Boletsi, Maria. Specters of Cavafy. Ann Arbor (MI): University of Michigan Press (Greek/Modern Intersections Series), 2024

 

A year has passed since Specters of Cavafy was published, and it still feels weird to have this book out, because it is as though I had been writing it my whole life, even when I didn’t know yet I had been writing it. The long process of its writing unfolded in conversation with many others—thinkers, writers, artists, teachers, colleagues, friends—in books and in real life, dead and living. Cavafy’s poems have also been constant interlocutors in these conversations, or rather, partners in thinking and living for me—as for many others—resonating in my other writings, shaping my thinking, and haunting different moments in my life. For a long time, I’ve had the habit of filtering ideas, emotions or experiences through Cavafian poems, through which I’d try to make sense of, or cope with, situations and events, either in my own life or in politics and culture, within and beyond Greece.

Many who have felt the need to write about Cavafy or create art that responds to his work were motivated by an intensely personal, affective bond with his poems. I firmly believe in the intellectual and conceptual force that such visceral bonds with poetry and art can yield. Haunting is one way to describe this bond with something that has a lingering grasp on us. The book is my attempt to theorise and make sense of Cavafy’s persisting grasp. What led me to haunting and the figure of the spectre is, first and foremost, Cavafy’s own preoccupation with spectres and with a nonlinear, spectral temporality. I found the vocabulary to theorise this preoccupation and its implications in recent theoretical studies of haunting, ghosts, and spectres that took up since the 1990s, when Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994; Spectres de Marx 1993) was published. This body of theory, which gave shape to what has been called a “spectral turn” in the humanities and social sciences (Weinstock 2004; Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013; Peeren 2014; Gordon 2008),  gave me conceptual tools to approach Cavafy’s poetics from a new lens and to reckon with the continuing appeal of his poetry, on individual and collective, cultural and political levels. In the book, then, I propose spectrality as a new approach to Cavafy’s modernist poetics, which I called spectral poetics, as well as a mode of reading that chimes with the spectral, nonlinear temporality in Cavafy’s writings.

But what does haunting mean, exactly? Haunting, following Derrida, signals a temporality that is not unidirectional, from past to present to future, but messy: the present is not self-sufficient, but disjoined by the past and the future. It is easy—perhaps even commonplace—to say that Cavafy is haunting us, as any great poet might, but it is just as important to consider how his writing is haunted by us, in the present. In other words, the ways we use, frame, cite, adapt, twist, misunderstand or fragment his verses keep shifting the terms of his poetry’s address to us. The signifier ‘Cavafy,’ then, becomes what Roman Jakobson (1971) called a shifter: a sign whose meanings and performative force keep shifting as it is called to function in ever new contexts and conversations. The haunting force of Cavafy’s poetry is strongest when readers not only recognise themselves and what they already know in it, but when they take the risk of changing, being undone, through such conversations. Thus, to say that Cavafy’s writing haunts us suggests that it carries the potential to shift the terms through which we understand ourselves, and to generate images, ideas or affects that compel us see the present or the future differently.

To understand how Cavafy’s writing haunts and is haunted by future presents, we should look both at his texts and at the ways they have been recast from our present. In the book, I trace the spectral temporality Cavafy’s poetry enacts and transpose it into a mode of reading Cavafy’s work through its afterlives, for which I use the term pre-posterous. I borrow the term from Mieke Bal’s notion of “pre-posterous history,” which she understands as an act of reversal that “puts the chronologically first (pre-) as an aftereffect behind (post-) its later recycling” (Bal 1999, 6-7). A “pre-posterous” reading allows me, for example, to stage conversations between a Cavafian text and a contemporary adaptation of it, in order to explore not only how Cavafy’s text influences its adaptation but also how the adaptation ‘haunts’ back, prompting new readings of Cavafy’s work.

Cavafy himself was intensely concerned with the messy interference of past, present, and future that haunting entails, exploring the porousness of these temporal boundaries. His spectral poetics manifests itself in various strategies for animating the past and temporarily resisting death and finality without resorting to notions of eternal life or the permanence of poetic truth or language. In Cavafy’s writing we find no everlasting truth or perspective, no stable presence or identity. Invoked characters or moments are fleeting, never fully materialising. Presence is shadowed by absence and nothing is ever fully or permanently hypostatised. His poetic universe teems with spectral entities—ghosts, shadows, apparitions, visions, epiphanies of gods, conjurations of historical characters, scenes, sensations, former or dead lovers. Cavafy’s dealings with the spectral started in his early work through his engagement with esoterism, occultism, spiritualism, and decadence. In his later writings, spectres become disengaged from the supernatural: they usually appear when the poetic subject summons them in the present.  Yet, as the book shows, spectres and their messy temporality were a constant component of Cavafy’s modernist poetics, in his poetry and prose, in fiction and non-fiction, in early writings and in his later, so-called realist phase.

A spectre is a liminal figure, between presence and absence, materiality and immateriality, life and death. As a conceptual metaphor, the spectre has been mobilised, for example, to talk about liminal subjects, people leading spectral lives of social invisibility, questions of power, agency and justice, and conflicting epistemological positions. How does all this relate to Cavafy? The figure of the spectre helped me reckon with a paradox: On the one hand, Cavafy’s writing is obsessed with the past. Cavafy experimented with strategies for conjuring the past and making people or scenes from the past incalculable forces in future presents. On the other hand, his writings address the future and anticipate future developments, societies, and communities of readers. Cavafy, too, in an unpublished self-appraisal from 1930, described himself as “an ultra-modern poet, a poet of the future generations” (original in French; trans. Peter Jeffreys; Cavafy 2010). His spectral poetics can thus be seen an attempt to respond to this recurring paradox in his writings:

How does a poetry obsessed with the past, memory, loss, and death, speak to the future?

But also:

What are the conditions that make the dead haunt? What makes things past—including poems—active forces in future presents?  

When we disengage from a normative linear notion of time and move towards a spectral temporality, the above ceases to be a paradox. Conjuring spectres, allowing them to interfere with the poetic present, can create openings for alternative futures, even when these are not yet imaginable in Cavafy’s time; futures, for example, in which queer subjects are not condemned to spectral, precarious lives of social invisibility. Derrida’s thinking helped me articulate how questions of justice and futurity are tied to conjurations of the past in Cavafy. In the poems, the dead who try to speak beyond their graves or the people in the present who try to hear them—not always successfully—make demands that resonate in the future, just as spectres from the future—people, communities or events that have not yet arrived—can also momentarily unhinge the poetic present. In the book, I was attentive to such interferences from different temporalities. Sometimes the spectres conjured in Cavafy’s poems have a voice and sometimes they don’t—think of prince Caesarion, for example, who is conjured as a spectre by the poetic subject, but never speaks. Yet even these mute spectres are able to touch other lives or make demands for justice.

For Derrida, the demand for justice that spectres issue presupposes that the past is never settled and the future is not predetermined but remains open to the other. Cavafy’s writing makes space for future spectres: languages or concerns that are not yet fully there at the time of writing but may materialise later. This is how we can understand the oft-repeated claim by critics that Cavafy ‘foresaw’ or anticipated concerns, developments or discourses that would take shape well beyond his death—on modernity, postcoloniality, multiculturalism, homosexuality or biopolitics, to name a few. If his poetry is thought to foresee the future, this can, paradoxically, be attributed to the unforeseeability his writings cultivate: the unstable truths, conflicting perspectives, porous social and cultural contexts, and polyphonic worlds he sets up refuse to yield a final judgment that steers the future towards one direction. His poetry can thus prefigure futures without fully circumscribing them, making space for alternative scenarios and communities that were not yet there in his time.

In the book, I look at how Cavafy’s writing haunts and is haunted by the past and by future presents, up to the contemporary moment. This double inquiry roughly corresponds with the book’s two parts. In the first part (Chapters Two to Four), I delineate Cavafy’s spectral poetics by revisiting popular and lesser known Cavafian texts, including early poems and prose. In the second part (Chapters Five and Six), I broach his poetry’s bearing on our present, asking how Cavafy’s poems haunt contemporary realities from the post-Cold War Western cultural and political imaginary to Greece’s recent financial crisis.

In chapter Two, I turn to literal and abstract spectres in Cavafy’s poetry, and identify  strategies through which poetic subjects try to activate the past in the present—particularly conjurations and broken promises. While spectres have often been linked to Cavafy’s early interest in occultism, I argue that they form a central tenet of his modernist poetics throughout his work. In doing so, I challenge the common evolutionary view of his work as a linear development towards poetic maturity, which has often led to his early writings being deemed immature or not worth serious engagement. Chapter Three is concerned with the entanglement of haunting, capitalism and modernity as it takes shape in Cavafy’s only short story: an early ghost story titled “Εις το φως της ημέρας” / “In Broad Daylight” (1895-96). I read this story pre-posterously, through a scene in Ersi Sotiropoulos’s novel  Τι μένει από τη νύχτα (2015) / What’s Left of the Night (2018)—a fictionalised account of Cavafy’s trip to Paris—tracing how haunting and spectrality inflect the modern subject’s experience both in Sotiropoulos’s novel and Cavafy’s story. Chapter Four centers on the interplay of spectrality, irony, and affect. While critics have often linked Cavafy’s irony to a detached narrator, I trace how irony emerges in Cavafian texts from vulnerability, linguistic instability, and the (unwitting) transmission of affects. Two nonfiction prose texts helps me forge these links: Cavafy’s 1901 diary from his first visit to Athens and a 1903 text on poetic creation known as “Philosophical Scrutiny.” Irony in these texts arises not from a stable ironic subject, but from competing truths and repressed desires that haunt the text and the ironic subject, yielding what I call a reluctant irony.

Chapters Five and Six follow the ways certain Cavafian poems have been haunting contemporary realities, and how reworkings, adaptations, citations, even fragmentations of these poems from the present can pre-posterously, and serendipitously, trigger novel readings that renew the poems’ ability to haunt. In Chapter Five, I trace the travels of “Περιμένοντας τους βαρβάρους” / “Waiting for the Barbarians” in the Western cultural and political imaginary since the end of the Cold War, particularly after 9/11, from artistic adaptations to citations in political commentary, in order to probe the poem’s political intervention in contexts of crisis. In Chapter Six, I start with recent practices of dissemination of Cavafy’s poetry in Greek public space, in order to propose a fragmentary, pre-posterous reading of the poem “Εν μεγάλη Ελληνική Αποικία, 200 π. Χ.” / “In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.” (1928). In this reading, I trace how the poem echoes Egypt’s modern history of debt and colonisation, as well as the neoliberal rhetoric of debt, crisis, and reform during Greece’s financial crisis, and how the poem’s future fragments allow readers to draw political hope from stifling contexts of crisis.

We are not done with Cavafy and Cavafy is not done with us, as long as the terms through which we negotiate his poetry’s stakes today keep being renewed. Revisiting Cavafy’s poetics through the lens of spectrality became a way for me to grapple with the question of his work’s continuing appeal, which has preoccupied so many critics. There is nothing timeless or eternal about the way Cavafy’s poetry haunts future presents. Cavafy’s spectral poetics involves a deep awareness of transience, loss, death. His obsession with conjuring the past springs from an understanding of the finality of things and people and of the  fragility of memory (think, for example, of “Mακρυά” / “Long Ago”). Cavafy’s poems keep talking to future readers precisely because they are vulnerable to time. Cavafy, I show in the book, saw poetry and its truth as transient, subject to change, even death. It is the ephemeral nature of poetic truth that enhances its ability to touch other lives and speak to the future.

 

POETRY AND HAUNTING "IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR"

Since the book’s publication in the summer of 2024 much has happened in the world—enough to compel us to ask: why continue talking about Cavafy, poetry, and haunting today?

Spectres appear when there is unfinished business or when something in the present is not right and demands to be set right. They also appear where there is desire—erotic but also political desire for a different present and better future. When desire is settled, fulfilled or stifled, there are no spectres left to haunt. Cavafy understood this all too well. His poetry of desire, conflicting perspectives, unfinished affairs, injustices, voices that demand, is a poetry of spectres.

There is, today, much that is not right with the world, and the space for political hope feels increasingly narrow. In this sinister historical moment—with the ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza, fascism on the rise, the spread of anti-intellectualism, the assault on higher education by far-right governments, and the crackdown of public protest and free speech—what power does poetry still hold? Can poetry help us respond to, endure, or even survive this present, and sustain political hope for a different future?

Poetry sure isn’t enough. But consider the degree to which people’s experience of their realities, on local and global scales, is produced by the affective and performative power of words and the framings of reality they generate. Consider how populist leaders, fascists or dictators capitalise on language to mobilise crowds; how the rhetoric of the forces of light fighting the forces of darkness is capable, for example, to convince many people that bombing, shooting or starving civilians to death is justified and necessary. All language is performative in that it shapes lived realities and subjects. But poetry exemplifies this performative power of language to conjure: the word poesis in poetry suggests its power to bring worlds and realities into being. This is, of course, a power that does not always have desirable or emancipatory effects; it can also subdue, discriminate, isolate, exclude, injure. But we need to insist on poetry’s power to haunt this anti-poetic present in ways that can conjure other frameworks of living, relating to others, making sense of what is happening around us, and resisting destructive political frameworks that hold sway over the world.

Poetry is more than ‘just’ words. The solace I often find in Cavafy’s poetry and its acts of haunting lies in how it forges relations to others that may seem impossible or fanciful: talking to the dead and have them talk back or confronting us with their silence; calling upon ghosts from the future; prefiguring queer communities that are not yet there; conjuring ghosts erased by History through archival traces that are picked up and speculatively reconfigured. This enabling of seemingly impossible relations—particularly relations of love and care—is politically necessary today, in a present of precarity, growing injustice, wars, erasure of worlds, and destruction of social bonds.

Haunting, let us not forget, can be a very painful affair. Cavafy’s ghosts often remind us that relating to others, including the dead, and animating the past can fail; that we are alone, in spite (or because) of the ghosts that surround us; that we long to disengage from painful pasts that refuse to go away; that we are stuck in melancholia, reliving trauma, unable to move on; that there is loss and injustices that demand to be set right. But how can ghosts keep haunting when all material traces of people and their lifeworlds are obliterated? I think of Gaza today, and of Palestine, which, Nat Muller writes, “remains, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the most egregious example in which time and place are, and continue to be, structurally erased” (2024). Ghosts are tied to places, prone to “return to the site of trouble” (2024). To haunt, they need material traces. In Cavafy’s poems, such material triggers—an old book, a photograph, a sketch, a bloody rag—are crucial conditions for successful conjurations. The following verses—the last stanza of the poem “Under the Rubble” by Palestinian writer, poet, and scholar Mosab Abu Toha—hint at the danger of the dead not being able to haunt when all traces of their bodies and the lives they lived are obliterated:

[…]

When we die, our souls leave our bodies,
take with them everything they loved
in our bedrooms: the perfume bottles,
the makeup, the necklaces, and the pens.
In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed.
Nothing remains for the soul.
Even our souls,
they get stuck under the rubble for weeks.

^{[From “Under the Rubble” by Mosad Abu Toha; published on 30 Sep 2024, in the New Yorker, and included in his poetry collection Forest of Noise, 2024]}

Ghosts, Avery Gordon writes, are “attached to events, things, and places that produced them in the first place.” Thus, “once the conditions that call them up and keep them alive have been removed, their reason for being and their power to haunt are severely restricted” (2008, xix). If all material indexes of bodies and lives lived are erased, no souls will be able to escape the rubble, no ghosts will be left to demand. Poetry can perhaps help safekeep some of these traces that could turn “rubble”—mass or matter bereft of meaning—into materials and voices that haunt. If poetry can give us tools to conjure these and other ghosts, then that is something worth insisting on.

Ghosts, however, are not only markers of loss. Rather than mourning “a condition of death-in-life,” ghosts can also become reminders of “the resilience of life-even-in-death” (Ball 2014, 144; also in Muller 2024). In Cavafy’s poetry, too, specters often breach a painfully linear temporal order or a suffocating closed context, safeguarding the possibility that death may sometimes miss. Painfully aware of the fact that conjurations can fail and that ghosts can disappear, Cavafy’s poems remind us of loss, but also resist death’s finality, making sure that acts of haunting and being haunted can continue to take place. As a vehicle for haunting, poetry can stubbornly sustain political hope or, as Dimitris Papanikolaou recently put it, “formidable persistence” (2025), sometimes against all odds.

In Cavafy’s “Ο Δαρείος” / “Dareios,” the fictional poet-protagonist, Phernazis, aspires to please his king, Mithridatis, by writing a poem about one of the king’s ancestors, the Persian king Dareios the Great. When his plans are interrupted by the news that the war with the Romans has broken out, Phernazis, disappointed that nobody will bother with poems now, exclaims:

In the middle of a war—just think, Greek poems!

I am—somewhat pre-posterously—taking Phernazis’s words out of context here, as Phernazis is in fact dismissing the idea that his poetry will be of use to anyone (let alone the king) in times of war. Yet in that poem, too, war eventually becomes a catalyst for genuine poetic insight to emerge. Though I do not wish to make an overly romanticised claim about poetry as a counterforce to injustice and violence in the world, I do believe that we need poems, precisely in the middle of war. Poetry does not stand outside, beyond, above or before the world’s turmoil but can resonate, and haunt, to borrow Cavafy’s words, “in the middle” of it.

 

Note

In addition to the book itself, for this essay, and especially its second part, I have drawn on a recent presentation that was part of an event around the book titled Cavafy and His Spectres, held in Oxford on 23 May 2025 and organised by the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and the Greek Studies Now network. I am very grateful to Dimitris Papanikolaou and all colleagues and students who co-organised or participated in this event.

 

WORKS CITED

Bal, Mieke. 1999. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ball, Anna. 2014. “Communing with Darwish’s Ghosts. Absent Presence in Dialogue with the Palestinian Moving Image.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2): 135-151.

Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren, eds. 2013. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. London: Bloomsbury.

Cavafy, C.P. 2010. Selected Prose Works. Trans. Peter Jeffreys. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Gordon, Avery. 2008 [1997]. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1971. “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb.” In Roman Jakobson, Selected writings II. Word and Language. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 130–147.

Muller, Nat. 2024. “H(a)unting for Tomorrow: Spectral Temporalities and Sites in Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s Tomorrow’s Ghosts.” Perspective, June. https://www.perspectivejournal.dk/en/haunting-for-tomorrow-spectral-temporalities-and-sites-in-larissa-sansour-and-soeren-linds-tomorrows-ghosts/

Papanikolaou, Dimitris. 2025. “Η θαυμάσια επιμονή” [The Formidable Persistence]. To Vima, 16 June. https://www.tovima.gr/print/opinions/i-thaymasia-epimoni/

Peeren, Esther. 2014. The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Toha, Mosab Abu. 2024. Forest of Noise. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Toha, Mosab Abu. 2024. “Under the Rubble.” The New Yorker, 30 Sept. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/07/under-the-rubble-mosab-abu-toha-poem

Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2004. “Introduction: The Spectral Turn.” Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 3–17.