Cavafy like Philip Larkin lived a very boring life externally. A Greek, he spent 30 years as a minor bureaucrat with the Irrigation Service of the Public Works Department in Alexandria. He mirrored Larkin in just this aspect.

Unlike the British poet, he was not consumed with envy and hatred towards other writers and poets and, moreover, he was homosexual, a sexual preference that crops up repeatedly in his poems. Unusually too, he never published a single collection of verse in his lifetime. By all accounts, an extroverted man with a wide circle of friends, his method of disseminating his work was to give his circle privately printed pamphlets of his poems.

The first collected edition of his work was published a couple of years after his death, and his stature steadily grew thereafter, until he is now regarded as the most important figure in 20th Century Greek poetry.

A large proportion of Cavafy's poems are firmly rooted in his country's rich historic and mythological heritage that he blends seamlessly with the present to create striking tableaux. In these poems, the great figures of Greece acquire a dimension of reality that enfolds the reader in their grasp.

Other poems are intensely erotic and yet others are romantic - alluding as they do to love found, lost, recaptured. None of the poems are prolix or flowery and as a result lend themselves readily to translation.

And perhaps what finally stamps the poems with greatness is the fact that time has not weathered or dated them. A fragment of perhaps his most famous poem "Ithaka" which first brought Cavafy to the attention of T.S Eliot, T.E Lawrence, Arnold Toynbee and E.M Forster should serve to show you what I mean:

... Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are des
tined for
But do not hurry the journey at all
Better if it lasts for years.
So you are old by the time you reach 
the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on 
the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous jour
ney.
Without her you would not have set 
out.
She has nothing left to give 
you now ... 

DAVID DAVIDAR

* * *

In the article "Arun Shourie of the left" that appeared in the Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, edition dated November 26, the sentence in the Postscript should read as "This is a curious chioce, for so far as one can make sense of her argument, Ms. Roy seems to share the RSS's understanding of economics" and not as published.

With reference to the article "Children of the spirit" that appeared in the Sunday Magazine, November 19, Meena Radhakrishna is available for voluntary consultation on adoption related issues. She may be contacted at meena.rkna@vsnl.com