The Cavafy Effect: Homages, Allusions, Readings, por Fabián O. Iriarte

Fabián O. Iriarte holds a Licenciatura en Letras from the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (1987) and a Doctoral Degree in the Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas (1999). He currently teaches English and US Literature and Comparative Literature at the UNMdP and is a member of the Problemas de la Literatura Comparada research group. Some of his essays on translation have appeared in Traducción como cultura (1997) and La cultura de los géneros (2001). He has directed seminars on translation and gay & lesbian poetry. His translations of Jorie Graham’s and Adrienne Rich’s poetry are featured in the anthology Los pájaros, por la nieve (Santiago de Chile: RIL, 2008); he also co-edited and co-translated with Lisa R. Bradford Usos de la imaginación: Poesía de l@s latin@s en EEUU (Mar del Plata: Eudem, 2008).

W. H. Auden declared, in his Introduction to the 1961 edition of The Complete Poems of C. P. Cavafy, that the Alexandrian poet's work remained an influence on his writing since the time he had been introduced to it, thirty years earlier: "I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or perhaps not written at all." Cavafy seems to have had a similar effect on a host of American and British writers (some of whom identified themselves as either "homosexual" or "gay"). His poetry has been disseminated and multiplied in numerous texts by poets acknowledging their debt in several ways. Roughly classified, their poems may be seen as "homage poems" (like Peter Bradley's "On a Snapshot of Cavafy's House", 1990), "allusive poems" (like William Plomer's "A Casual Encounter", 1973), and "poems of reading experience" (like Timothy Liu's "Reading Cavafy", 1998). An analysis of these texts will reveal the productive effects of Cavafian poetry in translation in the English-speaking world and the way his poetry found new life in poetic homages, re-stagings of typical Cavafian scenes, and revisitations.