Kavafis: the days of "K"

Abstract

Please note: This article is in Greek. Kavafis: The Days of “K”: Four “Ks”: Kalvos, Kavafis, Karyotakis, Kafka. This paper focuses on a new approach regarding Kavafis’ poetry: reading it from the perspective of the fictional “character”. Reading Kavafis’ poetry we can easily realise that almost all individuals in his poems are not represented as traditional heroes but rather as contemporary characters, regardless of whether they are living in Alexandria, at the beginning of the 20th century or two thousand years ago, in any place around the Mediterranean. This choice makes them fresh, real, almost tangible and corresponds to the aesthetic expectations of the 20th and 21st century readers. Following this critical line, it became obvious to us that the main path to better understand Kavafis is the concept of the “subject”: how it was represented and transformed in the context of the western literature in general and in the area of Modern Greek literature in particular, during the last two centuries or so; when, where and how the traditionally multi-potential subject was challenged and why. The Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire was an important key point to start with on one hand and Franz Kafka, from Prague, almost an ending point: in a space of less than a half of a century the fictional subject was totally dismantled. Kavafis is situated in the middle of this extraordinary transition, pointing in both directions in a less dramatic way but full of dramatisation, while Modern Greek poetry was experiencing its own transformations. From Andreas Kalvos to Kostas Karyotakis, Modern Greek poetry emerges as a beginning and an end. Both such radically different poets, yet paradoxically, not so far away from each other, just like two different “days” under Kavafian terms and conditions.This paper was originally presented at the Ninth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University, June 2011