Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

  

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
( Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

 

 

ERSI SOTIROPOULOU

 

 

The making of a poet: erotic desires and the struggle with words 

 

What’s Left of the Night is about a struggle, a personal quest. One of the questions raised by the book is: how can one become a modern poet, innovative in his art, when because of his character and his education he feels dominated by the entourage of his family? Seen more broadly, this question provokes further questions. How does one actually become a poet, an artist? I was interested in Cavafy before he became the poet Constantine Cavafy: a young aspiring poet, full of ambition but timid and tormented by doubts. The choice of the date – June 1897 –  was arbitrary, but in the end, as it often happens, it was the right choice.

Little information existed about Cavafy’s trip to Paris in June 1897 – the first and last holiday journey of his life. Cavafy himself left no written trace. I started thinking of this young man (whose future course we all know very well), his trip to Paris at a very special moment in time, his passion for writing, his anxiety to find his own voice, and how he was tormented by sexual desires that were forbidden back then. I started to imagine him at this unique crossroads: Alexandria in the background, remote and cosmopolitan, further away Greece, humiliated and once more defeated, and finally Paris, illuminated, at the height of its glory.

For this novel, as I said before, I was driven by questions. My sources were not just the Cavafy archives but all sorts of information, books, letters, personal narratives, photos, documents: novels of the late nineteenth century, books on the political and economic history of Egypt, on the Greek community of Alexandria, on artistic life in Paris, on the Dreyfus affair, on the Greek-Turkish war of 1897, records of the Belle Époque Paris at the Museum of the City of Paris, etc. etc. And of course I visited Paris and Alexandria many times while I was writing the novel.

There is a poem of that period entitled “Half an Hour” – one of the ‘hidden’ poems – that has always stayed with me, especially these lines:

But we who serve Art,
sometimes with the mind’s intensity,
can create—but of course only for a short time—
pleasure that seems almost physical. (377)

That passage has served as a sort of central thread for my book.

Working on the novel, I arrived at two conclusions, each of them related to the importance of the year 1897 for Cavafy as both a poet and a person. First, it’s only after that date that he becomes the poet we know and admire. He abandons lyricism, shakes off the influence of romanticism, and develops his own distinctive voice, in which complex meanings are conveyed in a bare, limpid form. As a poet Cavafy matured very slowly. He was obsessed with formal perfection. Just imagine that “The City,” which is mentioned in the novel, took him more than ten years to complete.

The second conclusion concerns his private life. By 1897 Cavafy had accepted his homosexuality, though socially he was a conventional and old-fashioned person. But however tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy reached a point in his development as a poet where he was able to write about that desire openly, in an unapologetic, direct way, unifying his passion for the Hellenistic civilization and his passion for other men in poems that met his own rigorous standards.

What interested me from the very start was to capture the moment, that exceptional moment when physical desire turns into creative impulse. What happens is that, for Cavafy, erotic desire becomes a driving force. But what is at stake in art is how desire is represented, whatever this desire is – that is what differentiates an average poem from a great one: how the desire unfolds, transcends the poet who wrote about it, and turns into something capable of transmitting emotion to readers who do not share the same desire.

Where does art come from? What is its source? That’s the question at the core of What’s Left of the Night? Can art come from something trivial, from a tiny hair, a little harder than the others, on the pubis of the lover, an insignificant detail that suddenly catches fire and ignites existence?

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WORKS CITED

Cavafy, C. P. Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, Princeton UP, 1975.
Sotiropoulos, Ersi. What’s Left of the Night. Translated by Karen Emmerich, New Vessel Press, 2018.

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Ersi Sotiropoulos is the author of sixteen books of fiction and poetry. She studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology in Florence and served for nine years as the cultural attaché for the Greek Embassy in Rome. Her work has been translated into many languages, and has been awarded in Greece with the National Book Prize twice, the Book Critics’ Award and the Athens Academy Prize, the Dante Alighieri Award for her poetry in Italy, and has been shortlisted for the European Book Prize. Her novel What’s Left of the Night won the Prix Méditerranée Étranger 2017 in France and the National Translation Award 2019 in the USA. She has written scripts for film and television, and has participated in exhibitions of Visual Poetry. She has been a fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, at Princeton University, at Yaddo, at Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany, at the Sacatar Foundation in Brazil, at Villa Yourcenar in France, and at the Bogliasco Foundation and Civitella Ranieri in Italy among others.

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