Chair: Loizos Kapsalis (Special Scientist, Research (SSR) at the Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cyprus)
2:00-2:20pm: Sarah Ekdawi, ‘The Sixtieth Year of his Life: Cavafy Confronts Mortality and Posterity’
Cavafy is often said to have had two ‘watershed’ years: 1903 and 1911. In 1903, he reached the age of 40 and conducted a ‘scrutiny’ and purge of his work, culminating in a first printed collection (Poems 1904). In 1911, aged 48, he is generally believed to have found his mature voice. I shall argue that there was a third significant year, 1923, in which Cavafy radically altered his working practice as he set about preparing for his death and for his afterlife as a major European poet.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Ekdawi is a Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Oxford and the Reviews Editor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. She was among Roderick’s first students at KCL, where she wrote her BA dissertation on Cavafy’s erotic poems while Roderick was working on his seminal article on the historical poems. Following a bizarre graduation ceremony at the Albert Hall, which involved bowing or curtseying to a man representing Princess Anne, teacher and student engaged in a humorous debate about the uses of degrees in Modern Greek. Neither of them imagined it would eventually lead to an honorary doctorate and visiting professorship in Thailand.
Between the London and Bangkok chapters of her life, Ekdawi followed a more conventional career path, gaining a D.Phil. at Oxford in 1991, with a thesis entitled ‘The Poetic Practice of Anghelos Sikelianos’, and going on to become a postdoctoral research fellow and visiting lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast. Her publications include studies of Cavafy, Sikelianos, Ritsos, sixteenth century Cypriot sonnets and the Byzantine heroic romance of Digenis Akrites. She is also a qualified technical translator and practising literary translator.
2:20-2:40pm: Nikos Falagkas, ‘George Seferis, the Rower and the Angel: Biographies of a Poet’
In 1951 George Seferis had famously protested against the citation by the critic Timos Malanos of letters he had sent him. Seventy years later the constant interest in Seferis’ life had led to the publication of more than fifteen volumes of his correspondence, eleven volumes of his diaries and two biographies: one in French in 1985 by Denis Kohler and the other in English in 2003 by Roderick Beaton, which was translated into Greek and became a bestseller. The two biographies highlight different periods of Seferis’ life and propose rather complementary views, especially on Seferis’ years of formation. A comparison between them shows how the two alternative narratives are largely shaped by the choice of different excerpts from the poet’s essays, letters, diaries and from archival material.
Speaker Bio
Nikos Falagkas is an Associate Lecturer at the Hellenic Open University. He has published on private diaries and life writing, George Seferis, the Modern Greek short story, twentieth-century Greek novels and literary disability studies. His PhD thesis on the Modern Greek private diary was supervised by Professor Roderick Beaton.
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