JGMC 1 (2) pp.

183–190 Intellect Limited 2015

Journal of Greek Media & Culture

Volume 1 Number 2
© 2015 Intellect Ltd Introduction. English language. doi: 10.1386/jgmc.1.2.183_7

Introduction

Dimitris Papanikolaou and Eleni Papargyriou

Cavafy pop: Popular

reception, cultural
productivity and the many
lives of poems

In January 2015, the popular Greek TV programme I michani tou chronou/Time 1. Accessible online
Machine, broadcast by the Greek State TV network NERIT, dedicated a special at: https://www.
youtube.com/
evening to the poet C. P. Cavafy.1 With his eyes fixed on the camera, and look- watch?v=LfTDGnR1-AI.
ing stern, the journalist in charge of the programme announced that ‘tonight Accessed 30 August
2015.
we will meet one of the biggest Greek poets. We will meet not only his work,
but also his life, that life he tried so hard to keep hidden, away from the eyes
and badmouthing of the people’. In the hour that followed, the audience was
treated to a lazy review of the main narrative about Cavafy’s life (1863–1933),
‘hidden’ and ‘unhidden’: the Cavafy family’s wealth and its eventual decline
at the end of the nineteenth century; the early years in England, Istanbul
and Alexandria; the first homosexual experiences (pleasingly set, at least
according to this popular narrative, in the hammams of Istanbul); the return
to Alexandria and the life as a clerk, a reserved public life that ran along-
side the ‘secret’ life of the night; the fear of being discovered; the pride in his
Greek identity; the house on the Alexandrian Rue Lepsius, above a bordello
and close to the Greek hospice and hospital; the early ‘passion’ for drink; the

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2. A series of unpublished gambling; the eventual dedication to a life of letters; the personal poems, the
and unfinished poems,
as well as earlier and
historical poems, the mythical poems. The quaint world, the queer man, the
disowned poems, exquisite poetry.
have also attracted Cavafy is known mainly for the 154 relatively short poems that were
a considerable
readership and collected under his instructions and republished in book form after his death.2
translations. Greeks have also learnt to appreciate him as a highly distinct poetic voice who
3. A good recent disengaged from a spent romantic tradition and proposed a novel perspective
example of this type on Hellenism, identity and eroticism that still remains central in the Greek
of appreciation, is cultural sphere. But Cavafy’s extraordinary worldwide fame and central posi-
the article by Orhan
Pamouk, published in tion in World Literature relies perhaps less on his importance for the global
the New York Times literary movements of modernity, and more on the popular appeal of specific
on 19 December
2013, available at:
poems (including some with a homosexual theme), as well as a certain
http://www.nytimes. mythology about his own life. Cavafy might be hailed by critics as a formida-
com/2013/12/22/books/ ble dissector of historical power, knowledge, desire and loss, but in the frame-
review/other-countries-
other-shores.html?_r=0. work of his work’s popular reception, he is also always the protean old man of
Accessed 30 August Alexandria, ‘a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless
2015. at a slight angle to the universe’ (Forster 1923: 91), a (reserved) gay forefather,
an icon of Greek cosmopolitanism who spent his life on the second floor of a
house visited today by hundreds of tourists.
The recent Time Machine TV programme on Cavafy, therefore, is indicative
of that type of popular reception of the poet which has recently gone not only
global, but also viral. Numerous similar television documentaries in many
languages have followed in the steps of books, newspaper and magazine arti-
cles, and journal special issues of an earlier period, recycling specific ‘famous’
poems (such as ‘Ithaki’/’Ithaca’ [1910], ‘I Polis/The City’ [1910], ‘Perimenontas
tous Varvarous/ Waiting for the Barbarians’ [1904], ‘Troes/ Trojans’ and ‘Ap’
tes Ennia/ Since Nine O’Clock’) alongside narrativized events from the poet’s
life, and a popular mythology about Cavafian Alexandria.3
The actual material for this popular mythology is not always available (for
instance, we know almost nothing about the poet’s personal life, especially his
erotic life), or is often self-evident and based on a tendency to read poems as
transparent accounts of the poet’s life. It can also be based on clichés, miscon-
ceptions, social doxas, phobias and oversimplifications (e.g. about cosmopoli-
tan Alexandria and homosexual subcultures in the early twentieth century,
about Cavafy’s upbringing, and so on). New research has questioned some of
these assumptions, or critiqued the very role they have played in the framing
of the Cavafian oeuvre since the beginning, even during the poet’s lifetime.
Yet the fact remains: the reception, circulation and life of Cavafy’s work are
intertwined with a powerful literary myth that is both difficult to penetrate
and equally difficult to avoid. Cavafy’s popularity and his work’s global popu-
lar reception rest on this myth and are nourished by it. However, in a very
exciting and quite recent development, Cavafy’s popular reception creates
instances that do not simply perpetuate the myth of the poet, but overappro-
priate and/or undermine it in new, creative and conjectural ways.
It is worth exploring these two, intermingling, new tendencies, overappro-
priation and undermining, a little further. First, overappropriation. In recent
years, the popular reception of Cavafy’s work has grown so pluriform, multi-
layered and anarchic, that in many ways it renders the old traditional biography
of the poet and the assumptions about his work (and the work’s ‘integrity’),
obsolete, especially because it overappropriates them as a starting point. With
‘popular reception’ we have in mind a global workshop on Cavafy’s poetry
and persona, which includes rewritings in various genres, personal reflections

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in autobiographical texts, dramatic works based on Cavafy’s life and work, 4. The full performance
is accessible online
musical renderings of poems, television and film projects, and visualizations at: http://www.lifo.
of poems in diverse forms. It is a reception that extends from painting and gr/tv/the-tube/1689.
photography to comics and video art, from the use of poems out of context or Accessed 30 August
2015.
in a fragmented fashion on the Internet, street art and in public spaces, to the
commercialization of Cavafy’s image and ‘hit’ verses on media headlines, in 5. Accessible online
at: https://www.
merchandizing or TV commercials. In many and unexpected ways, as most of youtube.com/
the contributors of this special issue argue, these creative overappropriations watch?v=7pSUaQKbhrc.
offer a new and dynamic relationship with the Cavafian text and Cavafy’s Accessed 30 August
2015.
persona, all the while pointing to directions previously unexplored.
A close reading of photographic work dedicated to Cavafy over the years, 6. These were themes
also developed by most
for instance, reveals how a stereotypical image of the mature reserved artist video artists in the
and a focus on the thematics of erotic poetry, became for photographers such special exhibition on
‘Cavafy and Video Art’
as Duane Michals, Dimitris Yeros and Stathis Orphanos only the starting curated by Marilena
point for projects that eventually talked about identity and the dynamics of Karra, presented in
representation, also exploring the interrelation between text and image, desire Athens at the end of
2013 by the Onassis
and objectification, and modernity and the archive of the past. Coded and Cultural Centre; see
complex, these contemporary photographic projects do not only showcase http://www.sgt.gr/
poems as indicators of personal attachment, or fill the gaps in our knowledge en/programme/
event/1352/ Accessed
about Cavafy’s life with imaginative conjectures. They can also inspire and 30 August 2015.
inform an art-historical investigative project like that of Kostis Kourelis in this
collection. Kourelis (not unaware of conjectural projects like Michals’s Cavafy
series) sets out to reread the most famous photographic portrait Cavafy himself
posed for, as an elaborate exercise in popular self-fashioning, paying special
attention to the coded meanings of the props present in the photograph. In
other words, in contemporary projects inspired by his literary myth, as well as
in the projects of rereading his life’s work, the silent man of Alexandria comes
out as much less silent than we previously thought.
He also comes out as much more modern, outward-looking and commu-
nicative. This is the guiding principle behind a recent musical and video
performance created by composer Lena Platonos and choreographer Dimitris
Papaioannou. In K.K. (2010),4 a setting that first brings onto the stage the ster-
eotype of ‘the old man of Alexandria’, grows to reveal a work exploring visual
genealogies of modern desire, with an electronic musical setting of the poems
that unexpectedly touches upon issues of connectivity, hypermodernity, irony
and pastiche. This is a Cavafy updated for the Internet era, a projection of the
poet as a blogger avant la lettre, experimenting with the limits of autobiogra-
phy, self-construction, the aesthetics of the self and communication. A video
by Egyptian Swiss artist Yossef Limoud (2007) posted on the internet, tran-
scends Cavafy’s myth in a similar fashion, producing complex contemporary
insights. In the video ‘The City’,5 the almost proverbial poem is read in Arabic
against a panel comprised of two shots of the staircase of Cavafy’s house in
Rue Lepsius, the same staircase that thousands of tourists (and most of them
on camera) have used during their visit in Alexandria. What is replayed here
is the mythology of the derelict and hidden Cavafian house; once again, the
old house serves as a metonymy for the Cavafian City. Yet the video does not
show much else. Two shots of the stairs unfold in parallel, two long takes
caressing the staircase at different speeds while we hear the lines from ‘The
City’ translated into the official language of modern Egypt. Nothing else.
Rather than a visual visit to the Cavafian house, this is a visual contemplation
of revisiting, returning, reclaiming and re-placing, as well as a reminding of
their diverse temporalities.6

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On the one hand, such instances of reception show the unexpected twists
and turns that Cavafy’s popular legacy gives rise to, especially if certain liber-
ties are taken with it. On the other hand, they foreground important issues
in the Cavafian text and its cultural circulation which have largely remained
unexplored or unacknowledged in the past.
Take, as a further example, the recent tendency to use phrases from Cavafy’s
poetry in (multi)media texts and contexts, from commercials to promotional
panels and from journalistic articles to tweets and facebook statuses (examples
of this are discussed here by Anna-Maria Sichani, Lilia Diamantopoulou and
Zyranna Stoikou, and Vicente González and Ioanna Nicolaidou, but also by
Daniel Mendelsohn in a recent New Yorker piece [2015]). As a gesture, it might
have attracted the ire of traditional aficionados of poetry, yet it has also had the
effect of showing, in practice, how Cavafian poetry also functions at the level of
the phrase, often creating sentences that work as good punchlines, that thrive
on double entendres, interesting rhythmical effects or their dramatic irony. Of
course, this does not mean that Cavafy was writing for advertising or that his
poems are not more complex than the fragmented use of his lines allows us to
think. Such popular use, though, does excavate and exploit a certain feature of
Cavafian poetry that we otherwise might disavow: a tendency to create phrases
that work within and against the integrity of the poem, within and against
dominant ideologies, within a deep historical context and actively disengaging
from it. Moreover, as a recent public debate on the use of Cavafy’s poems on
Greek buses has shown (analysed in this special issue by Dimitris Plantzos),
such popular uses of Cavafy’s ‘fragments’ can open up the debate on the public
and political use of poetry, on the contradictions and limitations of the prevail-
ing discourse regarding poetic integrity and fragmentation, on literary propri-
ety and national culture, and on modernity, heritage and institutional power.
If overappropriation produces interesting new avenues in Cavafy’s recep-
tion, it also foregrounds a politics of reading and of articulating cultural texts
that can give rise to more probing questions and reorganize our research
agendas. This is the second tendency we can discern in the new popular and
new-media reception of Cavafy’s texts: an impulse, not only to appropriate,
but also to question and to a certain extent dismantle the more facile assump-
tions of Cavafy’s myth and global circulation. Hala Halim (2013), for instance,
working to produce a new postcolonial ‘archive [of] Alexandrian cosmopoli-
tanism’, has recently brought us the marvellous example of Alexandrian libret-
tist Bernard De Zonghem (1924–1999). In his operetta, La Vita Alessandrina,
a pastiche work based on an imaginary reconstruction of Cavafy’s life and
the setting of some of his poems to popular tunes, De Zonghem provides
his own carnivalesque narrative of Alexandrian life, with Cavafy’s persona
and adapted texts playing a major role. In Halim’s reading, De Zonghem’s
camp extravaganza has the power to unhinge the myth of cosmopolitan
Alexandria from its colonialist and orientalist agendas, especially because it
works so much from an unfinished, uneven, popular culture viewpoint. Such
a work, Halim insists, can help us rethink cosmopolitanism in a new way, and
perhaps reconsider, against the popular narrative, the type of cosmopolitan-
ism Cavafy projected in his poems. Coming from a different direction, the
1990 film Trojans by Constantine Giannaris (analysed in this special issue)
produces a similar effect. Even though it is based on otherwise traditional
material about Cavafy’s life and work, it ends up posing new questions about
archivality, ethnicity, precarity and desire, as well as queer identification both
in Cavafy’s life and in the early 1990s when the film was made.

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We decided to put this special issue together in 2013 during the world-
wide celebrations for the 150 years since the birth, and 80 since the death
of the poet. It was the first anniversary of the poet to be celebrated with so
many and such diverse cultural projects, ranging from special ‘Cavafy weeks’
in university towns, to collective autobiographical Internet projects, and from
events with world-renowned actors and authors, to advertising campaigns
and high school projects where students were asked to write their own text
in the spirit of Cavafy, or to compose their own graphic novel based on one
of his poems. As Vassilis Lambropoulos memorably put it in a much quoted
statement, ‘Cavafy is not any more a body of work; he has become a creative
field’ (2014).
All this activity points towards the importance of a popular reception of
Cavafy’s work that moves with and against the often banalized literary myth,
as it works with and against the philological integrity of the poems. It is a
multiform tendency we will call, for the purposes of this special issue, Cavafy
pop: an ever-expanding area of cultural productivity and now, as we propose,
a new field of study.
So what does this special issue do? For one thing, it delimits a series of
shifts and transformations. Stuart Hall has argued that we cannot have a fixed
description of ‘the popular’, that we need instead to always place the category
of the popular in its broader cultural context, explaining the cultural prac-
tices it stands against, is informed by, works with and/or influences. Popular
culture, according to this view, is not a stable cultural terrain, but is, instead,
‘the very ground on which transformations are worked’ (Hall 1981: 228). In
these terms, Cavafy’s popular reception is discussed here not as a fixed project
(different, in opposition, or outside his more ‘highbrow’ or ‘serious’ literary
appreciation). Instead, it is seen as part and parcel of the contemporary read-
ing of this poet, the ground where transformations are constantly happening.
All the articles collected in this volume begin from specific examples of
‘Cavafy in popular culture’, and work outwards, trying to map larger thematic
terrains. As a first step, this gesture indicates a shift from the text as an exclu-
sively written work, to the text as event. The written aspect of a poem is
also diffused into different modes of presentation: it is sung, danced, photo-
graphed, posted on the Internet with comments and graphics, acted out and
driven around the streets on buses.
Subsequently, the essays collected here move away from Cavafy’s singu-
larity to the plurality of those who read him. Contributors to this issue are
concerned much less with scholar-readers and much more with the non-
academic reader: a larger, less specialized category. We are thus moving away
from asserting a culture of authenticity and expertise, to observing a participa-
tory culture, in which every reader becomes an agent in the dissemination of
poems and the cultural events produced by their circulation. In an era, not of
interpretation, but of plural readings, Cavafy, as most articles here reiterate,
is no longer the privileged terrain of scholars. With platforms such as blogs
and social media, a plural Cavafy, wrought by diverse communities of readers,
becomes more visible and influential than ever.
In this context, we could argue that the place of the committed and
specialized Cavafy reader is now slowly being filled by a different person, the
user in the Cavafy field, who is, crucially, not a disinterested agent, but one
equally marked out by pensiveness, personal commitment and investment.
Many of the creative agents discussed in the pages to follow (artists, transla-
tors, Internet users, media publics, passers-by) are also shown to engage in a

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performance of the self, using Cavafy as a platform. Cavafy, for them, becomes
a means to rethink issues of autobiography, the aesthetics of the self and
communication. It is not an exaggeration to claim that, in this popular frame-
work, Cavafy has become an expansive autobiographical project that involves
and invites other critical autobiographies in the making. We are confident
that this development can also suggest an important transition: from a literary
context to a performative one, from a readerly text to a writerly one, from the
personal to the participatory, from the singular to the plural, from the closed
to the open, from the hidden to the celebratory. Cavafy pop marks for us a
non-conformity in the triangulation between text–user–society, in ways that
need to be explored further in the years to come.
One important aspect of these shifts is the radical change they bring in
the ways we approach the concept of ‘archive’, an important notion in Cavafy
studies from a very early stage. Cavafy left behind an archived series of papers,
objects, memorabilia, books and press cuttings; most of those which survived
became the official ‘Cavafy archive’, organized and curated by the poet’s
main editor after the 1960s, George Savvidis. The source of many important
publications (such as the Anekdota Poiimata/Unpublished Poems [1968], the
Ateli poiimata/Unfinished Poems [1994] and the Anekdota Simeiomata Poiitikis
kai Ithikis/Personal Notes on Poetics and Ethics), the official Cavafy Archive was
closed for decades to many researchers and to the public, becoming, with the
years, a symbol of a more traditional understanding of the role of literature,
of philology and of the literary archive. The status of the Cavafy Archive turns
out to be even more interesting if we consider that Cavafy is himself a poet
of the archive, producing series of interrelated poems, many of which refer
to and reflect on the historical record. Furthermore, he is also the poet of the
personal archive, of the laborious effort to organize and revisit the evasive, the
hidden, the lost, the forgotten in one’s life; in more than one way, Cavafy is
the poet of what Ann Cvetkovich (2003) has called the ‘archive of feelings’,
and his work invites readers to respond by interrelating their own archives:
their open archives of readings, identifications and feelings.
For these reasons, the expansive global reception of Cavafy, previously
considered to be irrelevant to the narrow literary archive, is now becoming
more and more annexed to it, reframing Cavafy’s archivality, opening it up
in practice. The archive is no longer a closed and consolidated repository that
has ceased growing after the poet’s death. Through the viewpoint of Cavafy
pop, the Cavafian archive now seems more porous, sensitive to and receptive
of the world outside; ever-expanding, shifting, breathing in its newly acquired
space.
Apart from a new conceptualization of the archive, this volume builds on
the recent questioning of a series of other issues, foremost among which is the
issue of adaptation. In the past, scholars tended not to concern themselves
with adaptations, because they did not see how they were connected to the
literary as a disciplinary category. In the rare instances when they did discuss
them, they would mostly evaluate them according to their ‘faithfulness’ to the
‘original text’. But why should the original text take priority over the photo-
graph, the film or the comic strip? Why should the success of Giannaris’s film
Trojans be measured against the poem that inspired it? It is an altogether
different event, a creative diffusion of Cavafy’s text that thrives in the cultural
context of the 1980s and 1990s rather than that of the 1900s. Adaptation, in
a sense, is a new text, and therefore should not be confined to the logic of
faithfulness.

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Contributors here discuss adaptations pointing out the limitations of the

‘original text’ as a concept. This signifies a moment when hermeneutics as a
reading practice is considered as not enough, not exhaustive. Cavafy has long
suffered from being considered an historical, philosophical or sensual poet. In
reading Cavafy in popular culture we would like to move away from systema-
tizing such an interpretation of the poet. More than that, we would like to
go beyond normativity. We are moving from grand narratives on Cavafy (the
historical Cavafy, the national, the homosexual Cavafy) to the open archive
of/on the poet and the fluidity of its identifications. It is our contention that
our manner of looking at those new receptions of Cavafy with a special focus
on popular media, will bring about a new framework within which to discuss
not only the contemporary acclaim of this poet, but also the genealogies of his
work’s reception in all media (including literature) – making us more respon-
sive to the plurality of previous readings of his work.
Our contributors examine Cavafy’s presence in a wide array of popu-
lar media. Dimitris Plantzos discusses a campaign launched in 2013 by the
Onassis Cultural Centre to use Cavafy’s words on public transport in Athens.
He inquires into the visual configuration of the verse in the public spaces
of transportation in the context of the political climate of the Greek reces-
sion, which had already entered its fourth year at the time. In turn, Vicente
Fernández González and Ioanna Nicolaidou close-read a previous project by
Rogelio López Cuenca entitled Calle Cavafis (1998) that placed Cavafy’s verse
on public transport, this time in the Spanish city of Malaga.
In such projects, as well as in the republication of his work via the mass
media, Cavafy’s verses are circulated alongside photographs, sketches or cari-
catures of the poet himself. All these depictions of the poet are based on the
limited number of photographic portraits Cavafy arranged for himself during
his lifetime. It is these staged photographs produced during Cavafy’s lifetime
that Kostis Kourelis re-examines in his article. Kourelis traces the signifi-
cance of staging in these photographs, the props used and their possible
hidden meaning, as well as the fate of these portraits in future adaptations.
Eleni Papargyriou’s article looks at such adaptations, examining a series of
photographic projects by well-known artists based on Cavafy’s poetry. While
the earlier projects, such as those by Duane Michals and Dimitris Yeros,
used Cavafy as well as the photographic medium to advance an argument
about the depiction of homosexuality, more recent projects, such as those by
Dimosthenis Gallis and Maria Stefosi, aim to uncover the more intricate rela-
tion of Cavafy’s oeuvre with modernism, memory and the fin-de-siècle poetics
and aesthetics of decadence.
Turning to film, Dimitris Papanikolaou contrasts two biopics on Cavafy:
Constantine Giannaris’s Trojans (1990) and Yannis Smaragdis’s Kavafis (1996),
showcasing ways in which a film about Cavafy can become not only a biograph-
ical but also an autobiographical project. Giannaris’s work, in particular, is a
literary biopic and at the same time a personal reflection on identity and desire,
at a time of extreme precarity for the director and his creative group of friends
and colleagues. Working with new adaptation theories, Lilia Diamantopoulou
and Zyranna Stoikou examine the transformation/translation of Cavafy’s poetry
into comics, animations and film, pointing out that it is often the ones that
completely stray from the poem’s original context that are more exciting. Last
but not least, Anna-Maria Sichani discusses Cavafy’s presence in the interac-
tive environment of Web 2.0; she inquires into the new perspectives opened on
Cavafy through performative acts such as ‘sharing’, ‘retweeting’ and ‘liking’.

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The articles included here make up an inventory of tendencies and are

not, of course, meant to exhaust the subject. We had no intention of trying to
cover each and every manifestation of Cavafy in fields as diverse as comics,
painting, photography, cinema and the Internet. Moreover, there is a variety
of other uses and adaptations that could have been examined: Cavafy in thea-
tre and dance, in music, in media events, in caricature, and so on. Different
ways of reading Cavafy’s presence in different media should also be examined
more thoroughly in future work. How do readers make the shift from read-
ing a printed text in a collection of poems, to reading the same text on the
Internet, or adapted in film or photography? New reading and media theories
will be of great use in future research in these areas.
Our aim was to point towards a discussion that needs to be conducted, and
has the potential to provide us with novel analytical models and new research
agendas. This special issue, therefore, first and foremost hopes to generate
new approaches to Cavafy in the years to come. If Cavafy has become global,
he also offers a great opportunity for Greek literary and cultural studies to
update their analytical vocabularies and rethink their priorities.

References
Cavafy, C.P. (1968), Anekdota Poiimata 1882–1923/Unpublished Poems (ed.),
Giorgos Savvidis, Athens: Ikaros.
—— (1994), Ateli Poiimata 1918–1932/Unfinished Poems 1918–1932 (ed.),
Renata Lavagnini, Athens: Ikaros.
—— (2009 [1983]), Anekdota Simeiomata Poiitikis kai Ithikis/Personal Notes on
Poetics and Ethics, presented by Giorgos Savvidis, Athens: Ermis.
Cvetkovich, A. (2003), An Archive of Feelings, Durham: Duke University Press.
Forster, E. M. (1923), Pharos and Pharillon, Richmond: Hogarth Press.
Halim, H. (2013), Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive, New York:
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Hall, S. (1981), ‘Notes on deconstructing the popular’, in R. Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory, London: Routledge, pp. 227–40.
Lambropoulos, V. (2014), ‘Pos of Kavafis egine apo syggrafeas pedio’/‘How
Cavafy was transformed from an author into a field’, Avgi, 4 January,
http://www.avgi.gr/article/1611971/pos-o-kabafis-egine-apo-suggrafeas-
pedio. Accessed 30 August 2015.
Mendelsohn, D. (2015), ‘The Right Poem’, The New Yorker, 27 July, http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/27/the-right-poem. Accessed
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Dimitris Papanikolaou and Eleni Papargyriou have asserted their right under
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors
of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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