What do Lawrence Durrell, Constantin Cavafy and Leonard Cohen have in common?

I lay in bed this morning for short time reading. I have just finished Durrell’s novel Justine …. the first in his celebrated four-part work known as the “Alexandria Quartet”.* Becoming aware of the number of occasions on which Durrell pays homage to the Greek poet C.p. Cavafy, I have just got hold of a copy of his collected poems. I was intrigued by the fact that Durrell had actually included in his novel a translation of two of the Greek writer’s poems, and it struck me that it might be interesting to compare the different translations. I was startled, as I was reading “The God abandons Antony” to realise that it all sounded remarkably familiar. Then the penny dropped. This poem is the inspiration for Leonard Cohen’s Alexandra leaving!

Durrell’s novels are all set in the city of Alexandria, during the 1930s. The purpose of his citing Cavafy is that the latter, who lived in the city, focusses on the idea in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra that Antony has a premonition while in Alexandria of his being abandoned by God. Cohen cleverly inverts the image, and depicts himself as being abandoned by a woman named Alexandra. His song is a pastiche of Cavafy’s poem. I was thunderstruck by this realisation, and promptly leaped out of bed, and headed for the computer, on which I checked out the idea. Needless to say I was disappointed to discover that this insight is not original to me, and indeed is a standard observation on the part of critics writing seriously about Cohen’s music.

I hang onto the fact that, while not an original insight, it is one at which I arrived under my own steam. I had never appreciated before that there might be inspirational roots in the poetry of others for Cohen’s melancholic vision of the world. It’s worth reflecting on further.

*Actually, re-reading it. His work has that degree of complexity and nuance that compels you to return to it. More of that perhaps tomorrow.