Poetry’s Haunting: A Symposium on C.P. Cavafy
The Greek diasporic queer poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) has been recognized as a central figure in world literature and literary modernism. On December 9th, a symposium around his work will take place at Leiden University Libraries. This will be combined with the launch of Maria Boletsi's book Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024).
This symposium will revolve around the work of Cavafy who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and the ways it haunts our present through its resonance in contemporary art, culture and politics and across diverse media. In the Netherlands, there has been remarkable interest in his work, with several Dutch translations of his poetry having been published from 1934 to the present. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or liminal, queer, marginalized, forgotten people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry preoccupied with the past, memory, loss, and death, speak to the future? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? How does his poetry resonate in contemporary artistic production and how does this resonance prompt new readings of his work? By addressing these questions, the symposium will explore the global resonance of Cavafy’s poetry and, in particular, the way his poetry ‘haunts’ contemporary literature and art from different cultural contexts, including Europe, the Middle East, and South America.
The symposium will include multilingual poetry readings and a poetry performance and talk by Brazilian poet Ricardo Domeneck. It will be concluded with the screening of the recorded multimedia performance Constantinopoliad by Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly (production: Onassis Foundation).
Constantinopoliad is a visual essay, and a sojourn through lost and missing archives. Through the blank pages in a teenage diary by Constantine Cavafy from the 1800s, the work considers the impossibility of knowing the past, but the possibility of being haunted by it. Burnt and damaged slides, an attempt to recreate the sounds of a 1930's Alexandrian cabaret, and a hand-made artists book with words and images hidden between the folds of the pages, come together in a communal reading experience that asks: How can we see, and hear, through the distortions of time? And how do we invite the ghosts of the past to haunt us into new ways of being in the future?
The symposium will also be accompanied by a pop-up exhibition featuring special items by and about Cavafy from the Leiden University library collection, such as Gerard Blanken's 1934 translation, which was the first publication of Cavafy's poems internationally, and the recently acquired art book Cavafy, My father and Me by Loes Huis in 't Veld.
Programme
Monday, 9 December, 15.30 - 20.30
Vossius Room, Leiden University Library
Witte Singel 27, 2311BG Leiden.
| 15:30 - 15:50 | Welcome & Introduction, Tommy van Avermaete & Patrick Gouw, Leiden University Libraries |
| 15:50 - 16:50 | Cavafy’s Spectral Poetics, Maria Boletsi Talk & book presentation of Specters of Cavafy by M. Boletsi, followed by Q & A |
| 16:50 - 17:05 | Break |
| 17.05 – 17:25 | Multilingual readings of Cavafy’s poetry |
| 17:25 – 18:10 | Cavafy International, Ricardo Domeneck, poetry reading & talk |
| 18:10 – 18:45 | Break with drinks and bites in Lipsius building |
| 18:45 – 20:30 | Screening of multimedia performance Constantinopoliad followed by Q & A with the artist, Sister Sylvester NB: The screening of Constantinopoliad will take place in the Lipsius building, room 0.19. The screening can be attended without registration. |
Maria Boletsi
Maria Boletsi is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Leiden University and Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Marilena Laskaridis Chair). She is the author, among others, of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press 2013) and Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (Metzler, 2 vols; 2018/2023). She has published on modern Greek literature and culture, the concepts of barbarism, crisis, and spectrality, and cultures of resistance in Greece and the Mediterranean. Her latest project focuses on the concept of the weird and its mobilizations in aesthetics, ecology, and politics.
Ricardo Domeneck
Ricardo Domeneck is a poet, essayist, and performer, born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1977. He has published 10 collection of poems and 2 collections of short stories in Brazil and Portugal. His poems and essays have been translated into a dozen languages, and book-length collections have been published in Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands [‘Het verzamelde lichaam’, trans. Bart Vonck, Perdu, 2015]. His ‘Selected Poems’ is due in the United States in 2025. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Sister Sylvester
Sister Sylvester is a multimedia artist based in New York and Istanbul. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime (’23), which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and continues to tour to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad, with a live-score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise, which showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at Frascati Theater, Amsterdam, as a part of IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024. She is a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.
The symposium is organized by the Leiden University Libraries (UBL) and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).