“Il Gran Rifiuto”: The Mediterranean Exile of Ugo Foscolo and Constantine Cavafy

Abstract

In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as a yearning for an impossible return. Born on the Greek island of Zante (Zakynthos) in the Mediterranean, the Italian poet Ugo Foscolo finds himself in a state between land and sea, between languages and cultures. Foscolo’s attachment to the sea is both epic and unheroic. This paradox in Foscolo’s sea-oriented nostalgia is a preview of his fate as an exile. In his poems, Foscolo laments the impossible nostos to his native island by invoking the epic hero Ulysses (Odysseus). With its aura of myth, the sea becomes a symbol of Foscolo’s nostalgia. At the same time his fate as an exile is not defined by an epic homecoming but sealed by the irretrievability of home. A century later, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy also finds himself in a similar state of paradox. While he is attached to his native city Alexandria, Cavafy’s Alexandria is also detached from the present, as the poet descends into history to recreate a mythical city in his imagination. By drawing comparisons between Foscolo’s and Cavafy’s poems about home and displacement, exile and return, I argue that both poets’ uprootedness hinge on their wavering between land and sea, as their identity is pinned on the refusal of return, generating a sense of “transcendental homelessness” in the words of Georg Lukács and a “contrapuntal” awareness as defined by Edward Said. As an imaginary city out of time, Cavafy’s Alexandria reflects the poet’s own out-of-placedness as a Greek in Egypt. In comparison, Foscolo’s exile also reshapes his memory of home, making an anachronistic turn that Said identifies in Cavafy’s poetry and considers part of exile. In the end, these two poets of the Mediterranean follow the same path of “never return” as their great exilic predecessor Dante once did.