[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. As we are closing out Poetry Month, we've been learning about the life of Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved revolutionary-era poet, as part of our full bio conversation. Now we'll keep the verse flowing with the work of Constantine, hope I'm saying this right Cavafy, a Greek poet from the 20th century who was inspired by the sensibilities of classical Greek literature and used those aesthetics to explore themes like history, memory, and desire, particularly the homosexual desires that he felt he needed to shroud behind metaphor and illusion.

Cavafy is often referred to as the most influential Greek poet of the 20th century, and to celebrate his work, an upcoming festival is bringing together some very interesting names like visual artist Nick Cave, Bob Faust and Elena Park. Musicians like Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright, and Vijay Iyer. The festival is called Archive of Desire, a festival inspired by the poet C.P. Cavafy, presented by the Onassis Foundation. You can head to onassis.org to check out the schedule of events, which runs from this Friday through the beginning of June. My guests are Paolo Prestini, festival curator and co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust. Paolo, welcome.

``Thank you so much. Nice to see you.

Alison: Do me a favor, will you please say his name for me?

Paola Prestini: Constantine Cavafy.

Alison: Yes, I was close.

Paola: You did it.

[chuckles]

Alison: Also joining us are André Aciman. He's the author of Call Me by Your Name and a Festival Participant. André, so nice to meet you.

André Aciman: Nice to meet you too.

Alison: Paola for the uninitiated, can you tell us a little more about Constantine Cavafy, about what his life looked like around the time he was producing his work?

Paola: Absolutely. This is really you're talking about a poet who poets love. He is a poet who was, as you said, living at the beginning of the 20th century in Alexandria and who was creating work that was deeply erotic and historic at the same time and living in this very sensual and hidden world. What I love about him is he shared his work very independently, carefully and so when I was asked to curate the festival, it was such a joy to bring, first of all, for a foundation to put so much energy into the preservation of these archives, which is really what's happening right now with the Onassis Foundation.

Then as was speaking with them, to be able to be given the carte blanche, to not just bring this incredible work to a broader public, but then to also commission a whole new canon of work was extraordinary. In fact, that the title Archive of Desire actually comes from a new line of a poem by Robin Coste Lewis. The poet Robin Coste Lewis, who was inspired by the archive and who was doing a work with the extraordinary artist Julie Mehretu, the Gyre who you mentioned, and Jeff Ziegler on cello. It's a real honor to be bringing this work and to rediscover it and to do so in a citywide festival.

Alison: Just the slate of artists you just mentioned, that's phenomenal. André, what was your first encounter with Cavafy's work? What did you think?

André: Oh, God, I must have been 16 or 17 when I first encountered it. I encountered it in a volume by Lawrence Durrell, who is, of course, the author of the Alexandria Quartet. He just translated a few poems through his name a bit, just almost without thinking or with thinking, but seemingly not thinking. I thought this is an interesting poet. I've never heard of him. I went and bought a book of Cavafy's poetry, which at the time was only translated by Rae Dalven and was also prefaced by W.H. Auden. I'm sorry, there's noise in the background. That's New York City.

Alison: It's okay.

André: As you can hear. It was absolutely fabulous because I realized that here's a poet who is doing things that very few poets can do, which is to be on one hand, pellucid and clear and at the same time to be arcane and difficult to understand if you don't know the background. The background, however, is pretty simple because he provides it for you. Even though it's not always simple, just gay desire that he's writing about, it cannot be about anything else than gay desire. He's a supremely well-crafted and very intelligent man who knows English perfectly because he went to British schools as well, and he could write poetry in English if he wanted to, just like another poet who could have done the same thing and wrote in Portuguese, Pessoa. They're very similar, in fact.

Alison: André, would you read The City for us?

André: Sure. By the way, I have to preface this by saying that I'm a terrible reader, so you have to forgive me.

You tell yourself, I’ll be gone

To some other land, some other sea,

To a city lovelier far than this

Could ever have been or hoped to be.

Where every step now tightens the noose

A heart in a body buried and out of use.

How long, how long must I be here

Confined among these dreary purlieus

Of the common mind? Wherever now I look,

Black ruins of my life rise into view.

So many years have I been here

Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.

There’s no new land, my friend, no

New sea, for the city will follow you,

In the same streets, you’ll wander endlessly,

The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,

And the same house go white at last.

The city is a cage.

No other places, always this

Your earthly landfall and no ship exists

To take you from yourself. Ah, don’t you see

Just as you’ve ruined your life in this

One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth

Everywhere where on planet Earth? Don't you see?

This, by the way, is a translation by Lawrence Durrell. It's totally imprecise, but it's the most beautiful one. I go with beauty where given the choice.

Alison: I like that option. Paola, how did you want to think about Cavafy's Greek heritage and his ties to Alexandria? How did you want to incorporate it into the festival?

André: Absolutely. There were a few ways. One is there's an extraordinary composer named Nada El Shazly, who's from Alexandria, and she's actually opening the festival with Sister Sylvestre. What we did there was really take this idea of, because Cavafy was, again, so precise. He was a self-published poet for his life. In fact, I just want to read you one thing, which I love that I saw in the archives. He jotted on the back of a poem. "This poem need not be published, but it does not deserve to be suppressed. This idea of the independent artists of our time right now struggling so much as these systems are changing, which of course national is being an independent venue, all these things were really important to me.

Heading to him and his background, I really wanted to, first of all, find the artist who would respond to him and luckily, so many poets are obsessed with Cavafy, but also represent his home. One of the first pieces that actually opens the festival is a handmade book by Sister Sylvester that's lit by this extraordinary designer, Bruce Steinberg, and working with the Egyptian musical artist Nada El Shazly. They take you through a communal reading with the audience inspired by the first journal the Cavafy kept when his family fled Alexandria. This is one of the ways, but then there's many other ways in the sense of thinking about how artists reinterpret work.

I was moved by Nick Cave and Bob Foust taking this poem from Hidden Things and looking at repression and looking at how do you communicate joy and doing that so in this public art way, on the facade of our building thought was really powerful or thinking about diaspora which is what Robin and Julie and Vijay and Jeff are doing and how that relates to his poetry and to the liminal spaces present everywhere in his work. Really I was thinking about the archive as a whole and finding who I thought would paint their deepest inspirations from that archive. Then in these new ways that would communicate to a whole new audience hopefully.

Alison: We're discussing the forthcoming Archive of Desire Festival, which celebrates the work of poet C.P. Cavafy. It starts this Friday. My guests are Paola Prestini, who is the festival curator, and André Aciman, the author of Call Me By Your Name, also a festival participant. André, you were born and raised in Alexandria, and you wrote a piece for The Paris Review, I believe it was called Cavafy's Bed, which is about your relationship to the city of Alexandria. In that piece, you called Cavafy the ultimate Alexandrian. What makes him the ultimate Alexandrian?

André: Well, it could be many things, but I think that the Alexandrian temperament and we're talking about the early 20th-century Alexandria because the latter Alexandria is very different, and I don't recognize having lived there. The ultimate Alexandrian is a person who's totally at home in paradox and contradiction. In fact, I think that the Alexandrian temperament since antiquity has always been a home of paradox and this constant bickering of one thing and it's opposite. Then finally, discovering that they get along, that they have much in common, only to bicker again. I think that in many respects, you don't have anything that's totally holy in Alexandria, nor do you have anything that's totally unholy and totally perverse. There's no such thing. Everybody is both. I love this because I recognize myself in it, and I recognize all the great Alexandrians who have come by and gone.

I'm thinking of W.H. Auden, who introduced me to Cavafy in his preface to the work of Rae Dalven. Then this James Merrill. Of all the poets of the latter part of the 20th century, James Merrill totally understood Cavafy, translated Cavafy. Of course, one of the last things he wrote was to me saying, "Your book is typical of a particular era and of a particular voice. Well, let's call it a strain of a voice. I think Cavafy is home to everybody in today's world because if anything, we understand not just contradiction, but we understand fluidity in all its meanings.

Alison: Paola, for the festival, you set one of these poems to music. We're going to play a clip of that in a moment, but first, would you read Voices for us before we hear your composition?

Paola: Sure.

Voices, loved and idealized

Of those who have died, or of those

Lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams

Sometimes deep in thought, the mind hears them

And with their sound, for a moment return

Sounds from our life’s first poetry

Like music at night, distant, fading away.

This will be sung on the evening at Death of Classical, which is a mass. It's called The Waiting for the Barbarians Mass. This will be sung by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Joining us that evening are Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright, Nico Muhly, Helga Davis, Petros Klampanis, and Papadimitriou.

Alison: This is composer Paola Prestini's adaptation of Constantine Cavafy's Voices. Let's listen to a bit.

[music]

Alison: André, I want to bring you back in. People know you from your book, Call Me By Your Name, and the subsequent film. You publish a sequel, Find Me, and towards the end of the novel, you reference Cavafy's poem The Afternoon Sun. Could you do that for us?

André: Sure. That is actually my favorite poem by Cavafy.

Alison: I love that poem.

André: It was the favorite poem of one of my professor, Walter Kaiser, who was my dissertation advisor. He said, "Oh, my God, that's my favorite poem." We all agree that's a good thing. This is a translation that I made.

This room, how well I've know it

Now, it and the one next door are rented out as business offices

The whole house is home to brokers, merchants, companies

This room, how familiar it still is, though

Near the door, there was the couch

In front of it, a Turkish carpet

Nearby, a shelf that held two yellow vases

To the right-- no, opposite, a closet with a mirror

In the middle of the room, the table where he wrote

And the three large wicker chairs

Next to the window, was the bed

Where we made love so many times

This poor furniture is nowhere now

Next to the window, the bed

Which the afternoon sun touched midway

At four o'clock one afternoon, we parted for just a week

But alas, that week lasted forever

Alison: Paola, before we ran out--

André: I told you I was-

Alison: Yes, please.

André: -I was a bad reader.

Alison: No, wonderful.

Paola: I was closing my eyes. I was there, André.

Alison: In our last moments, Paola, would you let us know a little bit more about some of the interesting ways people are interpreting Cavafy's work?

Paola: Absolutely. I mentioned the Mass that's happening on May 2nd, which is all these extraordinary artists interpreting different works which is going to be amazing. The incredible artist, Juliana Huxtable, will be at National Sawdust doing a visual rave. She'll be taking the work by the Greek composer Lena Platonos and remixing it. We have short films that were directed by the amazing Elena Park. Does include Taylor Mac, Jad Abumrad. One of my favorite things that I saw is Footsteps with Carl Hancock Rux, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Bora Yoon, Jeff Ziegler. All of those films will be at the New Museum. Then we have these extraordinary talks of which André is part of. My friend Sarah McNally has opened up McNally Jackson to host those talks. Those really range from different topics, why Cavafy is a queer poet, which we did at the Leslie Lohman Museum.

Again, we have visual installations, Sonic Installations right now at Rockefeller Center for the month. Five women and non-binary composers did an extraordinary sonic installation on Cavafy at Rockefeller Center. All over the city, National Sawdust is a home, we're very, very excited.

Alison: People, go head to onassis.org to check out the schedule events, which runs from this Friday through the beginning of June. My guests have been André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name, and a participant in the Archive of Desire Festival, as well as Paola Prestini, festival curator. André, Paola, thank you for being with us today.

Paola: Thank you.

André: Thank you for having me. Thank you.

Paola: Thank you.

Alison: That's All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

 

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