step, his biography does, so the reader is well-prepared for the party winding down:

His many funerary poems attest that Constantine was capable of writing lines of intense pathos and of portraying individuals weighed down by unbearable tragedy. But he seems to have lost this capacity in his own life – to understand other people, to stand in their shoes, so to speak. The Constantine of middle age and beyond little resembled the kindhearted young man. It is not without justification that many contemporaries found him “cynical” and “cold.”

Those same readers will hold to the strong suspicion that Cavafy was generally cheerier than this, especially with friends. But even if that suspicion is overly optimistic, the portrait here is still arresting, superior to any of the admittedly few efforts yet made in English. Cavafy will almost certainly always feel one step removed from the elbow-to-elbow familiarity found in some other poets’ lives (and don’t ask Auden how many steps removed all his poetry is), but Jusdanis and Jeffreys have brought him into closer focus than ever before.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News