Queer Cavafy and Women’s Writing in Translation

Abstract

In a self-praise, Constantine Cavafis presents himself as the ultramodernist Greek poet for the future generations. Cavafis managed to overcome the barriers of language and culture. The poet continues to be an exceptional phenomenon in the publishing and translation world of modern Greek literature. 86 years have passed since his death and the poet is still a code that invites us to decipher. The heart of his poetry is sexuality during the Victorian era at the crossroads of the civilizations in Alexandria at the beginning of the 20th century. The poet speaks about a new identity that arises in Modernity, the homosexual identity. In short, the poet associates desire, passion and pleasure with sexuality, power, time, identity and politics. All these aspects described by Dimitris Papanikolaou (2014), who analyzes the work of Cavafis from a queer perspective, can be traced in a particular category of poems, the Greek funerary epigrams. The poet appropriates the form of the epigrams, characterized by insinuation, derision, brevity and sophistry, to refer to homosexuality and its ethical and political implications. The appropriation of this poetic genre results in an auto/homo/biographics based on the stories of homosexuals in a historical context. The techniques that he employs have much in common with the writing of women based upon the Antigone archetype. Based on the case study by Myriam Watthee-Delmotte (2016), we observe that the poet has more in common with women than with men. With the tools of Comparative Literature, Comparative Translation and Feminist/Queer Translation, this case study aims to examine the convergences between women's writing and that of Constantine Cavafis in elegiac discourse and how these techniques are employed in translation of his poems, by D. Mendelshon (2012) into English, by M. Volkovitch (2017) into French and by J. M. Macías (2015) into Spanish. Our hypothesis is that this convergence is not random because his poetry focuses on an oppressed and socially unacceptable sexuality, which at the beginning of the 20th century was tied to description, categorization and control. Therefore, with this representation we expect to explore possible affinities between Cavafis’ poetry and women’s prose, which has also been a historically oppressed social group.