The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy
The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy
Daniel Mendelsohn
No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry makes the historical personal – and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian’s assessing eye as well as the poet’s compassionate heart.After more than a decade of work, Daniel Mendelsohn – an acclaimed, award-winning author and classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world – is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy’s genius. This volume includes the first-ever English translation of thirty unfinished poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died – a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades. With Mendelsohn’s in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation is a literary event – the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.
C. P. CAVAFY
Complete Poems
TRANSLATED,
WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY,
BY
DANIEL MENDELSOHN
CONTENTS
Title Page (#uf1307358-6f8a-5860-8f1c-82a497468ad9)
Introduction: The Poet-Historian (#uaae696d8-4640-508b-947d-13e7165eed04)
A Note on Pronunciation of Proper Names (#u494b139f-561a-5631-8408-10e19148c327)
I: PUBLISHED POEMS (#u446d759c-1b0f-5114-a05d-621e6126574e)
Poems 1905–1915 (#ucc39a76e-62e3-5acb-924d-1d716ade57e5)
The City (#u7566f17c-2b64-58a5-84a6-d06991041724)
The Satrapy (#uf1249162-1f31-50bf-a6f1-e5e012c27be1)
But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent (#ufa13ffbb-8d8c-540e-9a57-a86b40c608ac)
Ides of March (#u0e77fb10-c932-5e3d-a9e5-393c02f6723e)
Finished (#u00a80c03-dd49-5cd0-bdf5-744991191c50)
The God Abandons Antony (#u1053f3ee-a5d0-548e-b6c6-ad1d9b80ea5b)
Theodotus (#ud29311d5-de6b-5890-a797-9334f45cb5c1)
Monotony (#u1402361a-c979-52d2-a171-6c45fd98e047)
Ithaca (#u7886cbe6-449e-5350-a521-2bb0f4f9c70c)
As Much As You Can (#ud552f4e4-ccae-5306-9a27-bad24a6cc770)
Trojans (#u53ec84f7-86f2-5d9e-a2c3-f42c353a897f)
King Demetrius (#u4bebfd14-78d4-538d-a2c4-d19a040a5152)
The Glory of the Ptolemies (#uffe1e67d-0cd1-5b01-99dd-23724b83e842)
The Retinue of Dionysus (#u2b53e354-0d5e-5209-8f0a-42ce2225876e)
The Battle of Magnesia (#ud9471c84-506a-5a3d-a985-bc36361421f1)
The Seleucid’s Displeasure (#ued52de49-a6e0-5c09-a0a7-9f188a891481)
Orophernes (#u199d19cb-a761-563d-82b4-2a17003f03fd)
Alexandrian Kings (#u4a6ae30f-3392-5047-a758-1bdbeada7e47)
Philhellene (#u8fc2fdd5-9f88-5124-82b9-3885dafdf132)
The Steps (#uc8ee6325-e31b-5f17-a6da-fac0ed1475c5)
Herodes Atticus (#u6e435cb3-eae1-5571-9c96-0b93cddac884)
Sculptor from Tyana (#u34cf97a2-1587-5d9f-a438-8b4808c74d07)
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian (#u153b9216-3b9c-5558-bbdc-0cfca534541c)
Tomb of Eurion (#u03237bdb-8a67-5822-9c68-593c849daed6)
That Is He (#u54e5c12d-3115-5470-af00-fc380c5f922f)
Dangerous (#uee6f1e31-4363-598b-8312-13e0ad3bb989)
Manuel Comnenus (#u0993afd8-449f-5cd0-a19c-291516f31e0a)
In the Church (#u8b86abef-aa93-5f78-bf21-bc96d45dfc7e)
Very Rarely (#u87b1a0a4-6997-5105-9c7f-96f5c9c36d4d)
In Stock (#uc7dc34fc-7370-57ec-a988-0e1d552d1741)
Painted (#u5a1cd588-4b00-52b0-9fc5-afabab0a8d1b)
Morning Sea (#u06383326-a946-5c19-8b8c-e5451f413f10)
Song of Ionia (#u37dc0635-5665-53c2-b74b-54f9331144ee)
In the Entrance of the Café (#ud9af806f-bf11-5eb6-8d73-c802f4c07b66)
One Night (#u34a94ffd-b934-5d46-a2dd-86b3e9b67897)
Come Back (#ua28e988e-b5e8-58bd-93a3-b58999bc71fa)
Far Off (#u28e33302-c99d-526e-acd6-84e8c96288c9)
He Swears (#u92c54033-6a40-50e2-bf09-5c74646a471c)
I Went (#uf54a2981-9caa-5ad5-ab82-96d8d1bff77d)
Chandelier (#u0e7d4878-1e0a-57e8-895f-4d23c664bb41)
Poems 1916–1918 (#u69678fbb-8b04-507e-9313-2718f533f716)
Since Nine— (#u6737b471-3609-5235-9b6a-7a4e97d49ab2)
Comprehension (#u854d8b60-7a6b-5443-840b-83e932d63e6f)
In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion (#u686aceb9-84fa-5e45-8295-6b515e9f8b6b)
Envoys from Alexandria (#uae10a661-9604-54b0-a3a9-09e580ab2c84)
Aristobulus (#ua8241c1e-3ba8-5808-bb93-d343a3cd4b98)
Caesarion (#ua064a5b5-83b7-545b-b515-ac112be0b55b)
Nero’s Deadline (#u2df9ba45-2a0e-5be0-9c06-b3d2da03a7e7)
Safe Haven (#u3d4196d4-40e8-57ca-a286-ef55f9344e1b)
One of Their Gods (#u27032b92-80ed-5cb9-9005-7fccbbd849e0)
Tomb of Lanes (#u23feaa36-8406-5389-b425-0ad3e3f46bf8)
Tomb of Iases (#ua391e284-6c89-5aef-ab7d-6efda9ff118a)
In a City of Osrhoene (#ua5b8c04f-f689-5790-9205-492a14b4fc57)
Tomb of Ignatius (#uf86cb4c0-6645-555b-97e9-2ff2a3778baa)
In the Month of Hathor (#u5bdd91bf-cfb1-5236-9d88-59486f72cf0c)
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610 (#ua35a839c-30c7-51c2-b87c-84aeb86793f7)
Aemilian Son of Monaës, an Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D. (#u33c67bd0-2945-5890-b0f8-87d9637671b4)
Whenever They Are Aroused (#u8c2cfaa4-c3a7-559c-a920-563f543ee719)
To Pleasure (#u3de544e4-a9ee-5512-9061-b1ba5b5498f5)
I’ve Gazed So Much— (#uff906a22-5769-5230-a878-9e20531c5628)
In the Street (#u97726a29-0590-5af9-aadc-44601a57532a)
The Window of the Tobacco Shop (#ua63ed76a-d08c-5977-a09a-a54c3e8431a8)
Passage (#ucca95ce8-26ae-57c4-8f19-06fc086de3de)
In Evening (#ua2190652-c063-5267-8d1a-0feeb65a3878)
Gray (#u9b3487fd-0e24-5711-9c11-4dd55d2c2be9)
Below the House (#u48fb3d94-fd72-5d4e-9853-d6617e3a380e)
The Next Table (#u2fcbdf28-a3a3-5da6-938b-1770dc8b0b2b)
Remember, Body (#uae179ec9-2fed-5afa-9126-ddc522cd067a)
Days of 1903 (#u90313518-4855-50f3-8ba8-f64931794f78)
Poems 1919–1933 (#u46fb8668-9c7e-5a6a-a877-f7295fd4f43d)
The Afternoon Sun (#ud11a7239-507d-5b86-8de0-36370c1c26b0)
To Stay (#u0b3e039d-efec-5081-badb-39eba6f9b107)
Of the Jews (50 A.D.) (#u1fcdb1de-44ea-56fd-b977-eb42d259eaad)
Imenus (#uf473f8f8-85ad-500d-babe-90caed89df6c)
Aboard the Ship (#u9f584aa9-5286-5f52-a74c-0940b160bb99)
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.) (#u6f774be9-c146-54e8-8813-53c50f476a6a)
If Indeed He Died (#ub2df17d4-eba7-5ed6-b909-dc5b11044575)
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.) (#ue41b352e-1613-5ebb-99a0-9ccebd8bb0e1)
That They Come— (#ucb27854f-78de-5ec3-859c-e413d79864a8)
Darius (#u5638980b-2261-5fec-ab9a-5bd2f5587c07)
Anna Comnena (#ua72d6eea-4dcf-5092-9e7f-6cd2b4388b94)
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying (#uf0b04f76-f2e4-50c6-81c6-ae5b4db38c47)
Their Beginning (#u9ebb0310-93ad-5780-b42b-6cacd7d86e26)
Favour of Alexander Balas (#u20ada021-a5ab-5976-8b59-2394d372a9c7)
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D. (#uf702e31d-b728-5ace-8de4-3c940f0849f9)
Demaratus (#u2f3087ad-953f-56ca-84d5-a42dfd31195d)
I Brought to Art (#u206d6bfc-8a80-54c1-8c9a-179b33e57110)
From the School of the Renowned Philosopher (#ub1811dc4-2ccc-53b9-97e3-bc482599aa41)
Maker of Wine Bowls (#ub23afd1e-0d61-566d-a585-235205056a65)
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League (#u6325c332-ab32-50b0-b5b0-9e52a4cc5d45)
For Antiochus Epiphanes (#u9eaf5a0d-0e42-5a2d-8c81-621816321cba)
In an Old Book (#u45e63cd4-6546-5b07-88fc-bf3485d6507c)
In Despair (#ucc78b1fd-412f-51c3-9b65-43060d29a4aa)
Julian, Seeing Indifference (#u3be70777-9e97-59ac-a519-983a7eea45f2)
Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene (#u81fc044f-8f37-51b9-b2dd-7e78445e0ee0)
Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.) (#ub9dea818-6c2c-5b08-b406-b68903586441)
Julian in Nicomedia (#ueb8a29d0-455c-5478-b065-bc59c83f4e62)
Before Time Could Alter Them (#ub600e236-9f87-53fc-9fbd-4e08bfe718ae)
He Came to Read— (#litres_trial_promo)
The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria (#litres_trial_promo)
John Cantacuzenus Triumphs (#litres_trial_promo)
Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D. (#litres_trial_promo)
Of Colored Glass (#litres_trial_promo)
The 25th Year of His Life (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Italian Seashore (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Boring Village (#litres_trial_promo)
Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes (#litres_trial_promo)
Cleitus’s Illness (#litres_trial_promo)
In a Municipality of Asia Minor (#litres_trial_promo)
Priest of the Serapeum (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Taverns (#litres_trial_promo)
A Great Procession of Priests and Laymen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sophist Departing from Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Julian and the Antiochenes (#litres_trial_promo)
Anna Dalassene (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1896 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old (#litres_trial_promo)
Greek Since Ancient Times (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1901 (#litres_trial_promo)
You Didn’t Understand (#litres_trial_promo)
A Young Man, Skilled in the Art of the Word—in His 24th Year (#litres_trial_promo)
In Sparta (#litres_trial_promo)
Portrait of a Young Man of Twenty-Three Done by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur (#litres_trial_promo)
In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Potentate from Western Libya (#litres_trial_promo)
Cimon Son of Learchus, 22 Years Old, Teacher of Greek Letters (in Cyrene) (#litres_trial_promo)
On the March to Sinope (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D. (#litres_trial_promo)
Alexander Jannaeus, and Alexandra (#litres_trial_promo)
Beautiful, White Flowers As They Went So Well (#litres_trial_promo)
Come Now, King of the Lacedaemonians (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Same Space (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mirror in the Entrance (#litres_trial_promo)
He Asked About the Quality— (#litres_trial_promo)
Should Have Taken the Trouble (#litres_trial_promo)
According to the Formulas of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians (#litres_trial_promo)
In 200 B.C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1908 (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Outskirts of Antioch (#litres_trial_promo)
Poems Published 1897–1908 (#litres_trial_promo)
Contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
Voices (#litres_trial_promo)
Longings (#litres_trial_promo)
Candles (#litres_trial_promo)
An Old Man (#litres_trial_promo)
Prayer (#litres_trial_promo)
Old Men’s Souls (#litres_trial_promo)
The First Step (#litres_trial_promo)
Interruption (#litres_trial_promo)
Thermopylae (#litres_trial_promo)
Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto (#litres_trial_promo)
The Windows (#litres_trial_promo)
Walls (#litres_trial_promo)
Waiting for the Barbarians (#litres_trial_promo)
Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
The Funeral of Sarpedon (#litres_trial_promo)
The Horses of Achilles (#litres_trial_promo)
II: REPUDIATED POEMS (1886–1898) (#litres_trial_promo)
Brindisi (#litres_trial_promo)
The Poet and the Muse (#litres_trial_promo)
Builders (#litres_trial_promo)
Word and Silence (#litres_trial_promo)
Sham-el-Nessim (#litres_trial_promo)
Bard (#litres_trial_promo)
Vulnerant Omnes, Ultima Necat (#litres_trial_promo)
Good and Bad Weather (#litres_trial_promo)
Timolaus the Syracusan (#litres_trial_promo)
Athena’s Vote (#litres_trial_promo)
The Inkwell (#litres_trial_promo)
Sweet Voices (#litres_trial_promo)
Elegy of the Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Hours of Melancholy (#litres_trial_promo)
Oedipus (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode and Elegy of the Streets (#litres_trial_promo)
Near an Open Window (#litres_trial_promo)
A Love (#litres_trial_promo)
Remembrance (#litres_trial_promo)
The Death of the Emperor Tacitus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Eumenides’ Footfalls (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tears of Phaëthon’s Sisters (#litres_trial_promo)
Ancient Tragedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Horace in Athens (#litres_trial_promo)
Voice from the Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tarentines Have Their Fun (#litres_trial_promo)
The Funeral of Sarpedon (#litres_trial_promo)
III: UNPUBLISHED POEMS (1877?–1923) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Beyzade to His Lady-Love (#litres_trial_promo)
Dünya Güzeli (#litres_trial_promo)
When, My Friends, I Was in Love … (#litres_trial_promo)
Nichori (#litres_trial_promo)
Song of the Heart (#litres_trial_promo)
To Stephanos Skilitsis (#litres_trial_promo)
Correspondences According to Baudelaire (#litres_trial_promo)
[Fragment of an untitled poem] (#litres_trial_promo)
“Nous N’osons Plus Chanter les Roses” (#litres_trial_promo)
Indian Image (#litres_trial_promo)
Pelasgian Image (#litres_trial_promo)
The Hereafter (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mimiambs of Herodas (#litres_trial_promo)
Azure Eyes (#litres_trial_promo)
The Four Walls of My Room (#litres_trial_promo)
Alexandrian Merchant (#litres_trial_promo)
The Lagid’s Hospitality (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Cemetery (#litres_trial_promo)
Priam’s March by Night (#litres_trial_promo)
Epitaph (#litres_trial_promo)
Displeased Theatregoer (#litres_trial_promo)
Before Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Second Odyssey (#litres_trial_promo)
He Who Fails (#litres_trial_promo)
The Pawn (#litres_trial_promo)
Dread (#litres_trial_promo)
In the House of the Soul (#litres_trial_promo)
Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
La Jeunesse Blanche (#litres_trial_promo)
Distinguishing Marks (#litres_trial_promo)
Eternity (#litres_trial_promo)
Confusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Salome (#litres_trial_promo)
Chaldean Image (#litres_trial_promo)
Julian at the Mysteries (#litres_trial_promo)
The Cat (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bank of the Future (#litres_trial_promo)
Impossible Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Addition (#litres_trial_promo)
Garlands (#litres_trial_promo)
Lohengrin (#litres_trial_promo)
Suspicion (#litres_trial_promo)
Death of a General (#litres_trial_promo)
The Intervention of the Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
King Claudius (#litres_trial_promo)
The Naval Battle (#litres_trial_promo)
When the Watchman Saw the Light (#litres_trial_promo)
The Enemies (#litres_trial_promo)
Artificial Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Strengthening (#litres_trial_promo)
September of 1903 (#litres_trial_promo)
December 1903 (#litres_trial_promo)
January of 1904 (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Stairs (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Theatre (#litres_trial_promo)
Poseidonians (#litres_trial_promo)
The End of Antony (#litres_trial_promo)
27 June 1906, 2 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
Hidden (#litres_trial_promo)
Hearing of Love (#litres_trial_promo)
“The Rest Shall I Tell in Hades to Those Below” (#litres_trial_promo)
That’s How (#litres_trial_promo)
Homecoming from Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Fugitives (#litres_trial_promo)
Theophilus Palaeologus (#litres_trial_promo)
And I Got Down and I Lay There in Their Beds (#litres_trial_promo)
Half an Hour (#litres_trial_promo)
House with Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
A Great Feast at the House of Sosibius (#litres_trial_promo)
Simeon (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bandaged Shoulder (#litres_trial_promo)
Coins (#litres_trial_promo)
It Was Taken (#litres_trial_promo)
From the Drawer (#litres_trial_promo)
Prose Poems (#litres_trial_promo)
The Regiment of Pleasure (#litres_trial_promo)
Ships (#litres_trial_promo)
Clothes (#litres_trial_promo)
Poems Written in English (#litres_trial_promo)
[More Happy Thou, Performing Member] (#litres_trial_promo)
Leaving Therápia (#litres_trial_promo)
Darkness and Shadows (#litres_trial_promo)
IV: THE UNFINISHED POEMS (1918–1932) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Item in the Paper (#litres_trial_promo)
It Must Have Been the Spirits (#litres_trial_promo)
And Above All Cynegirus (#litres_trial_promo)
Antiochus the Cyzicene (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Jetty (#litres_trial_promo)
Athanasius (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bishop Pegasius (#litres_trial_promo)
After the Swim (#litres_trial_promo)
Birth of a Poem (#litres_trial_promo)
Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dynasty (#litres_trial_promo)
From the Unpublished History (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rescue of Julian (#litres_trial_promo)
The Photograph (#litres_trial_promo)
The Seven Holy Children (#litres_trial_promo)
Among the Groves of the Promenades (#litres_trial_promo)
The Patriarch (#litres_trial_promo)
On Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
Epitaph of a Samian (#litres_trial_promo)
Remorse (#litres_trial_promo)
The Emperor Conon (#litres_trial_promo)
Hunc Deorum Templis (#litres_trial_promo)
Crime (#litres_trial_promo)
Of the Sixth or Seventh Century (#litres_trial_promo)
Tigranocerta (#litres_trial_promo)
Abandonment (#litres_trial_promo)
Nothing About the Lacedaemonians (#litres_trial_promo)
Zenobia (#litres_trial_promo)
Company of Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Agelaus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fragmentary Sketches (#litres_trial_promo)
[Bondsman and Slave] (#litres_trial_promo)
[Colors] (#litres_trial_promo)
[My Soul Was on My Lips] (#litres_trial_promo)
[Matthew First, First Luke] (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Textual Permissions (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note About the Translator (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daniel Mendelsohn (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION
The Poet-Historian
“OUTSIDE HIS POETRY Cavafy does not exist.” Today, seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the judgment passed in 1946 by his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh at the time, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious life, no great fame or recognition until relatively late in life (and even then, hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. All this—the ordinariness, the obscurity (whether intentional or not)—stands in such marked contrast to the poetry, with its haunted memories of passionate encounters in the present and its astoundingly rich imagination of the Greek past, from Homer to Byzantium, from the great capital of Alexandria to barely Hellenized provincial cities in the Punjab, that it is hard not to agree with Seferis that the “real” life of the poet was, in fact, completely interior; and that outside that imagination and those memories, there was little of lasting interest.
As the man and everyone who knew him have passed into history, the contrast between the life and the art has made it easy to think of Cavafy in the abstract, as an artist whose work exists untethered to a specific moment in time. This trend has been given impetus by the two elements of his poetry for which he is most famous: his startlingly contemporary subject (one of his subjects, at any rate), and his appealingly straightforward style. Certainly there have always been many readers who appreciate the so-called historical poems, set in marginal Mediterranean locales and long-dead eras and tart with mondain irony and a certain weary Stoicism. (“Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey; / without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road. / But now she has nothing left to give you,” he writes in what is perhaps his most famous evocation of ancient Greek culture, which tells us that the journey is always more important than the inevitably disappointing destination.) But it is probably fair to say that Cavafy’s popular reputation currently rests almost entirely on the remarkably prescient way in which those other, “sensual” poems, as often as not set in the poet’s present, treat the ever-fascinating and pertinent themes of erotic longing, fulfillment, and loss; the way, too, in which memory preserves what desire so often cannot sustain. That the desire and longing were for other men only makes him seem the more contemporary, the more at home in our own times.
As for the style, it is by now a commonplace that Cavafy’s language, because it generally shuns conventional poetic devices—image, simile, metaphor, specialized diction—is tantamount to prose. One of the first to make this observation was Seferis himself, during the same 1946 lecture at Athens in which he passed judgment on Cavafy’s life. “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order to become prose,” he remarked, although not without admiration. “He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know.” Bare of its own nuances, that appraisal, along with others like it, has inevitably filtered into the popular consciousness and been widely accepted—not least, because the idea of a plainspoken, contemporary Cavafy, impatient with the frills and fripperies characteristic of his Belle Epoque youth, dovetails nicely with what so many see as his principal subject, one that seems to be wholly contemporary, too.
No one more than Cavafy, who studied history not only avidly but with a scholar’s respect for detail and meticulous attention to nuance, would have recognized the dangers of abstracting people from their historical contexts; and nowhere is such abstraction more dangerous than in the case of Cavafy himself. To be sure, his work—the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets—is timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing particulars of the poet’s life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him—one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself). His style, to begin with, is far less prosaic, far richer and more musical, and indeed is rooted far more deeply in the nineteenth century—which, astoundingly it sometimes seems, he inhabited for more than half his life—than is generally credited. (Some readers will be surprised to learn that many of Cavafy’s lyrics, until he was nearly forty, were cast as sonnets or other elaborate verse forms.) As for his subject, there is a crucial specificity there as well, one that tends to be neglected because it can strike readers as abstruse. Here I refer to those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past: poems that, because they seem not to have much to do with our concerns today, are too often passed over in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal.
The aim of the present translation and commentary is to restore the balance, to allow the reader to recapture some of that specificity of both content and, particularly, form. Any translation of a significant work of literature is, to some extent, as much a response to other translations of that work as to the work itself; the present volume is no exception. The most important and popular English translations of Cavafy in the twentieth century were those of John Mavrogordato (1951), Rae Dalven (1961), and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1975); the latter in particular, with its briskly contemporary tone, its spare prosody, and its arresting use of Modern Greek spellings, was instrumental in persuading a new and younger audience that Cavafy’s “unmistakable tone of voice,” as Auden memorably put it, was one worth listening to. And yet precisely because (as Auden went on to observe) that tone of voice seems always to “survive translation,” I have focused my attention on other aspects of the poetry. In attempting to restore certain formal elements in particular, to convey the subtleties of language, diction, meter, and rhyme that enrich Cavafy’s ostensibly prosaic poetry, this translation seeks to give to the interested reader today, as much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek. A Greek, to deal with first things first, that is not at all a straightforward and unadorned everyday language, but which, as I explain below in greater detail, was a complex and subtle amalgam of contemporary and archaic forms, one that perfectly mirrored, and expressed, the blurring of the ancient and the modern that is the great hallmark of his subject matter. And a Greek, too, whose internal cadences and natural music the poet exploited thoroughly. There is no question that Cavafy in Greek is poetry, and beautiful poetry at that: deeply, hauntingly rhythmical, sensuously assonant when not actually rhyming. It seemed to me worthwhile to try to replicate these elements whenever it was possible to do so.
Cavafy’s content also merits renewed attention—both the specific subjects of individual poems and also his larger artistic project, which in fact holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace. For this reason I have provided extensive Notes in addition to a general Introduction. A necessary aspect of the project of presenting Cavafy anew to a public that enjoys poetry but is unlikely to be familiar with many of the eras and places where he likes to situate his poems (late Hellenistic Syria, say, or the fourteenth century in Byzantium; Seleucia, Cyrene, Tigranocerta) is to provide readers with the rich background necessary to decipher those works. Cavafy seems to have inhabited the remote past as fully as he inhabited the recent past, and so to appreciate his poems fully, with their nuances and, so often, their ironies—the latter in particular arising from the tension between what the characters in the poem knew while events were transpiring and what we know now, one or two millennia later—the reader also needs to be able to inhabit both of those pasts; to know what they knew then, and to know what we know now, too.
Readers will also find commentary on certain poems with subjects and settings that might not, at first, appear to require elucidation: poetic creation, erotic desire, the recent past. And yet however familiar or obvious to us the emotions that Cavafy describes may seem to be (the feeling of being “special”—of belonging to a rarefied elite—that comes with being a creative artist), or however self-evident or transparent the circumstances about which he writes, it is worth keeping in mind that the poet’s presentation of such themes was often deeply marked by his reading in the poets and authors of his time—or unexpectedly indebted to his lifelong immersion in ancient history. Our understanding of an ostensibly simple short poem like “Song of Ionia,” for instance—a poem that seems to revel straightforwardly in the fizzy possibility that even today the old gods still dart among the hills on the coast of Ionia—is deepened when we learn that it stemmed from the poet’s poignant vision, while reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of the late Roman emperor Attalus (who was born in Ionia) “singing a touching song—some reminiscence of Ionia and of the days when the gods were not yet dead.” By the same token, “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent,” a poem about the special perception granted to certain gifted men, begins with an epigraph from an ancient biography of the first-century B.C. sage Apollonius of Tyana; but the reader who is given a note explaining who Apollonius was, without being made aware of the strong influence exerted by Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century French Parnassian school on the young Cavafy’s thinking about poetry and “special” vision, is being deprived of a full appreciation of the poem.
That Apollonius poem, which comments implicitly on the role of the artist in the present even as it invokes a very ancient text, embodies a crucial aspect of the entire Cavafian oeuvre. Despite the persistent tendency to divide Cavafy’s poems into two categories—scholarly poems set in the ancient world, and poems about sexual love set in a more or less recognizable present—there is an overarching and crucial coherence to the work as a whole, one we can grasp only when we unravel the meaning of the poet’s famous description of himself as not “a poet only” but as a “poet-historian.” To fail to appreciate his unique perspective, one that (as it were) allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye, is to be deprived of a chance to see the great and moving unity of the poet’s lifelong project.
The Introduction that follows provides a brief survey of the life, in order to give readers a sense of who Cavafy was “outside his poetry”; an extended critical appreciation of the work; a discussion of Cavafy’s handling of formal devices such as rhyme, meter, and enjambment; a note on the arrangement of the various groups of poems in this volume (always a thorny issue in the case of a poet who himself never published a complete collection of his poems); and, finally, an overview of the “Unfinished Poems,” the thirty nearly complete drafts that the poet left among his papers at his death, and which appeared in English for the first time in my translation of The Unfinished Poems (2009). It is my hope that the essay will serve to do what an Introduction is supposed to do if we take seriously the etymology of the word, which is to lead someone into something—the something, in this case, being a destination every bit as worthwhile as the journey.
I
IN ONE SENSE, it was an unexceptional life—or, at least, no more exceptional or distinguished than the lives of certain other great poets, in whom the richness of the work stands in striking contrast to the relative uneventfulness of the life. (Emily Dickinson, say.) Constantine Petrou Cavafy—the Anglicized spelling of the Greek Kavafis was one that Cavafy and his family invariably used—was born in Alexandria in 1863, the youngest of seven surviving sons of parents whose families were not at all untypical of the far-flung Greek diaspora, with its hints of vanished empire. Their roots could be traced not only to the Phanar, the Greek community clustered around the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and to Nichori (Turkish Yeniköy) in the Upper Bosporus, but also to Caesarea, Antioch, and to Jassy, in present-day Moldavia. His father, Peter John Cavafy, was a partner in a flourishing family business devoted to corn and cotton export that eventually had offices in London and Liverpool as well as in several cities in Egypt; after moving from Constantinople to London, he finally settled in Alexandria, which was ruled at the time by the Muslim Khedive but had a large population of Europeans. There he would be considered one of the most important merchants in the mid-1850s—not coincidentally, a time when the Crimean War resulted in a steep rise in the price of grain. The poet’s mother, Haricleia Photiades, the daughter of a diamond merchant from Constantinople, counted an archbishop of Caesarea and a Prince of Samos among her relations. At the height of their wealth and social success in Alexandrian society, the parents of the future poet had, in addition to their other servants, an Italian coachman and an Egyptian groom. Said Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, paid attentions to Haricleia that were, if we are to judge from the photographs of her, purely a matter of politeness; Peter John received a decoration from the Khedive at the opening of the Suez Canal.
What effect the memory of such glory and prestige—carefully tended and endlessly polished by his mother long after she’d become a widow living in not very genteel poverty—might have had on her impressionable and imaginative youngest son, we can only guess at; but it is surely no accident that so much of Cavafy’s poetry is torn between deep sentiment about the lost riches of the past and the intelligent child’s rueful, sharp-eyed appreciation for the dangers of glib nostalgia. For his father’s premature death, when Constantine was only seven, would bring hard times to Haricleia and her seven sons, from which the family fortunes would never really recover: Peter John had lived well but not wisely. For several years the widow Cavafy and her three younger sons ambled back and forth between Paris and London and Liverpool, relying on the generosity of her husband’s brothers. They stayed in England for five years, where Cavafy acquired the slight British inflection that, we are told, accented his Greek. When it became clear that the surviving brothers had hopelessly bungled their own affairs, Haricleia returned to Alexandria in 1877, when Cavafy was fourteen. With the exception of a three-year sojourn in Constantinople, from 1882 to 1885, following the British bombardment of Alexandria (a response to Egyptian nationalist violence against some of the city’s European inhabitants; the bombardment largely destroyed the family home), Cavafy would never live anywhere else again.
For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:
And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.
At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called Constantinopoliad: An Epic, which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation; he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose Le Côté de Guermantes he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.
At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:
Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian étagères holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry to be delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a koré from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)
The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.
Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos, known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,
may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. … It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.
It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry quartier, the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”
In 1932, Cavafy, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. That summer he traveled to Athens for the tracheotomy that would deprive him forever of the famous voice; from that point on, he was forced to communicate in a distorted whisper and, later on, by means of penciled notes. He returned home in the autumn, after declining an invitation from his wealthy friend Antony Benakis, a collector and the brother of Penelope Delta, to stay with him in Athens. (“Mohammed Aly Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh my second. How can I leave them?”) After first refusing and then allowing himself to be visited by the Patriarch of the city, he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant concentricity, a perfect closure, that are nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by authors when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.
2
“IN THE POEMS of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,” Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, “something extraordinary happens.” As will be evident by now, little about the external events of his life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap; in this respect Cavafy resembles, more than a little, his near contemporary Proust, who similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling littérateur into a major artist. Only by tracing the course of Cavafy’s interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to discern the path by which (to paraphrase that other great Greek poet again) Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one.
In the 1880s and 1890s, when he was in his twenties and thirties, Constantine Cavafy was a young man with modest literary ambitions, steadily writing quantities of verse as well as contributing articles, reviews, and essays, most in Greek but some in English (a language in which he was perfectly at home as the result of those adolescent years spent in England), on a number of idiosyncratic subjects, to Alexandrian and Athenian journals. (“Coral from a Mythological Viewpoint,” “Give Back the Elgin Marbles,” Keats’s Lamia.) Such writings, as well as the historical poems that belong to this early period, already betray not only a deep familiarity with a broad range of modern historians, whom he read in Greek, English, and French, but also the meticulous attentiveness to primary sources in the original languages—the Classical and later Greek and Roman historians, the early Church Fathers, Byzantine chroniclers—that we tend to associate with scholars rather than poets.
The writings of those early years indicate that Cavafy was struggling to find an artistically satisfying way in which to unite the thematic strands that would come to characterize his work, of which the consuming interest in Hellenic history was merely one. (An interest, it is crucial to emphasize, that rather strikingly disdained the conventional view of what constituted “the glory that was Greece”—which is to say, the Archaic and Classical eras—in favor of the long post-Classical phase, from the Hellenistic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium.) There was, too, the poet’s very strong identity as a product of the Greek diaspora, an Orthodox Christian and the scion of that once-distinguished Phanariote family who saw, in the thousand-year arc of Byzantine history, not a decadent fall from idealized Classical heights—the standard Western European attitude, crystallized by Gibbon—but a continuous and coherent thread of Greek identity that seamlessly bound the antique past to the present.
And, finally, there was homosexual sensuality. However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter-of-fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wilde’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for “Hellenic” civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.
The earliest poems we have date to the poet’s late teens, the period when he was sojourning with his mother’s family in and around Constantinople. These include dutiful if unpersuasive exercises on Romantic themes (ecstatic encomia to the lovely eyes of fetching lasses; a Grecified adaptation of Lady Anne Barnard’s ballad on love and loss in the Highlands) and, perhaps predictably, some flights of Turkish Orientalism, complete with smoldering beauties locked up in harems. As time passed, he was drawn more and more to recent and contemporary currents in Continental literature. The Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s, in particular, with its eager response to Théophile Gautier’s call for an “Art for Art’s sake,” its insistence on elevating polished form over earnest subjective, social, and political content, and particularly its invitation to a return to the milieus and models of the antique Mediterranean past, had special appeal. (That a number of Cavafy’s poems from this period are sonnets is surely a testament to the influence of the Parnassians, who prized the form for its rigorous technical requirements.)
From the Parnasse it was but a short step to Baudelaire, a Greek translation of whose “Correspondences” constitutes part of one 1892 poem; and, ultimately, to Symbolism. It is not hard to see the allure that the French writer’s elevation of the poet as a member of an elite—a gifted seer whose special perceptions were denied to the common mass—had for the young Cavafy, in whom a taste for the past, as well as a necessarily secret taste for specialized erotic pleasures, coexisted. Lines from the second half of “Correspondences According to Baudelaire” suggests how thoroughly the young Alexandrian had absorbed the lessons of the pioneering French modernist:
Do not believe only what you see.
The vision of poets is sharper still.
To them, Nature is a familiar garden.
In a shadowed paradise, those other people
grope along the cruel road.
With Cavafy, the inevitably self-justifying preoccupation with the notion of a rarefied artistic elite (“Cavafy’s attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one,” wrote Auden, perhaps a trifle indulgently)—an attitude irresistible, as we might imagine, to a painfully closeted gay man—was paralleled by a lifelong fascination with figures gifted with second sight, extrasensory perception, and telepathic knowledge. It found its ideal historical correlative in the first-century A.D. magus and sage Apollonius of Tyana, about whom Cavafy published three poems and, as the corpus of poems left unfinished at the time of his death now makes clear, was working on the draft of another toward the end of his life.
As with Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the later Esoteric and Decadent poets, the furious nineteenth-century obsession with progress, fueled by the technological advances of the industrial age, found no favor with the young Cavafy. His 1891 sonnet “Builders” not only makes clear his allegiance to Baudelaire’s worldview, but also sets the stage for a poetic gaze that would, for so much of his life, be backward-glancing in one way or another:
… the good builders make haste
all as one to shield their wasted labor.
Wasted, because the life of each is passed
embracing ills and sorrows for a future generation,
that this generation might know an artless
happiness, and length of days,
and wealth, and wisdom without base sweat, or servile industry.
But it will never live, this fabled generation;
its very perfection will cast this labor down
and once again their futile toil will begin.
The rejection of modern notions of progress, the inward- and backward-looking gaze, inevitably led to a flirtation with Decadence and Aestheticism as well. The same turbulently formative years of the 1890s produced, for example, a coldly glittering poem, in quatrains, on Salome, in which a young scholar, having playfully asked Salome for her own head—and having been obeyed—“orders this bloodied thing to / be taken from him, and continues / his reading of the dialogues of Plato”; one feels the spirit of Wilde hovering here. More important, the beginning of that decade saw the composition of a cycle of eleven poems, all but two of which we know by their titles alone, which were collected under the heading “Byzantine Days”—Byzantium being a milieu much beloved of the Decadents, who viewed it, of course, from the Western, rather than Eastern, European point of view. Cavafy would come to reject these poems as “unsuitable to his characters”: only two survived the later purge of his early work. It would be some time before he came to appreciate fully just how well Byzantium would serve his artistic and intellectual needs.
Indeed, by the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis that had been precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 (the year after he wrote the last of his “Byzantine Days” poems) and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian. The exasperated rejection of Gibbon’s disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a Romantic-nationalist vision of a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy’s reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on “Ancient Days” (one of the thematic headings into which he’d group his poems: others were “The Beginnings of Christianity,” “Passions,” and “Prisons”), and inspired him to try to find a way to integrate History and Poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.
This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a “crisis of lasciviousness,” which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to Alexander Mavroudis. Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life’s work thus far: the “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1902–03, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation “Repudiated” for a group of poems that he’d already published by that time and subsequently disowned.) A contemporary note that he left reveals a writer at a moment that he recognizes as one of deep significance, even if he hasn’t yet seen his way through to his ultimate destination:
After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.
Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.
Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical …
Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet—who even when he works most philosophically, remains an artist—gives one side, which does not mean that he denies the other, or even—though perhaps this is stretching the point—that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling—sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.
Very often the poet’s work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or his immediate readers: Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realizing them themselves …
My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking the poems one by one and settling them at once—following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is finished, or effacing it if vowed to destruction: or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working on them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work …
If a thought has really been true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short-lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically. (tr. Manuel Savidis)
This unsparing (if, typically, not unforgiving) self-examination was the portal to the poet’s mature period, one in which the tripartite division that he had once used to categorize his work—into “philosophical” (by which he meant provocative of reflection), “historical,” and “sensual” poems—began to disintegrate. The enriched and newly confident sense of himself as a Greek and as a man of letters that resulted from the intellectual crisis of the 1890s seems to have resulted in some kind of reconciliation with his homosexual nature, too. (The death of his mother might, in its own way, have been liberating in this respect.)
Indeed, it is no accident that Cavafy himself dated this period to the year 1911—the year in which he published “Dangerous,” the first of his poems that situated homoerotic content in an ancient setting. Nor is it a coincidence that the subject of this poem is a Syrian student living in Alexandria during the uneasy double reign of the sons of Constantine the Great, Constans and Constantius, in the fourth century A.D., at the very moment when the Roman Empire was segueing from paganism to Christianity. As if profiting from that uncertain moment, and reflecting it as well, the young man feels emboldened to give bold voice to illicit urges:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
Both the setting and the character are typical of what George Seferis described as the characteristic Cavafian milieu: “the margins of places, men, epochs … where there are many amalgams, fluctuations, transformations, transgressions.” (The reader of his poems would, indeed, do well to observe how often, and how strikingly, we encounter the vocabulary of indirect placement—“nearby,” “in front of,” “by,” “next to,” “on the side”—in these poems. The titles alone of many betray this preoccupation with the edges of spaces: “In the Entrance of the Café,” “The Mirror in the Entrance,” “On the Outskirts of Antioch.”) As he neared the age of fifty, Cavafy had at last found a way to write, without shame, about his desire—a way that suggestively conflated the various margins to which he had always been drawn: erotic, geographical, spatial, temporal.
The painfully achieved reconciliation of Gibbon’s eighteenth-century, Enlightenment view of history and Paparrigopoulos’s nineteenth-century, Romantic national feeling, coupled with a startlingly prescient twentieth-century willingness to write frankly about homosexual experience, made possible the “unique tone of voice,” as the admiring Auden described it, that is the unmistakable and inimitable hallmark of Cavafy’s work. Ironic yet never cruel, unsurprised by human frailty, including his own (“Cavafy appreciates cowardice also,” Forster wrote, “and likes the little men who can’t be consistent or maintain their ideals”), yet infinitely forgiving of it, that tone takes its darker notes from the historian’s shrewd appreciation for the ironies of human action (which inevitably result, as did the life-altering business misfortunes of his father and uncles, from imperfect knowledge, bad timing, missed opportunities, or simply bad luck); yet at the same time is richly colored by a profound sympathy for human striving in the face of impossible obstacles. (Which could be the armies of Octavian or taboos against forbidden desires.) And it is inflected, too, by the connoisseur’s unsparing and unsentimental grasp of both the pleasures and the pain to which desire makes us vulnerable.
That appreciation, that sympathy, that understanding are, of course, made possible only by Time—the medium that makes History possible, too. As I have said, for many readers, even sophisticated ones, Cavafy is a poet who wrote essentially two kinds of poems: daringly exposed verses about desire, whose frank treatment of homoerotic themes put them decades ahead of their time—and make them gratifyingly accessible; and rather abstruse historical poems, filled with obscure references to little-known and confusingly homonymous Hellenistic or Byzantine monarchs, and set in epochs that one was never held responsible for learning and places that fringed the shadowier margins of the Mediterranean map. But to divide the poet’s work in this way is to make a very serious mistake: Cavafy’s one great subject, the element that unites virtually all of his work, is Time. His poetry returns obsessively to a question that is, essentially, a historian’s question: how the passage of time affects our understanding of events—whether the time in question is the millennia that have elapsed since 31 B.C., when the Hellenophile Marc Antony’s dreams of an Eastern Empire were pulverized by Rome (the subject of seven poems), or the mere years that, in the poem “Since Nine—,” have passed since those long-ago nights that the narrator spent in bustling cafés and crowded city streets: a space of time that has since been filled with the deaths of loved ones whose value he only now appreciates, sitting alone in a room without bothering to light the lamp. What matters to Cavafy, and what so often gives his work both its profound sympathy and its rich irony, is the understanding, which as he knew so well comes too late to too many, that however fervently we may act in the dramas of our lives—emperors, lovers, magicians, scholars, pagans, Christians, catamites, stylites, artists, saints, poets—only time reveals whether the play is a tragedy or a comedy.
The references to long-vanished eras, places, and figures that we so often find in Cavafy’s poetry, and which indeed are unfamiliar even to most scholars of Classical antiquity, are, for this reason, never to be mistaken for mere exercises in abstruse pedantry. Or, indeed, for abstruseness at all. A poem’s casual allusion to, say, the autumnal thoughts of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus in the year 1180 functions quite differently from the way in which invocations of arcane material can function in (to take the well-known example of a contemporary) The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot—where the self-consciously rarefied quality of the numerous allusions is part of the texture of the poem, part of its Modernist project. Cavafy, by contrast, may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him. Not for nothing are a striking number of his poems about nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In “Caesarion,” for instance, a poem written in 1914 and published in 1918—the intervening years, the years of the Great War, saw the publication of a number of poems on beautiful dead youths—the beautiful (as he imagines) teenage son of Caesar and Cleopatra materializes one night in the poet’s apartment:
Ah, there: you came with your indefinite
charm …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And I imagined you so fully
that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp
went out—I deliberately let it go out—
I dared to think you came into my room,
it seemed to me you stood before me.
Such apparitions do not always belong to the distant past. In “Since Nine—,” published in 1918 and written the year before, an “apparition” of the poet’s own “youthful body” suddenly materializes in front of him one evening as he sits alone in a darkened room; similarly, in an Unfinished Poem of the same period, first drafted in 1919 and bearing the provisional title “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the poet’s own soul appears in the form of a louche youth on a street in Marseille, a place he’d visited years before—this scene replacing a decor that is itself a suggestive mélange of past and present (a commonplace settee, a piece of Archaic Greek statuary). Although in the latter poem the narrator attributes his supernatural vision to the excess of wine he’d drunk the previous night—hence the title—such apparitions are, therefore, hardly anomalous in his creative life, and symbolize a crucial theme of the entire body of work: the presence of the past in our own present. To Cavafy, figures such as those of the dead princeling and his own youthful self all inhabit the same era—the vastly arcing past that his own imagination inhabited so fully—and were therefore as alive and present to him as the whores who lived in the brothel below his apartment on the Rue Lepsius. (“Where could I better live?” he once remarked, in the worldly tone we recognize from his verse. “Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”) It is the responsibility of the reader to inhabit that past as fully as possible, too, if only during the brief space during which he or she explores these poems. Otherwise, the meaning of many of them will be obscure, if not opaque. And the reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems, is missing the point of Cavafy’s work—is, like so many of his characters both real and imagined, mistaking the clouded part for the clear and illuminating whole.
The rich tension between furious human striving (political, intellectual, or erotic) in the present and the poignantly belated ability to assess the true significance of that striving indeed characterizes the most memorable of Cavafy’s poems. It is there in “Nero’s Deadline,” in which the thirty-year-old emperor, freshly back in Rome from a trip to hedonistic Greece, never dreams that “beware the age of seventy-three,” the Delphic oracle’s stern warning to him, refers not to him but to his aged general, Galba, plotting revolt in Spain, who will replace him on the imperial throne. It is there, too, in the dazzled and uncomprehending gawking on the part of the citizens of Seleucia, in “One of Their Gods,” who can’t possibly know that the stupefyingly beautiful youth whom they see passing through the marketplace on the way to the red-light district is actually one of the Greek gods. Quite typically of the great mature poetry, the confusion of the hapless observers within the poem mirrors a purposeful and productive confusion, for the reader, as to what era we are in, and indeed what order of being—human? divine? real? mythological?—we are reading about:
And as he disappeared beneath the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
making his way to the neighborhood that comes alive
only at night—that life of revels and debauch,
of every known intoxication and lust—
they’d wonder which of Them he really was
and for which of his suspect diversions
he’d come down to walk Seleucia’s streets
from his Venerable, Sacrosanct Abode.
Here we have another inscrutable apparition; and we have, too, the subtle, richly matured transformation of a theme from the early years: a message from the gods that only the elect can decipher.
The poet’s predilection for the historian’s perspective—his interest in the way in which the experiences of the present, always confusing as they occur, can only be properly understood in the future; which is to say, at the moment when the present has become the past—helps to explain why so many of the ostensibly erotic poems are, essentially, poems about the past, too. A significant number of poems about desire in the poet’s own time (or his recent past) are, in fact, cast as memories of love, or of desire. More often than not, when this poet speaks longingly of “skin, as if of jasmine” or eyes that are a “deep blue, sapphirine,” as he does in the 1914 lyric “Far Off,” he does so not as most conventional love poets might extol the virtues of their beloveds, but in his own distinctive way—which is to say, he speaks of them as a memory so far off that we cannot be sure whether the details of skin and eyes that he recalls are quite accurate:
I’d like to talk about that memory …
But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:
because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.
Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …
That August—was it August?—evening …
I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …
Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.
Even in the most intensely erotic verses, poems in which the poet reveals that he knows “love’s body … the lips, / sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness,” as he does in the 1916 poem “One Night,” the celebration of the physical turns out to be a memory:
And there, in that common, vulgar bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—
the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now
as I write, after so many years have passed!,
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.
This poet very seldom writes what we usually think of as love poetry; his verse, which if anything tends to be about desire, is also—if not primarily—about the way in which the passage of time makes possible the poetry about desire that we are reading.
That Cavafy saw not only desirable young men but desire itself through a historian’s appraising eyes helps to account for a distinctive feature of his poetry. In sharp contrast to other Greek poets of his day, he notably shuns elaborate, exotic, or self-consciously “poetic” diction; his language, so famously plain, is striking above all for its lack of precision in descriptions of physical beauty—a choice of arresting significance in a poet greatly preoccupied with desire. More often than not he will resort to abstract adjectives—oréos and émorfos, “beautiful,” idanikós, “ideal,” exaísia, “exquisite,” idonikós, “sensual,” “voluptuous,” esthitikós, “refined,” “sensitive,” “aesthetic”—where another poet might seek to evoke greater detail.
We very seldom know, in fact, just what the beautiful young men in so many of Cavafy’s poems look like. In “One of Their Gods,” the figure seen walking through the marketplace of a great city is simply “tall and perfectly beautiful”; in “Before Time Could Alter Them,” the narrator’s reverie about a long-ago affair whose premature end may have been a blessing (since it preserves the memory of the lovers’ beauty “before Time could alter them”), the lover is described as a “beautiful boy,” oréo pedí. And the climactic vision to which “Days of 1908” inexorably leads—a glimpse of a ravishing youth who is the subject of the narrator’s fascinated gaze, after the boy has stripped for a seaside bathe—reveals only that he is
flawlessly beautiful; a thing of wonder.
His hair uncombed, rising from its peak;
his limbs a little colored by the sun
What is of interest to Cavafy is not so much individual beauty, but the idea of beauty itself—what happens to it when it is filtered through the passage of many years. Significantly, one of the few poems to include some particulars of what a beautiful young man might actually look like is a poem about beauty in the abstract: the short lyric “I’ve Gazed So Much” (whose original title, it’s worth noting, was “For Beauty”):
At beauty I have gazed so much
that my vision is filled with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.
Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:
always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,
and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.
The poet’s descriptive vocabulary, then, while narrow, has the supreme advantage of imparting to his imaginations of the beautiful an abstract, philosophical dimension—and, perhaps more important, of forcing his reader to do what the historian must do, which is to apply his own imaginative powers to subjects of which, so often, few details are extant.
Indeed, if the desire that flares in so many of these poems has, more often than not, been extinguished, the compensation for all those vanished or disappointed or broken-off love affairs is an artistic one: for we are always reminded that the poem itself is the vehicle for the preservation of desire, and of beauty, that otherwise would have disappeared. This important theme has its roots in the young poet’s debt to the Parnasse and to Baudelaire, with their elevation of the poet as a craftsman and seer whose gifts are denied to the common masses. A crucial aspect of this theme, developed as the poet evolved, was that the artistic creation ultimately has a life more substantial than the object that inspired it. Two decades after the early poems of the 1890s, with their heavy debt to those French poets, the theme recurs with greater subtlety, in suggestive ways. In the 1913 poem “In Stock,” for instance, a jeweler—a stand-in for the poet, of course—fashions fabulous pieces that may mimic nature, but are symbols of the superiority of his creative fantasy to any vulgar needs of the public:
Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,
amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,
and judges, and wanted them; not in the way
he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away
in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the store,
he takes other jewels out of the cases to sell—
. . . .
And in another poem of virtually the same period, “Painted,” written in 1914 and published in 1916, the theme of the superior powers of Art is again stressed. Here, however, it is not natural life but a beautiful boy who becomes the object of Art’s transformative, and in this case healing, power:
In this painting, now, I’m looking at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be he’s worn out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.—
Like this, for some time, I sit and look.
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
Another twenty years later, the theme of the artist’s observing gaze and creative powers as the indispensable vehicles for both an emotionally charged reverie and a creative commemoration has its most sublime expression in the magnificent late poem “Days of 1908,” published the year before the poet’s death. Here, the beautiful but down-at-the-heels young Alexandrian, full of his schemes to make, win, or borrow money (a character we have met before, to be sure), never dreams, as he strips for his seaside swim, that the beauty by which he may well end up making his living will be immortalized in unimagined ways by the poem’s anonymous speaker. Or, rather, by Time itself, since the “you” to whom this speaker addresses himself is, in fact, the days of the long-past summer of 1908:
Your vision preserved him
as he was when he undressed, when he flung off
the unworthy clothes, and the mended underwear.
And he’d be left completely nude; flawlessly beautiful;
a thing of wonder.
His hair uncombed, springing back;
his limbs a little colored by the sun
from his nakedness in the morning at the baths,
and at the seashore.
The hotly yearning heart, with its ambitions, its strivings; the coolly assessing mind, to which those yearnings can appear so puny, even absurd, when measured against the epic forces of history and time and chance. Beauty, yes—the red lips, the jasmine skin, the sapphire eyes: but we can only know that beauty, know about the red and jasmine and sapphire, because of the assessing, measured gaze of the observing artist who beheld and touched and looked; and remembered. The rich, perfervid, sensuous present of most lives is lost forever to recollection: only the living memory of that past, memory that is itself alchemized into something permanent, and permanently beautiful, by poetry, “preserves” them forever. The past and the present; the past in the present. Small wonder that Cavafy, toward the end of his life, insisted that “plenty of poets are poets only, but I am a historical poet.” Those last two words are one way of rendering what he said in Greek, which was piïtís istorikós; but the adjective istorikós can also be a substantive, “historian.” There is no way to prove it, but I suspect that what he meant was precisely what his work makes clear: that he was a “poet-historian.”
3
THE READER WHO takes the time to immerse himself in Cavafy’s rich and idiosyncratic poetic world should be aware of certain technical features, not least because they raise questions about the aims and strategies of any given translation.
One of the techniques of which Cavafy made use to convey the suggestive interplay of past and present so important to his work is one that poses particularly thorny difficulties for the English translator. As a Greek author writing at the turn of the last century, Cavafy had available to him two quite different registers of the language: demotic Greek, the vernacular spoken by the people, and the far more formal Katharevousa, or “pure” Greek, the high language of literature, intellectual life, and officialdom. (The accent falls on the third syllable.) This artificial form of the language, invented at the turn of the nineteenth century by an eminent literary and political figure who had studied Classics, grafted much of the vocabulary and many of the more complicated grammatical forms of Classical Greek onto the everyday language as a means of “purifying” it of non-Greek elements that had accreted during centuries of foreign influence and occupation; its adoption was, therefore, a political gesture as much as anything else. Katharevousa became the official language of the state, and was used in newspapers, official publications, and government edicts. It was, moreover, de rigueur in institutions of higher learning.
Katharevousa savored, then, of official culture, the classical past, and high art. (To Forster, it “has tried to revive the classical tradition, and only succeeds in being dull.”) Just as Cavafy began writing, however, katharevousa—after having achieved preeminence over the years as the primary vehicle for literary expression, one increasingly characterized by an elaborate diction and style—was being rejected by the so-called Generation of 1880, a literary movement led by the prolific poet, dramatist, and critic Kostas Palamas, who advocated the use of demotic in literature. Cavafy’s earliest works were written in katharevousa, but in the early 1890s he had begun using demotic; the unpublished poem “Good and Bad Weather” (1893) was the first poem written entirely in demotic.
And yet he often chose not to write entirely in demotic. A distinctive feature of Cavafy’s style—perhaps the distinctive feature—is that he continued to mingle katharevousa diction and grammar (as well as pure Classical Greek words from time to time, to say nothing of citations from ancient texts) with demotic. The result is a poetry that has a unique and inimitable texture, very often plain and admirably direct but starched, too, with a loftier, more archaic and ceremonious language—like the talk of a fluent and charming raconteur (like Cavafy himself) that is sprinkled with locutions from the King James Bible. For this reason, it is a mistake to overemphasize, as many critics and admirers (and translators) have done, the laconic plainness of Cavafy’s diction; such an emphasis fails to convey the frequent strangeness of the diction, the “unique and cunning alloy,” as the great English travel writer and Hellenophile Patrick Leigh Fermor so marvelously put it in his essay “Landmarks in Decline,”
in which the fragments of legal diction and ancient Greek and inscriptions on tombs and old chronicles—one can almost hear the parchment creak and the flutter of papyrus—are closely haunted by the Anthology and the Septuagint; it is contained in a medium demotic perversely stiffened with mandarin and beaten at last into an instrument of expression which is austere and frugal in the extreme.
Those strange irruptions of mandarin stiffness deserve to be heard. When, in “Philhellene,” Cavafy ends a monologue by a vulgar eastern potentate—eager to indulge in superficial shows of Hellenic style despite that fact (which his monologue inadvertently betrays) that he is crassly disdainful of its substance—with an awkward shift into Classical Greek (on the word “unhellenized,” no less), he tells us more about the speaker’s pretensions than a laborious exposition could.
The deployment of this hybrid language—a verbal expression, you could say, of that larger and abiding fascination with margins, amalgams, cultural “alloys”—is, indeed, crucial for the interpretation of many poems. Two examples, one from a poem that treats a contemporary erotic theme, the other from a poem with an ancient setting, will help illuminate Cavafy’s subtle technique, while showing my own strategies for rendering them in English.
The 1928 poem “Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11” treats a favorite theme: the squalid life of an impoverished young man whose spectacular beauty stands in stark contrast to his humble circumstances—and, in this case, to his convenient morals. (We’re told that the lovely blacksmith’s assistant is willing to sell his favors, if necessary, in order to buy a coveted tie or expensive shirt.) In the poem’s final stanza, the narrator wonders whether even ancient Alexandria, famed for its louche and comely youths, could claim a young man as lovely as this down-at-the-heels boy. Here, the contrast between the allure of the youths in the glittering ancient city and that of a common blacksmith’s boy is suggestively conveyed by the shift in tone between the adjective used of the former, perikallis, and the noun used of the latter, agori: for the former is a high-flown katharevousa word taken directly from the Ancient Greek (which I translate by means of the rather stiff “beauteous”), while the latter is a noun as worn and plain as a pebble: “lad.”
Even more strikingly, in “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” first written in 1910 and published in 1916, a large part of the meaning of the entire poem rests on the difference between a katharevousa and a demotic word, both of which mean the same thing. Set in the second century B.C., as the Hellenistic monarchies founded after the death of Alexander were crumbling before an emergent Rome, the poem treats the painful disappointment felt by one Greek monarch, Demetrius I Soter of the Seleucid house in Asia, on hearing that his Egyptian counterpart, Ptolemy VI, had cast aside his royal dignity and traveled to Rome as a supplicant in order to appeal for help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. The first two stanzas evoke Demetrius’s grandiose regard for the dignity “befitting … an Alexandrian Greek monarch”: to the impoverished Ptolemy he offers lavish clothing, jewels, and a retinue for his presentation to the Senate.
The Seleucid monarch’s attitude is pointedly contrasted with Ptolemy’s canny appreciation for political realities; he knows that he’s likelier to obtain Roman aid if he appears humble when he makes his appeal. His abject willingness to come down off his royal pedestal is brilliantly evoked in the Greek. In the first line of the stanza he is described as having come for the purposes of epaiteia, a noun with roots in Classical and Byzantine Greek that means everything from “a request” to “begging”; but in the last line, the verb used for the reason for his visit is the demotic zondanevo, “to beg.” Hence the shift from the high to the demotic forms, both words meaning the same thing, itself beautifully reflects the demotion in his status from an ostensibly independent ruler to a supplicant reliant on the power of others. In my rendering of these lines, I have attempted to suggest this tonal shift by using an abstruse term in the first instance, and a familiar, monosyllabic word in the second:
But the Lagid, who had come a mendicant,
knew his business and refused it all:
He didn’t need these luxuries at all.
Dressed in worn old clothes, he humbly entered Rome,
and found lodgings with a minor craftsman.
And then he presented himself to the Senate
as an ill-fortuned and impoverished man,
that with greater success he might beg.
As these two examples indicate, I have tried to convey distinctions between katharevousa and demotic, when possible, by using high Latinate forms in the case of the former, and ordinary, plain Anglo-Saxon derivations in the case of the latter—an imperfect, but I hope suggestive, means of conveying this vital aspect of Cavafy’s technique. In certain cases, moreover (“Philhellene,” for one), I have used British spellings when rendering katharevousa, since these—as indeed with the archaic spellings of certain words that Cavafy often favored—instantly and quite effectively (to the American eye) signal a different, often elite cultural milieu, which is part of katharevousa’s flavor.
There are other stylistic matters, resulting in other choices I have made, with which the reader should be acquainted. However much Cavafy’s language may eschew the devices—metaphor, simile, figurative and “lyrical” language—that we normally associate with poetry, his verse, in Greek, is unmistakably musical. This music results principally from two stylistic features, which I have taken pains, whenever possible, to reproduce.
The first is meter. Very often Cavafy’s lines have a strong iambic rhythm; very often, too, he favors a five-beat line that English speakers are familiar with—as Cavafy himself was, from his deep reading of British poets. (There is, indeed, a distinctly English cast to many of his poems, as commentators have observed.) Although he will often preserve a strict iambic pentameter, he just as often loosens the line when it suits his purposes. In “Nero’s Deadline,” for instance, we first learn about the Delphic oracle’s warning (that the emperor should “beware the age of seventy-three”), as the direct object of the verb “heard,” in a line with a strictly iambic beat with precisely ten syllables (I have marked the stresses with acute accents):
tou Dhélfikoú mantíou tón khrismó
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle
Here, the preciseness of the meter vividly suggests the ineluctable character of the oracle itself. By contrast, the first line of the second stanza, in which the poet describes how Nero returns to Rome from a pleasure trip to Athens exhausted by his sensual indulgences, Cavafy maintains a five-beat line while padding it with five extra syllables:
Tóra stin Rhómi tha epitrépsei kourasménos lígo
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little bit wearied
The subtle loosening of the line nicely conveys the relaxation of the self-involved Nero, who is blithely unaware that his days of aesthetic and erotic pleasure are numbered.
These strong and suggestive rhythms structure much of the verse, from the early sonnets of the 1890s to the poems of his last decade; without them, the poetry, already devoid of the usual devices, might well seem flat-footed in a way that indeed reminds us that both the Ancient and the Modern Greek word for prose, pezos, literally means “pedestrian”—that is, language that lumbers along arhythmically instead of dancing. Fortunately for the English translator, English itself falls quite naturally into the rhythms that Cavafy favored.
Cavafy is, indeed, endlessly inventive with his meters. In certain early lyrics, for example “La Jeunesse Blanche” (1895) and “Chaldean Image” (1896), the very elaborate metrical schemes betray the young poet’s infatuation with the Continental poetry of the day; while in others, like the Repudiated Poem “A Love” (1896), we hear the thrumming fifteen-syllable beat characteristic of the Greek popular songs so beloved of this poet. (In a famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Cavafy rather suggestively casts the anxious questions of the speakers in this “Greek” rhythm, while the answers that come back are in “English” iambics.) One particularly noteworthy metrical innovation can be observed in a number of lyrics composed in what George Seferis, in commenting on these poems, referred to as a “tango” rhythm. Each line of these poems is composed of two half lines of three beats each; the lines are separated by white space. Hence, for instance, the opening of “In Despair” looks like this:
These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watches Roman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.
The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.
“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:
because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.
The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word
, “shame,” which is pronounced ehdhó, while line 3 (literally, “And I sit and lose all hope now here”) ends with the demotic word
, “here,” which has the identical pronunciation. In the first two couplets, moreover, the katharevousa usages are associated with the oppressive “them” (without shame, walls), while the demotic usages are associated with the imprisoned “I” (here, this fate). The only pairing in which the rhymed words are both in the demotic is that of lines 6 and 8.The former (literally, “O while they built the walls, how could I not pay attention?”) ends with the verb proséxo, “pay attention”—but to the Greek ear, the word is indistinguishable from the prepositional phrase pros éxo, “towards the outside”: which is to say, the very direction in which the speaker failed to look. (To the Greek ear, it sounds as if the line is going to be something like, “O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look towards the outside?”) In my translation I have tried to convey this provocative confusion by translating the first word by means of the casual English expression “look out,” which has the further advantage of enabling the loaded repetition, which we find in the Greek, of the word “out.”
Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a. Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme to hammer home a crucial point. The first stanza provides a useful example:
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (thaméni, the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek, tha méni, “will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of thaméni, inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (khalassa, “wasted”/thalassa, “sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.
In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:
Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá
That year he found himself without a job;
ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá
and so he made a living from cards,
apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.
from backgammon, and what he borrowed.
The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of the boy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in the second:
His clothes were in a dreadful state.
There was one suit that he would always wear,
a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.
Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,
your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared
that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.
But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.
As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.
A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.
Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack of any spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.
Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium.
The first instance of enjambment—“came out in droves / to have a look”—underscores the ardent curiosity of the local populace, and hence emphasizes the dazzling nature of the occasion (while hinting at the locals’ cynicism about political displays, which is, in fact, emphasized later on in the poem). The second instance—“who for the first / time were being taken”—places extraordinary emphasis on the noun time by separating it from its adjective, first, which is also thereby emphasized: an emphasis that reminds us of the youth and inexperience of the children who are being so cynically exploited by their parents.
To turn to a work from the poet’s latest phase, the final stanza of the great 1930 poem “The Mirror in the Entrance” suggests how Cavafy continued to hone his handling of this technique. The poem describes an occasion on which a beautiful youth employed by a tailor makes a delivery to a wealthy home; while he waits for a receipt, alone in the vestibule, he approaches an old mirror and fixes his tie, unaware that the mirror itself—here a double for the poet—is, as it were, “watching” him. The poem ends with a description of the mirror’s feelings:
But the ancient mirror, which had seen and seen again,
throughout its lifetime of so many years,
thousands of objects and faces—
but the ancient mirror now became elated,
inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself
perfect beauty, for a few minutes.
Except for the final two lines, each line is a grammatically independent unit ending with some kind of punctuation—a comma or a dash. Coming at the end of this series of discrete phrases, the penultimate line, which can only be logically and grammatically completed by the line that follows, takes on a tremendous drama and excitement: by withholding the object of the verb “received” until the next line, the poet gives the all-important word “beauty” an enormous climactic force.
Given the importance of this technique in Cavafy’s prosody, the meticulous care with which he constructed each line, I’ve tried to structure the English of these translations so that it achieves the same effect.
One final note, concerning a choice on my part that might strike some readers as controversial. In rendering Greek names from the Classical, Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Byzantine past, I have consistently chosen to eschew a phonetic rendering of the way those names sound in Greek, opting instead to adopt the traditional, Latinate forms—which is to say, the forms that will be familiar to English speakers. To my mind, mimicking the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the names of the historical or pseudohistorical characters is, at best, inappropriate and indeed unhelpful in an English translation. When the Greek eye sees the name
, the person brought to mind is the person brought to mind when the eye of an English-speaking person comes across the name “Justinian”; transliterating it as “Ioustinianos” is to obscure, rather than translate, Cavafy’s text.
Worse, a misguided allegiance to the sound of Modern Greek can lead to a serious misrepresentation of a poem’s deeper meanings. To take “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” once more: certain translators have chosen to render the title of this poem as “The Displeasure of Selefkidis”—that last word being an accurate phonetic reproduction of what the Greek word
, which indeed appears in the poem’s title, sounds like. But this choice conveys the entirely false impression that “Selefkidis” is someone’s name, whereas, as we know, the word refers here to a member of the Seleucid dynasty—someone whose name was, in fact, Demetrius. The word “Seleucid” in this poem is therefore a crucial part of its meaning, one that rests on our ability to grasp the great, if rather pathetic, pride that Demetrius took in the fact that he was a Hellenistic monarch—a Seleucid. A fluent speaker and tireless reader of English, Cavafy himself was familiar with the Latinate forms of these names from his extensive reading in English works of history and philology—Gibbon, J. B. Bury, many others—and used these forms himself when writing in English. Not least for that reason, I have done the same.
4
THE PRESENT VOLUME collects all of the known poetic work of Cavafy. Because of the complexities of their publication history, the organization of the poems in the pages that follow merits brief comment.
Although he published a small number of verses, most of them when he was young, in literary journals and annuals, Cavafy had for most of his career a highly idiosyncratic method of presenting his poems, and never published a definitive collection of them in book form. He preferred, instead, to have poems printed at his own expense as broadsheets or in pamphlets, which he would distribute to a select group of friends and admirers. Among other things, this method allowed the poet to treat every poem as a work in progress; friends recalled that he often went on emending poems after they had been printed. In an essay called Independence, the poet articulated what was clearly a kind of anxiety about the finality associated with publication:
When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought … he obtains a great freedom in his creative work. The writer who has in view the certainty, or at least the probability of selling all his edition, and perhaps subsequent editions, is sometimes influenced by their future sale … almost without meaning to, almost without realizing—there will be moments when, knowing how the public thinks and what it likes and what it will buy, he will make some little sacrifices—he will phrase this bit differently, and leave out that. And there is nothing more destructive for Art (I tremble at the mere thought of it) than that this bit should be differently phrased or that bit omitted.
Still, after a time he would periodically order modest printings of booklets that contained small selections of the poems, arranged thematically. The first of these, Poems 1904, contained just fourteen poems; a second, Poems 1910, added seven more, and a later manuscript of that booklet (known, because the poet copied it out by hand as a gift to his friend and heir, as the “Sengopoulos Notebook”) added one more early poem—“Walls”—which had been written in 1897 and much anthologized, bringing the total to twenty-two. These and subsequent booklets (and sometimes the poems in them) were constantly being revised, added to, and subtracted from: hence Poems 1910 became Poems (1909–1911), and then Poems (1908–1914), and so on, according to which works the poet had decided to add or remove.
By the time Cavafy died, there were three such collections in circulation. Two were bound, and arranged thematically: Poems 1905–1915, containing forty poems (the dates refer to the year of first publication), and Poems 1916–1918, containing twenty-eight poems. The third, Poems 1919–1932, a collection of sixty-nine poems arranged chronologically by date of first publication, was merely a pinned-together sheaf of individual sheets. These 137 poems, together with one poem that Cavafy had corrected for the printer in the weeks before his death, “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” and sixteen early poems from the Sengopoulos Notebook, all first published between 1897 and 1904, that had not already been collected in Poems1905–1915, are the 154 poems that appeared in the first commercial collection of his work, lavishly published (in a chic Art Deco style) in Alexandria two years after Cavafy’s death, edited by Rika Sengopoulou, the first wife of his heir.
Although this group of poems is now often referred to as “the Canon”—a word, one suspects, that would have caused Cavafy to raise an eyebrow, given his sardonic appreciation for the difference between the judgments we pass and those that history passes—I refer to them here as the Published Poems, since these are the works that this most fastidious of poets published, or approved for publication, during his own lifetime, precisely as he wanted them to be read. They appear here in the following order: (1) Poems 1905–1915; (2) Poems 1916–1918; (3) Poems 1919–1933 (including “On the Outskirts of Antioch”); a fourth section, which I have entitled “Poems Published 1897–1908,” offers the contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook, minus of course the six poems that already appear in Poems 1905–1915. (It is worth remembering that Cavafy was eager to take Poems 1910, the basis for the Sengopoulos Notebook, out of circulation in the years after its publication.) It is true that this presentation of the latter group wrests them from the poet’s careful thematic arrangement, in which each poem is meant to comment on and, as it were, converse with its neighbor; but it would be awkward, to say nothing of pedantic, to repeat six poems in two successive sections. For the sake of readers who want to experience the Sengopoulos Notebook as Cavafy arranged it, I have included, before this final section of the Published Poems, a list of the poems giving the order in which they appeared in the Notebook.
Because they were works about which the poet had mixed feelings, I have decided to place the remaining poems, some of which are very early, after those that the poet approved for publication. These appear in roughly chronological order. First come the twenty-seven Repudiated Poems, originally published between 1886 and 1898 and subsequently renounced by the poet. These are followed by the Unpublished Poems. The latter is a group of seventy-seven texts (including three written in English) that Cavafy completed but never approved for publication, and which he kept among his papers, many of them bearing the notation “Not for publication, but may remain here.” The first of these was written when the poet was around fourteen; the last was written in 1923, when he was sixty. Thirteen found their way into print after World War II, and a complete scholarly edition of the entire group, edited by George Savidis, was published in Athens, in 1968. A subsequent edition, published by Mr. Savidis in 1993, gives to them a new name, “Hidden Poems,” but I have retained the old designation, “Unpublished,” both in my text and in my notes, since I believe that “unpublished” adequately suggests the poet’s attitude toward those works without introducing speculative psychological overtones. In the present volume I have included translations of all seventy-four of the Unpublished Poems that were written in Greek, as well as the texts of the three poems Cavafy wrote in English, since they are original works; I have omitted from the present translation the poet’s five translations into Greek of works in other languages, of which three are from English. Readers will also find translations of the three remarkable Prose Poems among the Unpublished Poems.
The fourth and final section of this volume contains the Unfinished Poems, drafts that Cavafy had begun between 1918 and 1932 (see the discussion below).
A final word, about the appearance of the poems on the page. As we know, the dates of composition and subsequent publication of Cavafy’s poems is often suggestive: it surely meant something that he spent fifteen years returning to and polishing “The City” before he chose to publish it. According to Sarayannis,
Cavafy himself told me that he never managed to write a poem from beginning to end. He worked on them all for years, or often let them lie for whole years and later took them up again. His dates therefore only represent the year when he judged that one of his poems more or less satisfied him.
Given the importance of those dates, I have chosen to note them at the bottom of the page(s) on which the poems appear in the main portion of this text, rather than cluttering the notes at the back with one-line items (“Written in 1917, published in 1918”). To do so, I have adopted the following system of notation. When known, the year of original composition (and of subsequent rewriting, if there was one and if we know when it occurred) appears in italics; the year (or years) of publication appear in roman type. Hence, for example, in the case of the Published Poem “Song of Ionia,” of which an early version was written at some point before 1891 and then published in 1896, only to be subsequently revised in 1905 and published in its final form in 1911, the notation reads as follows: [1891; 1896; 1905; 1911].
In the case of the Unpublished Poems—the date of whose first publication, long after the poet’s death, does not, by contrast, shed any light on his feelings or intentions—I have merely added the year of composition, in parentheses, after the title of each poem. In the case of the Unfinished Poems, the year that appears in parentheses refers to what George Savidis, who discovered the drafts, called “the date of first conception,” which Cavafy noted on the dossier for each draft. In both cases, the addition of the date to the title has, I think, the virtue of making those poems visually distinct from the ones that Cavafy himself chose to publish—however he may have subsequently felt about them. Readers today are, indeed, likely to find more to admire, or at the very least to learn from, in the poems that Cavafy suppressed than the poet himself would have suspected.
5
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1932, at the end of a four-month sojourn in Athens that also marked the beginning of the end of his life, Cavafy revealed with some agitation that he had important unfinished business to attend to. “I still have twenty-five poems to write,” he declared to some friends, in the distorted whisper to which his famously mellifluous and enchanting voice had been reduced following the tracheotomy that was meant to save him from throat cancer, and which was the reason he’d come to Athens from Alexandria. “Twenty-five poems!”
The conversation, recalled by one of the friends to whom he’d spoken that day and reported after Cavafy’s death in April of the following year, was merely the first of what turned out to be several tantalizing references to a body of unfinished work that the poet was desperately trying to complete as death closed in. Ten years later, in 1943, someone who’d been engaged in compiling Cavafy’s bibliography during the very year in which the poet had traveled to Athens seeking medical help revealed that Cavafy had made it plain to him that the bibliography was far from complete. In 1963, on the thirtieth anniversary of Cavafy’s death, someone else wrote in to a newspaper claiming that, during those last months, the dying poet had written him to say that he still had fifteen poems to finish.
The mysterious texts to which these various hints alluded were finally identified, also in 1963, by the scholar George Savidis, Cavafy’s great editor, after an inspection of the Cavafy Archive, which Savidis himself eventually came to possess after acquiring it from Cavafy’s friend and heir, Alexander Sengopoulos. A year later, in an article about material in the Archive that had yet to be published (some of which—those poems that Cavafy had completed but did not approve for publication—he would publish in 1968 as “The Unpublished Poems”), Savidis revealed, with the deep emotion of an archaeologist making a great discovery, the existence of a cache of incomplete drafts, composed between 1918 and 1932, that the poet had left, meticulously labeled and organized, among his papers:
More interesting still are the sketches of 25 poems that Cavafy was unable to finish, and on which he was working, with great difficulty, during the last months of his life. Carefully wrapped by him in makeshift envelopes, each with its provisional title and the date, I imagine, of its first conception, they proceed from 1918 to 1932, and along with the very full drafts of some of the published work (like “Caesarion”) and some of the unpublished but completed poems, they give us a unique, unhoped-for, and tremendously moving look at the stages of Cavafian creation.
Closer inspection eventually revealed that there were, in fact, thirty drafts in all, along with a handful of fragmentary texts. In time, Savidis entrusted the task of editing these drafts, some of them awaiting the most minor of finishing touches, others apparently in the final stages of preparation but complicated by various textual problems, to the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini. A professor of Modern Greek at the University of Palermo and member of the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici (the Sicilian Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, founded by her father, the great Byzantinist and Neohellenist Bruno Lavagnini), she is both an authority on the literary aspects of Cavafy’s work and a meticulous philologist. As a specialist in textual criticism, Professor Lavagnini was particularly well equipped to tackle the technical problems associated with editing a mass of manuscript drafts into coherent texts—although, as she herself would be the first to emphasize, these texts must always remain, at best, hypothetical; something the reader must bear in mind.
The heroic task of sifting through these sometimes illegible sketches, of teasing out, from crossed-out lines and scribbled-in insertions, each discrete stage (or, as the poet called it, morfí, “form”) in the evolution of a given poem, of arriving at the likely last form taken by each work, and of meticulously annotating textual issues, as well as providing a thoroughgoing literary and historical commentary, took decades, but there can be no doubt that the result was worth the wait. The fruits of Professor Lavagnini’s labor, published as a scholarly Greek edition in 1994, gives this important body of poetic work to the world in a lucidly presented form; it bears the title chosen by Savidis, by which it will hereafter be known: Ateli piimata, the “Unfinished Poems.” (The adjective ateli in Greek suggests, too, a state of “imperfection.”) Thanks to the generous cooperation of the Cavafy Archive, I have the privilege of making this vitally important addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets available to English speakers for the first time.
The Unfinished Poems are unusual in at least one crucial respect. More often than not, when previously unknown manuscripts by major authors unexpectedly come to light, the material in question is juvenilia: immature work from the earliest phase of the artist’s career, which he or she has discarded or repressed and which, either through the dogged detective work of dedicated scholars or through happy accidents, suddenly sees the light of day once more. The discovery, in 1994, of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, which languished in the Harvard University Library until it was discovered by a pair of professors researching Alcott’s papers, and the 2004 discovery of the complete draft of an early novel of Truman Capote among some papers and photographs that had passed into the hands of a former house sitter, are but two recent examples. And yet as exciting and dramatic as these revelations can be, such work tends, inevitably, to be interesting less for any inherent artistic value it possesses than for the light it can shed on the writer’s creative development.
The thirty Unfinished Poems of Cavafy, by contrast, represent the last and greatest phase of the poet’s career: the decade and a half from 1918, when Cavafy was fifty-five—and when, too, he published the first of his “sensual” (or “aesthetic”) poems that were explicitly homosexual in nature—until the year before his death at the age of seventy. For this reason they are of the deepest significance not merely inasmuch as they illuminate the existing works—the Published, Unpublished, and Repudiated Poems—but as serious works of art in themselves, the deeply wrought products of a great poetic consciousness at its peak.
The publication of a writer’s unfinished work is, inevitably, an enterprise that raises complicated questions. This is particularly true in the case of a writer like Cavafy, who ruthlessly culled his own work every year, suppressing anything that did not meet his exacting standards—a process that suggests a stringent adherence to the very highest criteria of polish and perfection. But there is persuasive evidence that Cavafy considered the thirty drafts presented here as work he eventually meant to be recognized and published. The Cavafy Archive contains two lists that the poet made of work in progress: one dates to 1930, and the other was kept and constantly revised between 1923 and 1932. The former contains the titles of twenty-nine poems, of which twenty-five are all of the Unfinished drafts he’d composed by that time, and the latter records the titles of fifty poems, a figure that includes all thirty of the Unfinished drafts. All of the other poems listed in these indices are works Cavafy eventually sent to the printer. Hence the lists strongly indicate that the poet—who, as we know from the manuscripts of his Unpublished Poems, was perfectly willing to mark a finished poem with a note declaring that it “need not be published. But it may continue remaining here. It does not deserve to be suppressed”—made no distinction between those poems that he published and the ones he did not, in the end, have time to complete and publish. It was only time, and finally death, that consigned them, for a while, to obscurity.
“Light on one poem, partial light on another.” Cavafy’s 1927 remark is perhaps nowhere more apt than in the case of the Unfinished Poems. Readers encountering these works will immediately see how fully they partake of Cavafy’s special vision as I have described it above, and part of the excitement of reading them for the first time comes, indeed, from the way they seem to fit into the existing corpus, taking their place beside poems that are, by now, well known; there is a deep pleasure in having, unexpectedly, more of what one already loves. But a great deal of the excitement generated by the Unfinished Poems derives, even more, from the new “light,” as the poet put it, that they now shed on existing work—on our knowledge of the poet, his techniques, methods, and large ambitions.
Of these thirty texts, nine treat contemporary subjects that will be familiar to readers already at home in the poet’s world. There are evocative treatments of the memory of a deliciously illicit encounter on a wharf (“On the Jetty”), and an elderly poet’s reverie about long-past days in which he was a member of a gang of rough young men living at the fringes of society—and on the wrong side of the law (“Crime”). One has as its subject a photograph that elicits thoughts of a bygone love (“The Photograph”); it is a crucial addition to a small but vivid group of poems already known (“That’s How,” “From the Drawer,” “The Bandaged Shoulder”) that indicate how intrigued the poet was by photography and how suggestively it could figure in his work. A short but vivid lyric, entitled simply “Birth of a Poem,” casts a gentle, lunar light on our understanding of the way in which the poet imagined his own creative process to have worked (“imagination, taking / something from life, some very scanty thing / fashions a vision. …”).
A striking longer work, “Remorse,” takes its place beside the most emphatic of Cavafy’s philosophical poems—“Hidden Things,” “Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto”—while expanding their moral vision, adding a new note of gentle forgiveness for the unwitting cruelties to which fear and repression condemn us. Surely two of the most remarkable of these contemporary poems are “The Item in the Paper,” where the melodramatic donnée—a young man is reading an item in a paper about the murder of a youth with whom he’d had a liaison—becomes the vehicle for a tender and devastating exploration of a favorite theme, the soul-destroying effects of taboos against illicit love, and the hypocrisy of those who impose them; and “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the lyric (discussed above, p. XXXVII), about the nocturnal apparition of Cavafy’s younger self, a work in which, as in some of Cavafy’s greatest poems with this motif—“Since Nine—,” “Caesarion”—past and present, the quotidian and the intensely erotic, become disorientingly, thrillingly blurred.
The remaining twenty-one lyrics are historical in nature, although here, as with the best of Cavafy’s work, this label is often a matter of convenience. They have familiar Cavafian settings. There are Hellenistic powers teetering—often unbeknownst to the poems’ smug narrators—on the brink of implosion (“Antiochus the Cyzicene,” “Tigranocerta,” “Agelaus,” “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians”); the corrupted Egypt of the incestuous Ptolemies (“The Dynasty,” “Ptolemy the Benefactor [or Malefactor]”); the Greek-speaking margins of the Roman Empire (the setting of “Among the Groves of the Promenades,” the fourth and last of Cavafy’s Apollonius of Tyana poems, this one about the sage’s sudden, telepathic apprehension, in Ephesus, of Domitian’s murder back in Rome). The early Christian era is vividly represented (“Athanasius,” about the Christian bishop who was ill treated by Julian the Apostate, a recurring Cavafian character), as are the peripheries of the Greek-speaking world during the twilight of Late Antiquity (“Of the Sixth or Seventh Century”). And of course there is the vast arc of Byzantium, from Justinian (the subject of the spooky short lyric “From the Unpublished History”) to the empire’s final days.
To the latter epoch, poignant to any Greek, belongs what is surely one of the most striking of any of Cavafy’s poems, finished or unfinished: “After the Swim.” Here the poet, as often in his greatest mature creations, dissolves the distinctions between “historical” and “erotic” poetry, seducing the reader into thinking that the setting is, in fact, that of the late masterpiece “Days of 1908”—a hot Mediterranean day, a seaside swim, naked ephebic bodies—only to reveal, somewhat disorientingly, that we are in the waning days of Byzantium, haunted by the memory of the great scholar Gemistus Plethon, whose own identity (loyally Christian? covertly pagan?) was itself rather vexed.
Of these historical poems, two groups in particular are worthy of special attention because of their immense value to our understanding of the poet’s imaginative world. The first is a pair of poems, “The Patriarch” and “On Epiphany,” both written in the first half of 1925, whose subject is the fourteenth-century Byzantine ruler John VI Cantacuzenus, “the reluctant emperor”—the regent who felt compelled to take the throne after the foolish widow and conniving ministers of the late emperor, his bosom friend, staged a coup d’état and dragged the empire into a devastating civil war. We know from two Published Poems that date to almost exactly the same period, “John Cantacuzenus Triumphs” and “Of Colored Glass,” that this figure evoked a particularly strong emotion in Cavafy, who deeply admired Cantacuzenus’s steadfast loyalty, devotion to principle, and—once he had been forced to abdicate, after his enemies’ ultimate triumph—great dignity in defeat, along with an impressive piety. The existence of the two Unfinished Poems now makes it clear that during the mid-1920s the poet was hard at work on what amounts to an entire cycle of poems on this poignant and noble figure, a small but significant lyric corpus whose celebration of “the worthiest man whom our race then possessed, / wise, forbearing, patriotic, brave, adroit” sheds greater light on our understanding of the qualities that the mature Cavafy associated with the unique Greek identity for which Byzantium was the conduit. This Cantacuzenus cycle may now take its place alongside the previously known cycles of poems about certain historical figures who similarly evoked a particularly strong response in the poet, not least because of the way their lives shed light on something about what it was to be Greek, or a poet, or both: Marc Antony, Apollonius of Tyana, the apostate emperor Julian.
The other group of historical poems worthy of special note consists, in fact, of no less than four new texts about Julian, now revealed as the figure from the ancient past to whom the poet returned with greatest frequency and intensity: a total of eleven poems in all. (An embryonic twelfth is one of the four fragments in the Cavafy Archive; see here (#litres_trial_promo) in this volume.) Cavafy’s poetic engagement with this complex and enigmatic emperor, who wanted to return the empire to pagan worship not long after it had been converted by his uncle Constantine to Christianity, began early in his creative life, with the Unpublished Poem “Julian at the Mysteries” (1896), and continued virtually to his last days: he had just finished correcting the proofs to “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” about Julian’s contemptuous treatment of the Antiochene Christians, when he died. The four Unfinished drafts give expression to a wide range of favorite themes and motifs, all clustered around the figure of the emperor, who, in his scheme to impose a dour, humorless, and rigid paganism on the newly Christianized empire, embodied an intolerance, a rigidity of thought, and, worst of all, a profound hypocrisy that to Cavafy represented everything the true Hellenic spirit was not.
And so we have “The Rescue of Julian,” with its terse closing reminder, bare of any editorial comment whatever, that the emperor owed his life to the Christian priests he later tormented—a poem that savors of the tart ironies that give works like “Nero’s Deadline” their jaundiced effectiveness. “Athanasius,” which dramatizes the moment in which two Christian monks in Egypt have a vision of the death of Julian half a world away, in Persia, returns us to the milieu of telepathic perception that had so fascinated the young poet thirty years before. “The Bishop Pegasius,” about the still secretly pagan young Julian’s encounter with a secretly pagan bishop at an ancient Trojan shrine to Athena, is memorably irradiated by the aura of illicit homosexual attraction that haunts a masterpiece like the Published Poem “He Asked About the Quality.” And the perplexed narrator of “Hunc Deorum Templis” must grope in helpless ignorance like the unlucky masses in the early poem “Correspondences According to Baudelaire,” which owes so much to the Parnassians’ vision of the poet as someone granted a special vision. Contemplating the scene in which, during Julian’s triumphant entry into Vienne, an old woman cries out that “here is the man who will restore the [pagan] temples” (the exclamation to which the title refers), this narrator is forced to wonder, rather querulously, whether she is speaking in elation or despair—whether, that is to say, she is a secret pagan sympathizer or a loyal Christian. More secret identities.
The foregoing overview of these rich and quite beautiful works is, of necessity, brief. But in sketching the ways in which the present poems partake so richly of the themes and qualities of the poems already well known to us, I hope to have made clear what will, on a close reading of the poems themselves, be evident: that the Ateli not only complement our knowledge of the great poet’s output, but complete it. The addition of these poems to the canon of Cavafy’s published poetry allows us to say, three-quarters of a century after he died on his seventieth birthday—a perfect concentricity, a polished completion—that his work has, at last, been truly finished.
Although much of Professor Lavagnini’s edition is, necessarily, devoted to discussions of intricate issues related to textual criticism—material that I have not reproduced in this translation—I suspect that even the casual reader is likely to want to know something about the physical state in which these Unfinished Poems were found. As George Savidis observed in the comment that I cited above, it is clear that the poet carefully organized his work in progress. Each of the poems had its own “dossier.” Out of some thick paper—quite often the covers of his own printed collections, which he would appropriate for their new role—Cavafy would fashion a kind of rudimentary envelope (only once did he use an actual envelope), in which he would keep the various bits of paper pertinent to a given poem in progress: drafts, notes, passages from source texts that he had copied out, and so forth. On the outside of the envelope he would write the title (sometimes marked as “provisional”) and a date, consisting of the month and year: the moment, as Savidis argues, when Cavafy conceived the poem.
The meticulousness with which the poet conserved his drafts and materials stands, as Professor Lavagnini has noted, in stark and rather amusing contrast to the often quite random nature of his writing materials. These consisted all too obviously of whatever he had to hand at the moment of inspiration—letters that had been addressed to him, invitations to conferences, and, in one memorable case, a scrap of a cigarette box. One thing that this haphazard physical evidence does suggest bears importantly on our understanding of the poet’s creative process: clearly, when the moment of inspiration struck, he seized on whatever was immediately available and started writing. Each of my Notes begins with a brief summary, based on the Lavagnini commentary, of the contents of the relevant dossier; I have provided fuller discussion of those contents and the state of the manuscript when I thought such material would be of interest to the general reader.
Many readers are also likely to be curious about the physical appearance of the pages themselves, which Professor Lavagnini has rendered accessible through her labors. As is already well known due to the reproduction of some of his manuscripts, Cavafy’s handwriting was, generally speaking, forceful and clear (a godsend to the textual critic); he generally wrote in pencil. Divisions between strophes are often clearly marked, as are deletions, which the poet indicated by means of a line through the rejected verses—or, in cases of major deletions, a large wavy line over the entirety of the material to be deleted. Substitutions and additions are written in the space above the original text, and are, in general, made only after the material to be deleted was clearly marked. For this reason, there are relatively few instances in which variant readings appear without any clear indication of what the poet’s preference was. (It should, however, be said that in a number of cases, the manuscript pages are somewhat illegible, or show signs of vacillation, with confusingly repeated crossings-out and reinsertions; it is in these cases that Professor Lavagnini’s skills as a textual critic have done us the greatest service.)
When there are cases of variant readings in which Professor Lavagnini has been unable to establish priority, I have reproduced these variants (when they are significant, and not merely cases in which the drafts give us one or more synonyms for a given word, as is often the case) in the Notes, with commentary where appropriate. In no case have I chosen to present as part of the translation a variant that has been rejected by Professor Lavagnini. Only in the case of “Epitaph of a Samian” have I deviated from her printed text, for reasons I explain in the note to that poem.
In the interests of making these poems accessible to the general reader, I am not reproducing what textual scholars refer to as the “diplomatic text”—a text that indicates, by means of a series of conventional notations, all of the additions, deletions, insertions, and emendations that were made at each stage of composition. The texts of the poems themselves, therefore, simply reproduce what Professor Lavagnini, with admirable scrupulousness, refers to as “the last” (rather than “the final”) of the “forms” that can be construed from Cavafy’s manuscript pages. In this I feel licensed by, and am indeed following the example of, none other than Professor Lavagnini herself. In a Note to her late father’s translation of Cavafy into Italian (which includes translations of the Unfinished Poems based on these “last” forms), she writes that
The well-known caution that Cavafy showed in deciding when and how to entrust his poems to the printer can make the decision to publish these [Unfinished] texts today seem arbitrary—texts that the author considered still incomplete, and which, indeed, must be read in the contexts of the drafts and variants that precede them in order to be fully understood: something that is possible only for those who can read them in the original. But we nonetheless believe that, even granting those reservations, no reader of Cavafy would give up the chance to get to know these new, precious fragments which have been patiently gleaned from the poet’s workshop.
The only poem in this translation that bears visible witness to the textual uncertainties which I have mentioned above is, necessarily, one called “Zenobia,” in which the editor herself was unable to make out the poet’s writing at one point. There I have reproduced, in the appropriate spot in the main text of the translation, the standard notation for illegible characters: a small square cross, each one representing approximately two characters in the original manuscript. It seemed to me that the reader deserves to know where it is simply impossible to make out the poet’s intention—an uncertainty, we must always remember, that haunts all of these beautiful but unfinished works.
But then, as Cavafy himself knew better than most, the meanings, intentions, and ambitions of those who inhabited the past are nearly always smoothed away by the passage of the millennia, the centuries, the years. Time, in the end, is the final arbiter—of literary reputations, as well as other things. In the second of the essays he wrote about Cavafy, in the hopes of alerting English speakers to a poet “whose attitude to the past did not commend him to some of his contemporaries,” E. M. Forster, writing in 1951, recalled a conversation he had with the poet in 1918:
Half humorously, half seriously, he once compared the Greeks and the English. The two peoples are almost exactly alike, he argued; quick-witted, resourceful, adventurous. “But there is one unfortunate difference between us, one little difference. We Greeks have lost our capital—and the results are what you see. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital.”
“His words made one think,” Forster went on, after ruefully observing that, while British insolvency had seemed impossible in 1918, the passage of three decades and a world war had made “all things possible.” Now, when twice as many decades have passed since Forster wrote those words, there is once more occasion to “think” about the themes—the unexpected faltering of overconfident empires; the uneasy margins where West and East meet, sometimes productively but often not; how easy it is, for polities as well as for people, to “lose one’s capital”—which once again turn out to be not “historical” but, if anything, very contemporary indeed; themes that the “very wise, very civilized man” kept returning to, knowing full well, as historians do, that the backward glance can, in the end, be a glimpse into the future.
Costantino Kavafis: Poesie, tr. Bruno Lavagnini (Palermo: Edizioni Novecento, 1996), p. 159; translation mine.
A NOTE ON
PRONUNCIATION OF PROPER NAMES
The rhythm and assonance of Cavafy’s poetry depends in many cases on the correct pronunciation of proper names; fortunately, a more or less standard pronunciation of Greek and Byzantine names as traditionally spelled in English, which I have chosen to follow, often allows for scansion and sound patterns not dramatically different from the ones produced by the Modern Greek pronunciation of those names.
The consonant combination ch, representing the Greek letter χ, is generally pronounced as a hard c or k whether at the beginning of a word or in the middle; hence the name Charmides is KAHR-mih-deez, not Tchar-mih-deez.
An initial i is consonantal, pronounced as a y: hence the name Iases is pronounced Yah-SEEZ. Otherwise, the vowel i is pronounced ee, and never rhymes with the word eye.
The final -es in masculine nouns and names is invariably voiced, and pronounced eez, like the -es at the end of the name Socrates. Hence the name Mebes is pronounced Meebeez, never Meebs.
In the case of Classical Greek names, the final e in feminine nouns and names is always sounded as ay: hence the name Stratonice is Strah-toe-NEE-kay. In the case of Byzantine names, the final e is pronounced as ee: hence the second part of the empress Anna Dalassene’s name is Dah-lah-see-NEE, never Dah-lah-SEEN.
I
Poems 1905–1915
The City
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been illfated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.
[1894; 1910]
The Satrapy
What a pity, given that you’re made
for deeds that are glorious and great,
that this unjust fate of yours always
leads you on, and denies you your success;
that base habits get in your way,
and pettinesses, and indifference.
How terrible, too, the day when you give in
(the day when you let yourself go and give in),
and leave to undertake the trip to Susa,
and go to the monarch Artaxerxes,
who graciously establishes you at court,
and offers you satrapies, and the like.
And you, you accept them in despair,
these things that you don’t want.
But your soul seeks, weeps for other things:
the praise of the People and the Sophists,
the hard-won, priceless “Bravos”;
the Agora, the Theatre, and the victors’ Crowns.
How will Artaxerxes give you them,
how will you find them in the satrapy;
and what kind of life, without them, will you live.
[1905; 1910]
But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent
The gods perceive what lies in the future, and mortals, what occurs in the present, but wise men apprehend what is imminent.
—PHILOSTRATUS, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VIII, 7
Mortal men perceive things as they happen.
What lies in the future the gods perceive,
full and sole possessors of all enlightenment.
Of all the future holds, wise men apprehend
what is imminent. Their hearing,
sometimes, in moments of complete
absorption in their studies, is disturbed. The secret call
of events that are about to happen reaches them.
And they listen to it reverently. While in the street
outside, the people hear nothing at all.
[1896; 1899; <1915]
Ides of March
Of glory be you fearful, O my Soul.
And if you are unable to defeat
your ambitions, then hesitantly, guardedly
pursue them. And the further you proceed,
the more searching, the more attentive must you be.
And when at last you reach your apogee—a Caesar;
and cut the figure of one who’s much renowned,
then take heed more than ever as you go out on the street,
a man of power, conspicuous with your retinue,
when someone approaches you out of the crowd,
a certain Artemidorus, bringing a letter,
and hurriedly says “Read this right away,
it’s something important that concerns you,”
don’t fail to stop; don’t fail to put off
all talk and business; don’t fail to
brush off all and sundry who salute and fawn
(you can see them later); let even
the Senate wait, and find out at once
the weighty contents of Artemidorus’s letter.
[1906; 1910]
Finished
Deep in fear and in suspicion,
with flustered minds and terrified eyes,
we wear ourselves out figuring how
we might avoid the certain
danger that threatens us so terribly.
And yet we’re mistaken, that’s not it ahead:
the news was wrong
(or we didn’t hear it; or didn’t get it right).
But a disaster that we never imagined
suddenly, shatteringly breaks upon us,
and unprepared—no time left now—we are swept away.
[1910; 1911]
The God Abandons Antony
When suddenly, at midnight, there comes the sound
of an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music playing, with voices raised—
your good fortune, which now gives way; all your efforts’
ill-starred outcome; the plans you made for life,
which turned out wrong: don’t mourn them uselessly.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
Above all do not fool yourself, don’t say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don’t stoop to futile hopes like these.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who’s been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.
[1910; 1911]
Theodotus
If you are among the truly elect,
watch how you achieve your predominance.
However much you’re glorified, however much
your accomplishments in Italy and Thessaly
are blazoned far and wide by governments,
however many honorary decrees
are bestowed on you in Rome by your admirers,
neither your elation nor your triumph will endure,
nor will you feel superior—superior how?—
when, in Alexandria, Theodotus brings you,
upon a charger that’s been stained with blood,
poor wretched Pompey’s head.
And do not take it for granted that in your life,
restricted, regimented, and mundane,
such spectacular and terrifying things don’t exist.
Maybe at this very moment, into some neighbor’s
nicely tidied house there comes—
invisible, immaterial—Theodotus,
bringing one such terrifying head.
[<1911; 1915]
Monotony
On one monotone day one more
monotone, indistinct day follows. The same
things will happen, then again recur—
identical moments find us, then go their way.
One month passes bringing one month more.
What comes next is easy enough to know:
the boredom from the day before.
And tomorrow’s got to where it seems like no tomorrow.
[1898; 1908]
Ithaca
As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you won’t find such things on your way
so long as your thoughts remain lofty, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you won’t encounter them
unless you stow them away inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.
Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire the finest wares:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
Many Egyptian cities may you visit
that you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.
Always in your mind keep Ithaca.
To arrive there is your destiny.
But do not hurry your trip in any way.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;
without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road.
But now she has nothing left to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you.
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.
[1910; 1911]
As Much As You Can
And even if you cannot make your life the way you want it,
this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don’t cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.
Don’t cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.
[1905; 1913]
Trojans
Our efforts, those of the ill-fortuned;
our efforts are the efforts of the Trojans.
We will make a bit of progress; we will start
to pick ourselves up a bit; and we’ll begin
to be intrepid, and to have some hope.
But something always comes up, and stops us cold.
In the trench in front of us Achilles
emerges, and affrights us with his shouting.—
Our efforts are the efforts of the Trojans.
We imagine that with resolve and daring
we will reverse the animosity of fortune,
and so we take our stand outside, to fight.
But whenever the crucial moment comes,
our boldness and our daring disappear;
our spirit is shattered, comes unstrung;
and we scramble all around the walls
seeking in our flight to save ourselves.
And yet our fall is certain. Up above,
on the walls, already the lament has begun.
They mourn the memory, the sensibility, of our days.
Bitterly Priam and Hecuba mourn for us.
[1900; 1905]
King Demetrius
Not like a king, but like an actor, he exchanged his showy robe of state for a dark cloak, and in secret stole away.
—PLUTARCH, Life of Demetrius
When the Macedonians deserted him,
and made it clear that it was Pyrrhus they preferred
King Demetrius (who had a noble
soul) did not—so they said—
behave at all like a king. He went
and cast off his golden clothes,
and flung off his shoes
of richest purple. In simple clothes
he dressed himself quickly and left:
doing just as an actor does
who, when the performance is over,
changes his attire and departs.
[1900; 1906]
The Glory of the Ptolemies
I’m the Lagid, a king. The possessor absolute
(with my power and my riches) of pleasure.
There’s no Macedonian, no Eastern foreigner
who’s my equal, who even comes close. What
a joke, that Seleucid with his vulgar luxe.
But if there’s something more you seek, then simply look:
the City is our teacher, the acme of what is Greek,
of every discipline, of every art the peak.
[1896; 1911; 1911]
The Retinue of Dionysus
Damon the artisan (none as fine
as he in the Peloponnese) is
fashioning the Retinue of Dionysus
in Parian marble. The god in his divine
glory leads, with vigor in his stride.
Intemperance behind. Beside
Intemperance, Intoxication pours the Satyrs wine
from an amphora that they’ve garlanded with vines.
Near them delicate Sweetwine, his eyes
half-closed, mesmerizes.
And further down there come the singers,
Song and Melody, and Festival
who never allows the hallowed processional
torch that he holds to go out. Then, most modest, Ritual.—
That’s what Damon is making. Along with all
of that, from time to time he gets to pondering
the fee he’ll be receiving from the king
of Syracuse, three talents, quite a lot.
When that’s added to the money that he’s got,
he’ll be well-to-do, will lead a life of leisure,
can get involved in politics—what pleasure!—
he too in the Council, he too in the Agora.
[1903; 1907]
The Battle of Magnesia
He’s lost his former dash, his pluck.
His wearied body, very nearly sick,
will henceforth be his chief concern. The days
that he has left, he’ll spend without a care. Or so says
Philip, at least. Tonight he’ll play at dice.
He has an urge to enjoy himself. Do place
lots of roses on the table. And what if
Antiochus at Magnesia came to grief?
They say his glorious army lies mostly ruined.
Perhaps they’ve overstated: it can’t all be true.
Let’s hope not. For though they were the enemy, they were kin to us.
Still, one “let’s hope not” is enough. Perhaps too much.
Philip, of course, won’t postpone the celebration.
However much his life has become one great exhaustion
a boon remains: he hasn’t lost a single memory.
He remembers how they mourned in Syria, the agony
they felt, when Macedonia their motherland was smashed to bits.—
Let the feast begin. Slaves: the music, the lights!
[1913; 1916]
The Seleucid’s Displeasure
The Seleucid Demetrius was displeased
to learn that a Ptolemy had arrived
in Italy in such a sorry state.
With only three or four slaves;
dressed like a pauper, and on foot. This is why
their name would soon be bandied as a joke,
an object of fun in Rome. That they have, at bottom,
become the servants of the Romans, in a way,
the Seleucid knows; and that those people give
and take away their thrones
arbitrarily, however they like, he knows.
But nonetheless at least in their appearance
they should maintain a certain magnificence;
shouldn’t forget that they are still kings,
that they are still (alas!) called kings.
This is why Demetrius the Seleucid was annoyed,
and straightaway he offered Ptolemy
robes all of purple, a gleaming diadem,
exceedingly costly jewels, and numerous
servants and a retinue, his most expensive mounts,
that he should appear in Rome as was befitting,
like an Alexandrian Greek monarch.
But the Lagid, who had come a mendicant,
knew his business and refused it all;
he didn’t need these luxuries at all.
Dressed in worn old clothes, he humbly entered Rome,
and found lodgings with a minor craftsman.
And then he presented himself to the Senate
as an ill-fortuned and impoverished man,
that with greater success he might beg.
[1910; 1916]
Orophernes
He, who on the four-drachma piece
seems to have a smile on his face,
on his beautiful, refined face,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
A child, they chased him out of Cappadocia,
from the great ancestral palace,
and sent him away to grow up
in Ionia, to be forgotten among foreigners.
Ah, the exquisite nights of Ionia
when fearlessly, and completely as a Greek,
he came to know pleasure utterly.
In his heart, an Asiatic still:
but in his manners and in his speech a Greek,
bedecked with turquoise, yet Greek-attired,
his body scented with perfume of jasmine;
and of Ionia’s beautiful young men
the most beautiful was he, the most ideal.
Later on, when the Syrians came
to Cappadocia, and had made him king,
he threw himself completely into his reign,
that he might enjoy some novel pleasure each new day,
that he might horde the gold and silver, avaricious,
that over all of this he might exult, and gloat
to see the heaped-up riches glittering.
As for cares of state, administration—
he didn’t know what was going on around him.
The Cappadocians quickly threw him out.
And so to Syria he fled, to the palace of
Demetrius, to entertain himself and loll about.
Still, one day some unaccustomed thoughts
broke in on his total idleness:
he remembered that through his mother, Antiochis,
and through that ancient lady, Stratonice,
he too descended from the Syrian crown,
he too was very nearly a Seleucid.
For a while he emerged from his lechery and drink,
and ineptly, in a kind of daze,
cast around for something he might plot,
something he might do, something to plan,
and failed miserably and came to nothing.
His death must have been recorded somewhere and then lost.
Or maybe history passed it by,
and very rightly didn’t deign
to notice such a trivial thing.
He, who on the four-drachma piece
left the charm of his lovely youth,
a glimmer of his poetic beauty,
a sensitive memento of an Ionian boy,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
[1904; 1916]
Alexandrian Kings
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium,
that they might proclaim them kings
before the brilliant ranks of soldiers.
Alexander: they declared him king
of Armenia, of Media, of the Parthians.
Ptolemy: they declared him king
of Cilicia, of Syria, of Phoenicia.
Caesarion was standing well in front,
attired in rose-colored silk,
on his chest a garland of hyacinths,
his belt a double row of sapphires and amethysts,
his shoes laced up with white
ribbons embroidered with pink-skinned pearls.
Him they declared greater than the boys:
him they declared King of Kings.
The Alexandrians were certainly aware
that these were merely words, a bit of theatre.
But the day was warm and poetic, the sky pale blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a triumphant artistic achievement,
the courtiers’ elegance exceptional,
Caesarion all grace and beauty
(Cleopatra’s son, of Lagid blood):
and the Alexandrians rushed to the festival,
filled with excitement, and shouted acclaim
in Greek, and in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
enchanted by the lovely spectacle—
though of course they knew what they were worth,
what empty words these kingdoms were.
[1912; 1912]
Philhellene
Take care the engraving’s artistically done.
Expression grave and majestic.
The diadem better rather narrow;
I don’t care for those wide ones, the Parthian kind.
The inscription, as usual, in Greek:
nothing excessive, nothing grandiose—
the proconsul mustn’t get the wrong idea,
he sniffs out everything and reports it back to Rome—
but of course it should still do me credit.
Something really choice on the other side:
some lovely discus-thrower lad.
Above all, I urge you, see to it
(Sithaspes, by the god, don’t let them forget)
that after the “King” and the “Savior”
the engraving should read, in elegant letters, “Philhellene.”
Now don’t start in on me with your quips,
your “Where are the Greeks?” and “What’s Greek
here, behind the Zágros, beyond Phráata?”
Many, many others, more oriental than ourselves,
write it, and so we’ll write it too.
And after all, don’t forget that now and then
sophists come to us from Syria,
and versifiers, and other devotees of puffery.
Hence unhellenised we are not, I rather think.
[1906; 1912]
The Steps
On an ebony bed that is adorned
with eagles made of coral, Nero sleeps
deeply—heedless, calm, and happy;
flush in the prime of the flesh,
and in the beautiful vigor of youth.
But in the alabaster hall that holds
the ancient shrine of the Ahenobarbi
how uneasy are his Lares!
The little household gods are trembling,
trying to hide their slight bodies.
For they’ve heard a ghastly sound,
a fatal sound mounting the stairs,
footsteps of iron that rattle the steps.
And, faint with fear now, the pathetic Lares,
wriggle their way to the back of the shrine;
each jostles the other and stumbles
each little god falls over the other
because they’ve understood what kind of sound it is,
have come to know by now the Erinyes’ footsteps.
[1893; 1897; 1903; 1909]
Herodes Atticus
Ah, Herodes Atticus, what glory is his!
Alexander of Seleucia, one of our better sophists,
on arriving in Athens to lecture,
finds the city deserted, since Herodes was
away in the country. And all of the young people
followed him out there to hear him.
So Alexander the sophist
writes Herodes a letter
requesting that he send back the Greeks.
And smooth Herodes swiftly responds,
“I too am coming, along with the Greeks.”
How many lads in Alexandria now,
in Antioch, or in Beirut
(tomorrow’s orators, trained by Greek culture)
when they gather at choice dinner parties
where sometimes the talk is of fine intellectual points,
and sometimes about their exquisite amours,
suddenly, abstracted, fall silent.
They leave their glasses untouched at their sides,
and they ponder the luck of Herodes—
what other sophist was honored like this?—
whatever he wants and whatever he does
the Greeks (the Greeks!) follow him,
neither to criticize nor to debate,
nor even to choose any more; just to follow.
[1900; 1911; 1912]
Sculptor from Tyana
As you will have heard, I’m no beginner.
Lots of stone has passed between my hands.
And in Tyana, my native land,
they know me well. And here the senators
commission many statues.
Let me show
a few to you right now. Notice this Rhea;
august, all fortitude, quite archaic.
Notice the Pompey. The Marius,
the Aemilius Paullus, and the African Scipio.
The likenesses, as much as I was able, are true.
The Patroclus (I’ll touch him up soon).
Near those pieces of yellowish
marble there, that’s Caesarion.
And for some time now I’ve been involved
in making a Poseidon. Most of all
I’m studying his horses: how to mold them.
They must be rendered so delicately that
it will be clear from their bodies, their feet,
that they aren’t treading earth, but racing on water.
But this work here is my favorite of all,
which I made with the greatest care and deep feeling:
him, one warm day in summer
when my thoughts were ascending to ideal things,
him I stood dreaming here, the young Hermes.
[1893; 1903; 1911]
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian
Just there, on the right as you go in,
in the Beirut library we buried him:
the scholar Lysias, a grammarian.
The location suits him beautifully.
We put him near the things that he
remembers maybe even there—glosses, texts,
apparatuses, variants, the multivolume works
of scholarship on Greek idiom. Also, like this,
his tomb will be seen and honored by us
as we pass by on our way to the books.
[1911; 1914]
Tomb of Eurion
Inside of this elaborate memorial,
made entirely of syenite stone,
which so many violets, so many lilies adorn,
Eurion lies buried, so beautiful.
A boy of twenty-five, an Alexandrian.
Through the father’s kin, old Macedonian;
a line of alabarchs on his mother’s side.
With Aristoclitus he took his philosophical instruction;
rhetoric with Parus. A student in Thebes, he read
the sacred writings. He wrote a history
of the Arsinoïte district. This at least will endure.
Nevertheless we’ve lost what was most dear: his beauty,
which was like an Apollonian vision.
[1912; 1914]
That Is He
Unknown, the Edessene—a stranger here in Antioch—
writes a lot. And there, at last, the final canto has
appeared. Altogether that makes eighty-three
poems in all. But the poet is worn out
from so much writing, so much versifying,
the terrific strain of so much Greek phrasing,
and every little thing now weighs him down.
A sudden thought, however, pulls him out
of his dejection—the exquisite “That is he”
which Lucian once heard in a dream.
[1898; 1909]
Dangerous
Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria; during the reign
of the augustus Constans and the augustus Constantius;
partly pagan, and partly Christianized):
“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as it was before: ascetic.”
[?; 1911]
Manuel Comnenus
The emperor Lord Manuel Comnenus
one melancholy morning in September
sensed that death was near. The court astrologers
(those who were paid) were nattering on
that he had many years left yet to live.
But while they went on talking, the king
recalls neglected habits of piety,
and from the monastery cells he orders
ecclesiastical vestments to be brought,
and he puts them on, and is delighted
to present the decorous mien of a priest or friar.
Happy are all who believe,
and who, like the emperor Lord Manuel, expire
outfitted most decorously in their faith.
[1905; 1916]
In the Church
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
[1892; 1901; 1906; 1912?]
Very Rarely
He’s an old man. Worn out and stooped,
crippled by years, and by excess,
stepping slowly, he moves along the alleyway.
But when he goes inside his house to hide
his pitiful state, and his old age, he considers
the share that he—he—still has in youth.
Youths recite his verses now.
His visions pass before their animated eyes.
Their healthy, sensuous minds,
their well-limned, solid flesh,
stir to his own expression of the beautiful.
[1911; 1913]
In Stock
He wrapped them up carefully, neatly
in green silken cloth, very costly.
Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,
amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,
and judges, and wanted them; not in the way
he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away,
in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the store,
he takes other jewels from the cases to sell—fabulous things—
bracelets, chains, necklaces, rings.
[1912; 1913]
Painted
To my craft I am attentive, and I love it.
But today I’m discouraged by the slow pace of the work.
My mood depends upon the day. It looks
increasingly dark. Constantly windy and raining.
What I long for is to see, and not to speak.
In this painting, now, I’m gazing at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be that he’s worn himself out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.—
Like this, for some time, I sit and gaze.
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
[1914; 1916]
Morning Sea
Here let me stop. Let me too look at Nature for a while.
The morning sea and cloudless sky
a brilliant blue, the yellow shore; all
beautiful and grand in the light.
Here let me stop. Let me fool myself: that these are what I see
(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)
instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,
my recollections, the ikons of pleasure.
[?; 1916]
Song of Ionia
Because we smashed their statues all to pieces,
because we chased them from their temples—
this hardly means the gods have died.
O land of Ionia, they love you still,
it’s you whom their souls remember still.
And as an August morning’s light breaks over you
your atmosphere grows vivid with their living.
And occasionally an ethereal ephebe’s form,
indeterminate, stepping swiftly,
makes its way along your crested hills.
[1891; 1896; 1905; 1911]
In the Entrance of the Café
Something they were saying close to me
drew my attention to the entrance of the café.
And I saw the lovely body that looked as if
Eros had made it using all his vast experience:
crafting with pleasure his shapely limbs;
making tall the sculpted build;
crafting the face with emotion
and leaving behind, with the touch of his hands,
a feeling in the brow, the eyes, and the lips.
[1904?; >1915]
One Night
The room was threadbare and tawdry,
hidden above that suspect restaurant.
From the window you could see the alley,
which was filthy and narrow. From below
came the voices of some laborers
who were playing cards and having a carouse.
And there, in that common, vulgar bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—
the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now
as I write, after so many years have passed!,
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.
[1907; 1916]
Come Back
Come back often and take hold of me,
beloved feeling come back and take hold of me,
when the memory of the body reawakens,
and old longing once more passes through the blood;
when the lips and skin remember,
and the hands feel like they’re touching once again.
Come back often and take hold of me at night,
when the lips and skin remember …
[1904; 1909; 1912]
Far Off
I’d like to talk about that memory …
But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:
because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.
Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …
That August—was it August?—evening …
I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …
Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.
[1914; 1914]
He Swears
Now and then he swears to begin a better life.
But when the night comes on with its own counsels,
its own compromises, and with its promises:
but when the night comes on with a power of its own,
of a body that desires and demands, he returns,
lost, once more to the same fateful pleasure.
[1905; >1915]
I Went
No restraint. I surrendered completely and I went.
To gratifications that were partly real,
partly careening within my mind—
I went in the illuminated night.
And I drank powerful wines, just as
the champions of pleasure drink.
[1905; 1913]
Chandelier
In a small and empty room, four lone walls,
covered in a cloth of solid green,
a beautiful chandelier burns and glows
and in each and every flame there blazes
a wanton fever, a wanton need.
In the small room, which has been set
aglow by the chandelier’s powerful flames,
the light that appears is no ordinary light.
The pleasure of this heat has not been fashioned
for bodies that too easily take fright.
[1895; 1914]
Poems 1916–1918
Since Nine—
Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp
and sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,
without speaking. With whom should I speak,
so utterly alone within this house?
The apparition of my body in its youth,
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp,
has come and found me and reminded me
of shuttered perfumed rooms
and of pleasure spent—what wanton pleasure!
And it also brought before my eyes
streets made unrecognizable by time,
bustling city centres that are no more
and theatres and cafés that existed long ago.
The apparition of my body in its youth
came and also brought me cause for pain:
deaths in the family; separations;
the feelings of my loved ones, the feelings of
those long dead which I so little valued.
Half past twelve. How the time has passed.
Half past twelve. How the years have passed.
[1917; 1918]
Comprehension
The years of my youth, my pleasure-bent existence—
how plainly do I see their meaning now.
What useless, foolish regrets …
But I didn’t see their meaning then.
In the dissolute life I led in my youth
my poetry’s designs took shape;
the boundaries of my art were drawn.
That is why the regrets were never firm.
And my resolutions—to master myself, to change—
would keep up for two weeks at the most.
[1895; 1917/1918]
In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion
On a chariot of white, drawn by four
snow-white mules caparisoned in silver,
I have arrived at Latmus from Miletus. I sailed over
from Alexandria in a purple trireme to perform
holy rites for Endymion, sacrifices and libations.
Behold the statue. With rapture I now look upon
the fabled beauty of Endymion. My slaves
empty panniers of jessamine; and well-omened acclamations
have awakened the pleasure of ancient days.
[1895; 1916]
Envoys from Alexandria
They hadn’t seen, in Delphi, such beautiful gifts in centuries
as those that were sent by the two, the Ptolemies,
the rival brother kings. Ever since the priests accepted them,
though, they’ve been worried about the oracle. To frame it
with finesse they’ll need all of their expertise:
which of the two, two such as these, must be displeased.
And they convene at night, secretly,
to confer about the Lagid family.
But look, the envoys have come back. They take their leave.
Returning to Alexandria, they say. They no longer have
need of oracles. The priests are overjoyed to hear this
(it’s understood they’ll keep the fabulous gifts)
but they’re also bewildered in the extreme,
clueless as to what this sudden lack of interest means.
For yesterday the envoys had grim news of which priests are unaware:
At Rome the oracle was handed down; destinies were meted there.
[1915; 1918]
Aristobulus
The palace is in tears, the king’s in tears,
King Herod inconsolably laments,
the entire country is in tears for Aristobulus
who so needlessly, accidentally drowned
playing in the water with his friends.
And also when they hear the news elsewhere,
when it gets as far as Syria,
even many of the Greeks will be distressed:
the poets and the sculptors all will mourn,
for the renown of Aristobulus had reached them,
and any vision of theirs of what a youth could be
never matched the beauty of this boy.
What statue of a god could Antioch boast
that was the like of this boy of Israel?
The Throne Princess laments and weeps:
his mother, the greatest of the Jewesses.
Alexandra laments and weeps over the calamity.—
But when she finds herself alone her anguish alters.
She groans; she seethes; she swears; she calls down curses.
How they made a fool of her! How they gulled her!
How, in the end, they had got their way!
They’ve laid the house of the Hasmoneans in ruins.
How did he manage it, that criminal of a king;
that charlatan, that miscreant, that scoundrel?
How did he manage it? What a diabolical plan,
for Mariamne not to have noticed a thing.
Had Mariamne noticed, or suspected,
she’d have found a way to save her little brother;
she’s queen after all, she could have managed something.
How they’ll gloat now, how they’ll exult in secret,
those spiteful women, Cypros and Salome;
those vile trollops, Cypros and Salome.—
And to be powerless, to be compelled
to pretend as though she believed their lies;
to be unable to go to the people,
to go outside and cry out to the Jews,
to tell, to tell how the murder had been done.
[1916; 1918]
Caesarion
In part to ascertain a certain date
and in part to while away the time,
last night I took down a collection
of Ptolemaic inscriptions to read.
The unstinting laudations and flatteries
are the same for all. All of them are brilliant,
glorious, mighty, beneficent;
every undertaking utterly wise.
As for the women of the line, they too,
all the Berenices and the Cleopatras, are wonderful too.
When I successfully ascertained the date
I’d have finished with the book, if a tiny,
insignificant reference to King Caesarion
hadn’t attracted my attention suddenly. . . . . .
Ah, there: you came with your indefinite
charm. In history there are only a few
lines that can be found concerning you;
and so I could fashion you more freely in my mind.
I fashioned you this way: beautiful and feeling.
My artistry gives to your face
a beauty that has a dreamy winsomeness.
And so fully did I imagine you
that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp
went out—I deliberately let it go out—
I dared to think you came into my room,
it seemed to me you stood before me: as you must have been
in Alexandria after it had been conquered,
pale and wearied, perfect in your sorrow,
still hoping they’d have mercy on you,
those vile men—who whispered “Surfeit of Caesars.”
[1914; 1918]
Nero’s Deadline
Nero wasn’t worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”
He still had time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,
this deadline that the god is giving him,
for him to think about dangers yet to come.
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,
but exquisitely wearied by this trip
which had been endless days of diversion—
in the theatres, in the gardens, the gymnasia. …
Evenings of the cities of Achaea …
Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all …
So Nero. And in Spain, Galba
was secretly assembling his army and preparing it:
the old man, seventy-three years old.
[1915; 1918]
Safe Haven
Emes, a young man of twenty-eight, came by a Tenian
ship (meaning to learn the incense trade) to this Syrian
haven. But during the voyage he took sick,
and just after he had disembarked,
he died. His burial, the very cheapest kind,
took place there. A few hours before he died,
he whispered something about “home” and “elderly parents.”
But no one knew who they might have been;
nor what his native land might be, in all the wide Greek world.
Better this way. For this way, while
he lies dead in this safe haven,
his parents will keep hoping he’s still alive.
[1917; 1918]
One of Their Gods
Whenever one of Them would cross Seleucia’s
marketplace, around the time that evening falls—
like some tall and flawlessly beautiful boy,
with the joy of incorruptibility in his eye,
with that dark and fragrant hair of his—
the passersby would stare at him
and one would ask another if he knew him,
and if he were a Syrian Greek, or foreign. But some,
who’d paid him more attention as they watched,
understood, and would make way.
And as he disappeared beneath the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
making his way to the neighborhood that comes alive
only at night—that life of revels and debauch,
of every known intoxication and lust—
they’d wonder which of Them he really was
and for which of his suspect diversions
he’d come down to walk Seleucia’s streets
from his Venerable, Sacrosanct Abode.
[1899; 1918]
Tomb of Lanes
The Lanes whom you loved is not here, Marcus,
in the tomb where you come to cry, and stay for hours and hours.
The Lanes whom you loved you have much closer to you,
at home, when you shut yourself in and look at his picture:
it preserves some part of what was precious in him,
it preserves some part of what you’d loved.
Remember, Marcus, how you brought the famed
Cyrenian painter back from the proconsul’s palace,
and with what artful cunning he attempted
to persuade you both, no sooner had he seen your friend,
that he simply had to do him as Hyacinth
(which would make his portrait so much better known).
But your Lanes didn’t loan out his beauty like that;
and objecting firmly he told him to represent
neither Hyacinth nor anyone else,
but Lanes, son of Rhametichos, an Alexandrian.
[1916; 1918]
Tomb of Iases
Here I lie: Iases. Throughout this great city I was renowned
for being the most beautiful boy.
Admired by men of deep learning—and also by the less profound,
the common folk. Both gave equal joy
to me. But they took me so often for a Narcissus or a Hermes
that excess wore me out, and killed me. Passerby,
if you’re an Alexandrian you won’t judge me. You know the yearnings
of our life; what heat they hold; what pleasures most high.
[1917; 1917]
In a City of Osrhoene
From the tavern brawl they brought him back to us, wounded—
our friend Rhemon, around midnight yesterday.
Through the windows we’d left open all the way
the moon illumined his beautiful body on the bed.
We’re a hodgepodge here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Rhemon too is such a one. But yesterday, as the moon
shone its light upon his sensuous face
we were put in mind of Plato’s Charmides.
[1916; 1917]
Tomb of Ignatius
Here I’m not the Cleon who’s renowned
in Alexandria (where they aren’t easily impressed)
for my fabulous houses, for my gardens,
for my horses and for my chariots,
for the diamonds and the silks I wore.
Far from it: here I’m not that Cleon.
May those twenty-eight years be erased.
I am Ignatius, a Lector, who very late
came to my senses. But still I lived ten blessed months
in the serenity and security of Christ.
[1916; 1917]
In the Month of Hathor
With difficulty I read upon this ancient stone
“O Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.” I can just discern a “So[u]l.”
“In the mon[th] of Hathor” “Leuciu[s] went to his re[s]t.”
Where they record his age “The span of years he li[ve]d”
the Kappa Zeta is proof that he went to his rest a youth.
Amidst the erosion I see “Hi[m] … Alexandrian.”
Then there are three lines radically cut short;
but some words I can make out— like “our t[e]ars,” “the pain,”
“tears” again further down, and “grief for [u]s, his [f]riends.”
In love, it seems to me, Leucius was greatly blessed.
In the month of Hathor Leucius went to his rest.
[1917; 1917]
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610
Raphael, they want you to compose
some verses as an epitaph for the poet Ammon.
Something very artistic and polished. You’ll be able,
you’re the perfect choice, to write what’s suitable
for the poet Ammon, one of our own.
Certainly you’ll talk about his poetry—
but do say something, too, about his beauty,
about the delicate beauty that we loved.
Your Greek is always beautiful and musical.
But now we want all of your craftsmanship.
Into a foreign tongue our pain and love are passing.
Pour your Egyptian feeling into a foreign tongue.
Raphael, your verses should be written
so that they have, you know, something of our lives within them,
so that the rhythm and every phrasing makes it clear
that an Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian.
[1915; 1917]
Aemilian Son of Monaës, an Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D.
From my speech, and looks, and from my mien
I shall make an excellent panoply;
and so I’ll stand before those wicked men
without fear, without debility.
They will want to harm me. But none of those
who come close to me will ever see
where my vulnerable places are, my wounds,
beneath the falsehoods that will cover me.—
Boastful words of Aemilian son of Monaës.
I wonder if he ever made that suit of armor?
In any event, he didn’t wear it much:
At twenty-seven, in Sicily, he died.
[1898?; 1918]
Whenever They Are Aroused
Try to keep watch over them, poet,
for all that few of them can be restrained:
Your eroticism’s visions.
Place them, partly hidden, in your phrases.
Try to keep hold of them, poet,
whenever they’re aroused within your mind,
at night or in the brightness of midday.
[1913; 1916]
To Pleasure
Joy and balm of my life the memory of the hours
when I found and held on to pleasure as I wanted it.
Joy and balm of my life—for me, who had no use
for any routine enjoyment of desire.
[1913; 1917]
I’ve Gazed So Much—
At beauty I’ve gazed so much
that my vision is filled with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.
Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:
always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,
and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.
Faces of love, exactly as
my poetry wanted it … in the nights of my youth,
secretly encountered in my nights. …
[1911; 1917]
In the Street
His appealing face, somewhat pallid;
his chestnut eyes, looking tired;
twenty-five years old, but looks more like twenty;
with something artistic about his clothes
—something in the color of the tie, the collar’s shape—
aimlessly he ambles down the street,
as if still hypnotized by the illicit pleasure,
by the very illicit pleasure he has had.
[1913; 1916]
The Window of the Tobacco Shop
Nearby the illuminated window
of a tobacco shop they stood, in the midst of many others.
Quite by chance their glances happened to meet,
and timorously, hesitantly expressed
the illicit longing of their flesh.
Later, on the pavement, a few nervous steps—
until they smiled, and nodded very faintly.
And afterward the closed carriage. …
the sensitive nearing of their bodies;
the hands as one, the lips as one.
[1907; 1917]
Passage
What he timidly imagined in his school days, is opened up,
revealed to him. And he makes the rounds, stays out all night,
gets swept up in things. And as is (for our art) only right,
pleasure rejoices in his fresh, hot blood,
an outlaw sensual abandon overcomes
his body; and his youthful limbs
give in to it.
And so a simple boy
becomes, for us, worth looking at, and passes through the High
World of Poetry, for a moment—yes, even he;
this aesthete of a boy, with his blood so fresh and hot.
[1914; 1917]
In Evening
At any rate it wouldn’t have lasted long. Years
of experience make that clear to me. But still, Fate
came and ended things in too much of a hurry.
The life of loveliness was brief.
But how powerful our perfumed unctions were,
how exquisite the bed in which we lay,
to what pleasure we gave our bodies away.
A reverberation of the days of pleasure,
a reverberation of those days drew near me,
something we two had in youth, the fire;
once more I took a letter in my hands,
and read it over and over, till the light had failed.
And I went out onto the balcony, melancholy—
went out so I might clear my head by seeing at least
a little of this town I love so well,
some little movement in the street, and in the shops.
[1916; 1917]
Gray
Looking at an opal of medium gray,
I remembered two beautiful gray eyes
that I saw; it must be twenty years ago. …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For one month we were in love.
Then the departure, for Smyrna I daresay,
to get work there, and we never saw each other again.
Those gray eyes—if they’re alive—will have lost their beauty;
the beautiful face will have fallen into ruins.
O my memory, keep them as they were.
And, memory, whatever you can bring back from that love of mine,
whatever you can, bring back to me tonight.
[1917; 1917]
Below the House
Yesterday while strolling through a neighborhood
on the edge of town, I passed below the house
I used to go in when I was very young.
There Eros had taken possession of my body
with his exquisite force.
And yesterday
as I passed along that ancient street,
suddenly everything was made beautiful by desire’s spell:
the shops, the pavements, the stones,
and walls, and balconies, and windows;
there was nothing ugly that remained there.
And while I was standing, gazing at the door,
and standing, tarrying by the house,
the foundation of all my being yielded up
the sensual emotion that was stored inside.
[1917; 1919]
The Next Table
Can’t be more than twenty-two years old.
And yet I’m sure that, just about the same
number of years ago, I enjoyed that very body.
It’s not at all a flaring of desire.
And I only came to the casino a little while ago;
I haven’t even had time to drink a lot.
This very body: I enjoyed it.
And if I don’t remember where—one slip doesn’t signify.
Ah there, sitting at the next table now:
I recognize each movement—and beneath the clothes
I see once more the naked limbs I loved.
[1918; 1919?]
Remember, Body
Body, remember not just how much you were loved,
not just the beds where you have lain,
but also those longings that so openly
glistened for you in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice—and some
chance obstacle arose and thwarted them.
Now that it’s all finally in the past
it almost seems as if you gave yourself to
those longings, too—remember how
they glistened, in the eyes that looked at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you; remember, body.
[1916; 1917/1918]
Days of 1903
I never found them, ever again—all so quickly lost …
the poetic eyes, the pallid
face. … in the gloaming of the street. …
I’ve not found them since—things I came to have completely by chance,
things that I let go so easily;
and afterwards, in anguish, wanted back.
The poetic eyes, the pale face,
those lips, I haven’t found them since.
[1909; 1917]
Poems 1919–1933
The Afternoon Sun
This room, how well I know it.
Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door,
for commercial offices. The entire house has now become
offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies.
Ah, this room, how familiar it is.
Near the door, here, was the sofa,
and in front of it a Turkish rug;
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror.
In the middle, the table where he’d write;
and the three big wicker chairs.
Near the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.
They must be somewhere still, poor things.
Near the window was the bed:
the afternoon sun came halfway up.
… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted
for one week only … Alas,
that week became an eternity.
[1918; 1919]
To Stay
One in the morning it must have been,
or half past one.
In a corner of that dive;
in back of the wooden partition.
Apart from the two of us, the place completely empty.
A kerosene lamp barely shed some light.
The vigilant servant was sleeping by the door.
No one would have seen us. But
we were so on fire for each other
that caution was beyond us anyway.
Our clothes were half undone—we weren’t wearing much,
since it was blazing hot, a heavenly July.
Delight in flesh amidst
clothes half undone:
quick baring of flesh—the image of it
has crossed twenty-six years; and now has come
to stay here in this poetry.
[1918; 1919]
Of the Jews (50 A.D.)
Painter and poet, runner and thrower,
Endymion’s beauty: Ianthes, son of Antonius.
From a family close to the Synagogue.
“The days that I most value are the ones
when I abandon the aesthetic quest,
when I forsake the beauty and rigor of the Hellenic,
with its overriding preoccupation
with perfectly formed and perishable white limbs.
And I become what I would like
always to remain: of the Jews, of the holy Jews, the son.”
A bit too heated, this declaration of his. “Always
remain of the Jews, of the holy Jews—”
But he didn’t remain one at all.
the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria
made the boy into their devotee.
[1912; <1919?]
Imenus
“… it should be loved all the more,
the pleasure that’s attained unwholesomely and in corruption;
only rarely finding the body that feels things as it wants to—
the pleasure that, unwholesomely and in corruption, produces
a sensual intensity, which good health does not know …”
A fragment of a missive
from the youth Imenus (of patrician stock), infamous
in Syracuse for dissipation,
in the dissipated times of Michael the Third.
[1915; 1919; 1919]
Aboard the Ship
It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him.
Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.
It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.
Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.
[1919; 1919]
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)
His every expectation turned out wrong!
He used to imagine that he’d do celebrated deeds,
would end the shame that since the time of the Battle
of Magnesia had ground his homeland down.
That Syria again would be a mighty power,
with her armies, with her fleets,
with her great encampments, with her wealth.
He endured it, grew embittered in Rome
when he sensed, in the conversation of his friends,
the scions of the great houses,
in the midst of all the delicacy and politesse
that they showed toward him, toward the son
of King Seleucus Philopator—
when he sensed that nonetheless there was always a hidden
disdain for the dynasties of the Greek East:
which were in decline, not up to serious affairs,
quite unfit for the leadership of peoples.
He’d withdraw, alone, and grow indignant, and swear
that it wouldn’t be the way they thought, at all.
Look, he has the will:
would struggle, would do it, would rise up.
If only he could find a way to reach the East,
manage to get away from Italy—
and all of this power that he has
in his soul, all this vehemence,
he’d spread it to the people.
Ah, if only he could be in Syria!
He was so little when he left his homeland
that he only dimly remembers what it looks like.
But in his thoughts he’s always studied it
like something sacred you approach on bended knee,
like an apparition of a beautiful place, like a vision
of cities and of harbors that are Greek.—
And now?
Now, hopelessness and dejection.
They were right, those lads in Rome.
It’s not possible for them to survive, the dynasties
that the Macedonian Conquest had produced.
No matter: he himself had spared no effort;
as much as he was able, he’d struggled on.
Even in his black discouragement,
there’s one thing that still he contemplates
with lofty pride: that even in defeat
he shows the same indomitable valor to the world.
The rest—was dreams and vain futility.
This Syria—it barely even resembles his homeland;
it is the land of Heracleides and of Balas.
[1915; 1919]
If Indeed He Died
“Where has he gone off to, where did the Sage disappear?
Following his many miracles,
and the great renown of his instruction
which was diffused among so many peoples,
he suddenly went missing and no one has learned
with any certainty what has happened
(nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).
Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.
But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never
wrote about the death of Apollonius.
Others said that he went missing on Lindos.
Or perhaps that other story is
true, that his assumption took place on Crete,
in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—
But nonetheless we have the miraculous,
the supernatural apparition of him
to a young student in Tyana.—
Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,
for him to appear before the world again;
or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us
unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again
as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then
he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,
and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”
So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—
after a reading of Philostratus’s
“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—
one of the few pagans, the very few
who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant
and timid man—he, too, outwardly
played the Christian and would go to church.
It was the period during which there reigned,
with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,
and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,
showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.
[1897; 1910; 1920; 1920]
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)
The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them
declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.
The salon opened onto the garden;
and had a delicate fragrance of blooms
that was mingled together with the perfumes
of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.
Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.
But when the actor had declaimed
“Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”
(stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary
the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),
at once a spirited boy sprang up,
mad for literature, and cried out:
“Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.
Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.
Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,
all your care, and remember your work once more
in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.
That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.
And don’t dismiss completely from your mind
the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—
that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,
those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,
that Seven Against Thebes—and leave, as your memorial,
only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—
that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”
[1920; 1920]
That They Come—
One candle is enough. Its faint light
is more fitting, will be more winsome
when come Love’s— when its Shadows come.
One candle is enough. Tonight the room
can’t have too much light. In reverie complete,
and in suggestion’s power, and with that little light—
in that reverie: thus will I dream a vision
that there come Love’s— that its Shadows come.
[?; 1920]
Darius
The poet Phernazes is working on
the crucial portion of his epic poem:
the part about how the kingdom of the Persians
was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our
glorious king is descended from him:
Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator.) But here
one needs philosophy; one must explicate
the feelings that Darius must have had:
arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more
like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.
Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.
But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes
running and delivers the momentous intelligence:
The war with the Romans has begun.
Most of our army has crossed the border.
The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!
How, now, can our glorious king,
Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,
be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?
In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.
Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!
Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”
to make his name, and to reduce his critics,
those envious men, to silence at long last.
What a setback, what a setback for his plans!
And if it had only been a setback: fine.
But let’s see if we are really all that safe
in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.
The Romans are most fearsome enemies.
Is there any way we can get the best of them,
we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?
Can we measure up to the legions now?
Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—
And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,
a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—
far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;
arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.
[<1897?; 1917; 1920]
Anna Comnena
She laments in the prologue to her Alexiad,
Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.
Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with
freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge
mine eyes. … Alack the breakers” of her life,
“alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her
“unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”
Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one
mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:
that she had only one profound regret
(even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:
for all of her dexterity she didn’t manage
to secure the Throne; instead he took it
practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.
[1917; 1920]
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying
Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.
In serious matters I have always been
most diligent. And on this I will insist:
that no one has a better knowledge of
Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.
On every question that he had, Botaniates—
every difficult ecclesiastical matter—
would take counsel with me, me first of all.
But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful
Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,
it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself
by crafting verses of six or seven lines—
divert myself with mythological tales
of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,
or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;
or with composing strict iambic lines
such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs
of Constantinople don’t know how to write.
That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.
[1921; 1920]
Their Beginning
The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure
is accomplished. They’ve risen from the bed,
and dress themselves quickly without speaking.
They emerge separately, covertly, from the house. And while
they walk rather uneasily in the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
what kind of bed they’d fallen into just before.
Nonetheless, how the artist’s life has gained.
Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write
powerful lines, that here was their beginning.
[1915; 1921]
Favour of Alexander Balas
Oh I’m not put out because my chariot’s
wheel was smashed, and I’m down one silly win.
I shall pass the night among fine wines
and lovely roses. All Antioch is mine.
I am the most exalted of young men.
I’m Balas’s weakness, the one he worships.
Tomorrow, you’ll see, they’ll say the race wasn’t proper.
(But if I were vulgar, and had secretly given the order—
they’d even have placed my crippled chariot first, the flatterers.)
[1916?; 1921]
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.
The aging of my body and my looks
is a wound from a terrible knife.
I have no means whatsoever to endure it.
Unto you I turn, Art of Poetry,
you who know something of drugs;
of attempts to numb pain, in Imagination and Word.
It’s a wound from a terrible knife.—
Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,
which make it impossible—for a while—to feel the wound.
[1918?; 1921]
Demaratus
The theme, “The Character of Demaratus,”
which Porphyry has suggested to him in conversation,
the young scholar outlined as follows
(intending, afterwards, to flesh it out rhetorically).
“At first the courtier of King Darius, and then
a courtier of King Xerxes;
and now accompanying Xerxes and his army,
to vindicate himself at last: Demaratus.
“A great injustice had been done to him.
He was the son of Ariston. Shamelessly
his enemies had bribed the oracle.
Nor did they fail to deprive him of his throne;
but when at last he yielded, and decided
to resign himself to living as a private person
they had to go and insult him before the people,
they had to go and humiliate him, in public, at the festival.
“And so it is that he serves Xerxes with such great zeal.
Accompanying the enormous Persian army
he too will make his return to Sparta;
and, a king once more, how swiftly
he will drive him out, will degrade
that conniving Leotychides.
“And so his days pass by, full of concerns:
giving the Persians counsel, explaining to them
what they need to do to conquer Greece.
“Many worries, much reflection, which is why
the days of Demaratus are so dreary.
Many worries, much reflection, which is why
Demaratus doesn’t have a moment’s pleasure;
since pleasure isn’t what he’s feeling
(it’s not; he won’t acknowledge it;
how can he call it pleasure? it’s the acme of his misfortune)
when everything reveals to him quite clearly
that the Greeks will emerge victorious.”
[1904; 1911; 1921]
I Brought to Art
I’m sitting and musing. I brought to Art
longings and feelings— some half-glimpsed
faces or lines; some uncertain mem’ries
of unfulfilled loves. Let me submit to it.
It knows how to shape the Form of Beauty;
almost imperceptibly filling out life,
piecing together impressions, piecing together the days.
[1921; 1921]
From the School of the Renowned Philosopher
He remained Ammonius Saccas’s student for two years;
but of philosophy and of Saccas he grew bored.
Afterward he went into politics.
But he gave it up. The Prefect was a fool;
and those around him solemn, pompous stiffs;
their Greek horribly uncouth, the wretches.
His curiosity was aroused,
a bit, by the Church: to be baptized,
to pass as a Christian. But he quickly
changed his mind. He’d surely get in a row
with his parents, so ostentatiously pagan:
and they’d immediately put an end—an awful thought—
to his extremely generous allowance.
Still, he had to do something. He became an habitué
of the depraved houses of Alexandria,
of every secret den of debauchery.
In this, fortune had been kind to him:
had given him a form of highest comeliness.
And he delighted in that heavenly gift.
For at least another ten years yet
his beauty would endure. After that—
perhaps to Saccas he would go once more.
And if in the meantime the old man had died,
he’d go to some other philosopher or sophist;
someone suitable can always be found.
Or in the end, it was possible he’d even return
to politics—admirably mindful
of his family traditions,
duty to one’s country, and other pomposities of that sort.
[1921; 1921]
Maker of Wine Bowls
On this mixing-bowl of the purest silver—
which was made for the home of Heracleides,
where great elegance always is the rule—
note the stylish blooms, and the brooks, the thyme;
and in the middle I put a beautiful young man,
naked, sensuous; he still keeps one leg,
just one, in the water.— O Memory, I have begged
to find in you the best of guides, that I might make
the face of the youth I loved as it really was.
This has proved to be very difficult since
some fifteen years have passed since the day on which
he fell, a soldier, in the defeat at Magnesia.
[1903; 1912; 1921]
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League
You brave, who fought and fell in glory:
who had no fear of those who’d conquered everywhere.
You blameless, even if Diaeus and Critolaus blundered.
Whensoever the Greeks should want to boast,
“Such are the men our race produces,” is what they’ll say
about you. That’s how marvelous the praise for you will be.—
Written in Alexandria by an Achaean:
in the seventh year of Ptolemy, the “Chickpea.”
[1922; 1922]
For Antiochus Epiphanes
The young Antiochene said to the king,
“In my heart there beats a single precious hope:
the Macedonians again, Antiochus Epiphanes,
the Macedonians are back in the great fight again.
If only they would win— I’ll give to anyone who wants them
the horses and the lion, the Pan made out of coral,
and the elegant mansion, and the gardens in Tyre,
and everything else you’ve given me, Antiochus Epiphanes.”
Maybe he was moved a little bit, the king.
But he recalled at once his father and his brother,
and so made no response. Some eavesdropper might
go and repeat something.— Anyway, as expected,
at Pydna there swiftly came the horrible conclusion.
[1911?; 1922; 1922]
In an Old Book
In an old book—about a hundred years old—
I found, neglected among the leaves,
a watercolour with no signature.
It must have been the work of a very powerful artist.
It bore the title “Representation of Love.”
But “—of the love of extreme sensualists” would have been more fitting.
For it was clear as you looked at this work
(the artist’s idea was easily grasped)
that the youth in this portrait wasn’t meant
for those who love in a somewhat wholesome way,
within the limits of what is strictly permitted—
with his chestnut-brown, intensely colored eyes;
with the superior beauty of his face,
the beauty of unusual allures;
with those flawless lips of his that bring
pleasure to the body that it cherishes;
with those flawless limbs of his, made for beds
called shameless by the commonplace morality.
[1892?; 1922]
In Despair
He’s lost him utterly. And from now on he seeks
in the lips of every new lover that he takes
the lips of that one: his. Coupling with every new
lover that he takes he longs to be mistaken:
that it’s the same young man, that he’s giving himself to him.
He’s lost him utterly, as if he’d never been.
The other wished—he said— he wished to save himself
from that stigmatized pleasure, so unwholesome;
from that stigmatized pleasure, in its shame.
There was still time, he said— time to save himself.
He’s lost him utterly, as if he’d never been.
In his imagination, in his hallucinations
in the lips of other youths he seeks the lips of that one;
He wishes that he might feel his love again.
[1923; 1923]
Julian, Seeing Indifference
“Seeing, then, that there is great indifference
among us toward the gods”—he says with that solemn affect.
Indifference. But what then did he expect?
Let him organize religion as much as he pleased,
let him write the high priest of Galatia as much as he pleased,
or to others like him, exhorting, giving directions.
His friends weren’t Christians: that much is certain.
But even so they weren’t able to
play the way that he did (brought up as a Christian)
with the system of a new religion,
ridiculous in theory and in practice.
In the end they were Greeks. Nothing in excess, Augustus.
[1923?; 1923]
Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene
After she returned from his funeral, greatly bereaved,
the sister of him who had temperately and sweetly lived—
the exceedingly scholarly Antiochus, king
of Commagene—she wanted an epitaph for him.
And the Ephesian sophist Callistratus—who sojourned
often in the principality of Commagene,
and who in the royal household had been
so pleasantly and frequently received—
wrote it, at the suggestion of Syrian courtiers,
and sent it to her aged ladyship.
“May the renown of Antiochus the benevolent king
be meetly extolled, O Commagenians.
He was the provident captain of the land.
The life he lived was just, and wise, and gallant.
The life he lived, still more, was that finest thing: Hellenic—
mankind holds no quality more precious:
among the gods alone does anything surpass it.”
[1923?; 1923]
Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.)
A respectable citizen’s son— above all else, a beauteous
youth who belongs to the theatre, agreeable in so many ways:
I now and then compose, in the language of the Greeks,
exceedingly daring verses, which I circulate
very secretly, of course— gods! they mustn’t be seen
by those who prate about morals, those who wear gray clothes—
verses about a pleasure that is select, that moves
toward a barren love of which the world disapproves.
[1923?; 1923]
Julian in Nicomedia
Foolhardy doings, full of risks.
The encomia for the ideals of the Greeks.
The white magic and the visits to the pagans’
temples. The raptures over the ancient gods.
The frequent conversations with Chrysanthius.
The theories of the (quite clever) philosopher Maximus.
And look at the result. It’s obvious that Gallus
is very anxious. Constantius is suspicious.
Ah, his advisors weren’t wary in the least.
This story’s gone too far, Mardonius says,
and it’s got to stop at once, all this furore.—
Julian is going back, a Lector once more,
to the church at Nicomedia,
where, loudly and with considerable
piety, he reads the holy Scriptures,
and at his Christian reverence the people wonder.
[1892?; 1924?; 1924]
Before Time Could Alter Them
They were very pained when they parted company.
They themselves didn’t want it; it was just the way things were.
The need to make a living was forcing one of them
to go far away— New York or Canada.
Certainly their love wasn’t the same as before;
the attraction had been gradually diminished,
its attraction had been very much diminished.
But still, that they should part— that they didn’t want.
It was just the way things were.— Or perhaps it was that Fate
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Daniel Mendelsohn
No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry makes the historical personal – and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian’s assessing eye as well as the poet’s compassionate heart.After more than a decade of work, Daniel Mendelsohn – an acclaimed, award-winning author and classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world – is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy’s genius. This volume includes the first-ever English translation of thirty unfinished poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died – a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades. With Mendelsohn’s in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation is a literary event – the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.
C. P. CAVAFY
Complete Poems
TRANSLATED,
WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY,
BY
DANIEL MENDELSOHN
CONTENTS
Title Page (#uf1307358-6f8a-5860-8f1c-82a497468ad9)
Introduction: The Poet-Historian (#uaae696d8-4640-508b-947d-13e7165eed04)
A Note on Pronunciation of Proper Names (#u494b139f-561a-5631-8408-10e19148c327)
I: PUBLISHED POEMS (#u446d759c-1b0f-5114-a05d-621e6126574e)
Poems 1905–1915 (#ucc39a76e-62e3-5acb-924d-1d716ade57e5)
The City (#u7566f17c-2b64-58a5-84a6-d06991041724)
The Satrapy (#uf1249162-1f31-50bf-a6f1-e5e012c27be1)
But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent (#ufa13ffbb-8d8c-540e-9a57-a86b40c608ac)
Ides of March (#u0e77fb10-c932-5e3d-a9e5-393c02f6723e)
Finished (#u00a80c03-dd49-5cd0-bdf5-744991191c50)
The God Abandons Antony (#u1053f3ee-a5d0-548e-b6c6-ad1d9b80ea5b)
Theodotus (#ud29311d5-de6b-5890-a797-9334f45cb5c1)
Monotony (#u1402361a-c979-52d2-a171-6c45fd98e047)
Ithaca (#u7886cbe6-449e-5350-a521-2bb0f4f9c70c)
As Much As You Can (#ud552f4e4-ccae-5306-9a27-bad24a6cc770)
Trojans (#u53ec84f7-86f2-5d9e-a2c3-f42c353a897f)
King Demetrius (#u4bebfd14-78d4-538d-a2c4-d19a040a5152)
The Glory of the Ptolemies (#uffe1e67d-0cd1-5b01-99dd-23724b83e842)
The Retinue of Dionysus (#u2b53e354-0d5e-5209-8f0a-42ce2225876e)
The Battle of Magnesia (#ud9471c84-506a-5a3d-a985-bc36361421f1)
The Seleucid’s Displeasure (#ued52de49-a6e0-5c09-a0a7-9f188a891481)
Orophernes (#u199d19cb-a761-563d-82b4-2a17003f03fd)
Alexandrian Kings (#u4a6ae30f-3392-5047-a758-1bdbeada7e47)
Philhellene (#u8fc2fdd5-9f88-5124-82b9-3885dafdf132)
The Steps (#uc8ee6325-e31b-5f17-a6da-fac0ed1475c5)
Herodes Atticus (#u6e435cb3-eae1-5571-9c96-0b93cddac884)
Sculptor from Tyana (#u34cf97a2-1587-5d9f-a438-8b4808c74d07)
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian (#u153b9216-3b9c-5558-bbdc-0cfca534541c)
Tomb of Eurion (#u03237bdb-8a67-5822-9c68-593c849daed6)
That Is He (#u54e5c12d-3115-5470-af00-fc380c5f922f)
Dangerous (#uee6f1e31-4363-598b-8312-13e0ad3bb989)
Manuel Comnenus (#u0993afd8-449f-5cd0-a19c-291516f31e0a)
In the Church (#u8b86abef-aa93-5f78-bf21-bc96d45dfc7e)
Very Rarely (#u87b1a0a4-6997-5105-9c7f-96f5c9c36d4d)
In Stock (#uc7dc34fc-7370-57ec-a988-0e1d552d1741)
Painted (#u5a1cd588-4b00-52b0-9fc5-afabab0a8d1b)
Morning Sea (#u06383326-a946-5c19-8b8c-e5451f413f10)
Song of Ionia (#u37dc0635-5665-53c2-b74b-54f9331144ee)
In the Entrance of the Café (#ud9af806f-bf11-5eb6-8d73-c802f4c07b66)
One Night (#u34a94ffd-b934-5d46-a2dd-86b3e9b67897)
Come Back (#ua28e988e-b5e8-58bd-93a3-b58999bc71fa)
Far Off (#u28e33302-c99d-526e-acd6-84e8c96288c9)
He Swears (#u92c54033-6a40-50e2-bf09-5c74646a471c)
I Went (#uf54a2981-9caa-5ad5-ab82-96d8d1bff77d)
Chandelier (#u0e7d4878-1e0a-57e8-895f-4d23c664bb41)
Poems 1916–1918 (#u69678fbb-8b04-507e-9313-2718f533f716)
Since Nine— (#u6737b471-3609-5235-9b6a-7a4e97d49ab2)
Comprehension (#u854d8b60-7a6b-5443-840b-83e932d63e6f)
In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion (#u686aceb9-84fa-5e45-8295-6b515e9f8b6b)
Envoys from Alexandria (#uae10a661-9604-54b0-a3a9-09e580ab2c84)
Aristobulus (#ua8241c1e-3ba8-5808-bb93-d343a3cd4b98)
Caesarion (#ua064a5b5-83b7-545b-b515-ac112be0b55b)
Nero’s Deadline (#u2df9ba45-2a0e-5be0-9c06-b3d2da03a7e7)
Safe Haven (#u3d4196d4-40e8-57ca-a286-ef55f9344e1b)
One of Their Gods (#u27032b92-80ed-5cb9-9005-7fccbbd849e0)
Tomb of Lanes (#u23feaa36-8406-5389-b425-0ad3e3f46bf8)
Tomb of Iases (#ua391e284-6c89-5aef-ab7d-6efda9ff118a)
In a City of Osrhoene (#ua5b8c04f-f689-5790-9205-492a14b4fc57)
Tomb of Ignatius (#uf86cb4c0-6645-555b-97e9-2ff2a3778baa)
In the Month of Hathor (#u5bdd91bf-cfb1-5236-9d88-59486f72cf0c)
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610 (#ua35a839c-30c7-51c2-b87c-84aeb86793f7)
Aemilian Son of Monaës, an Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D. (#u33c67bd0-2945-5890-b0f8-87d9637671b4)
Whenever They Are Aroused (#u8c2cfaa4-c3a7-559c-a920-563f543ee719)
To Pleasure (#u3de544e4-a9ee-5512-9061-b1ba5b5498f5)
I’ve Gazed So Much— (#uff906a22-5769-5230-a878-9e20531c5628)
In the Street (#u97726a29-0590-5af9-aadc-44601a57532a)
The Window of the Tobacco Shop (#ua63ed76a-d08c-5977-a09a-a54c3e8431a8)
Passage (#ucca95ce8-26ae-57c4-8f19-06fc086de3de)
In Evening (#ua2190652-c063-5267-8d1a-0feeb65a3878)
Gray (#u9b3487fd-0e24-5711-9c11-4dd55d2c2be9)
Below the House (#u48fb3d94-fd72-5d4e-9853-d6617e3a380e)
The Next Table (#u2fcbdf28-a3a3-5da6-938b-1770dc8b0b2b)
Remember, Body (#uae179ec9-2fed-5afa-9126-ddc522cd067a)
Days of 1903 (#u90313518-4855-50f3-8ba8-f64931794f78)
Poems 1919–1933 (#u46fb8668-9c7e-5a6a-a877-f7295fd4f43d)
The Afternoon Sun (#ud11a7239-507d-5b86-8de0-36370c1c26b0)
To Stay (#u0b3e039d-efec-5081-badb-39eba6f9b107)
Of the Jews (50 A.D.) (#u1fcdb1de-44ea-56fd-b977-eb42d259eaad)
Imenus (#uf473f8f8-85ad-500d-babe-90caed89df6c)
Aboard the Ship (#u9f584aa9-5286-5f52-a74c-0940b160bb99)
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.) (#u6f774be9-c146-54e8-8813-53c50f476a6a)
If Indeed He Died (#ub2df17d4-eba7-5ed6-b909-dc5b11044575)
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.) (#ue41b352e-1613-5ebb-99a0-9ccebd8bb0e1)
That They Come— (#ucb27854f-78de-5ec3-859c-e413d79864a8)
Darius (#u5638980b-2261-5fec-ab9a-5bd2f5587c07)
Anna Comnena (#ua72d6eea-4dcf-5092-9e7f-6cd2b4388b94)
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying (#uf0b04f76-f2e4-50c6-81c6-ae5b4db38c47)
Their Beginning (#u9ebb0310-93ad-5780-b42b-6cacd7d86e26)
Favour of Alexander Balas (#u20ada021-a5ab-5976-8b59-2394d372a9c7)
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D. (#uf702e31d-b728-5ace-8de4-3c940f0849f9)
Demaratus (#u2f3087ad-953f-56ca-84d5-a42dfd31195d)
I Brought to Art (#u206d6bfc-8a80-54c1-8c9a-179b33e57110)
From the School of the Renowned Philosopher (#ub1811dc4-2ccc-53b9-97e3-bc482599aa41)
Maker of Wine Bowls (#ub23afd1e-0d61-566d-a585-235205056a65)
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League (#u6325c332-ab32-50b0-b5b0-9e52a4cc5d45)
For Antiochus Epiphanes (#u9eaf5a0d-0e42-5a2d-8c81-621816321cba)
In an Old Book (#u45e63cd4-6546-5b07-88fc-bf3485d6507c)
In Despair (#ucc78b1fd-412f-51c3-9b65-43060d29a4aa)
Julian, Seeing Indifference (#u3be70777-9e97-59ac-a519-983a7eea45f2)
Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene (#u81fc044f-8f37-51b9-b2dd-7e78445e0ee0)
Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.) (#ub9dea818-6c2c-5b08-b406-b68903586441)
Julian in Nicomedia (#ueb8a29d0-455c-5478-b065-bc59c83f4e62)
Before Time Could Alter Them (#ub600e236-9f87-53fc-9fbd-4e08bfe718ae)
He Came to Read— (#litres_trial_promo)
The Year 31 B.C. in Alexandria (#litres_trial_promo)
John Cantacuzenus Triumphs (#litres_trial_promo)
Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D. (#litres_trial_promo)
Of Colored Glass (#litres_trial_promo)
The 25th Year of His Life (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Italian Seashore (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Boring Village (#litres_trial_promo)
Apollonius of Tyana in Rhodes (#litres_trial_promo)
Cleitus’s Illness (#litres_trial_promo)
In a Municipality of Asia Minor (#litres_trial_promo)
Priest of the Serapeum (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Taverns (#litres_trial_promo)
A Great Procession of Priests and Laymen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sophist Departing from Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Julian and the Antiochenes (#litres_trial_promo)
Anna Dalassene (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1896 (#litres_trial_promo)
Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old (#litres_trial_promo)
Greek Since Ancient Times (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1901 (#litres_trial_promo)
You Didn’t Understand (#litres_trial_promo)
A Young Man, Skilled in the Art of the Word—in His 24th Year (#litres_trial_promo)
In Sparta (#litres_trial_promo)
Portrait of a Young Man of Twenty-Three Done by His Friend of the Same Age, an Amateur (#litres_trial_promo)
In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Potentate from Western Libya (#litres_trial_promo)
Cimon Son of Learchus, 22 Years Old, Teacher of Greek Letters (in Cyrene) (#litres_trial_promo)
On the March to Sinope (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D. (#litres_trial_promo)
Alexander Jannaeus, and Alexandra (#litres_trial_promo)
Beautiful, White Flowers As They Went So Well (#litres_trial_promo)
Come Now, King of the Lacedaemonians (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Same Space (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mirror in the Entrance (#litres_trial_promo)
He Asked About the Quality— (#litres_trial_promo)
Should Have Taken the Trouble (#litres_trial_promo)
According to the Formulas of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians (#litres_trial_promo)
In 200 B.C. (#litres_trial_promo)
Days of 1908 (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Outskirts of Antioch (#litres_trial_promo)
Poems Published 1897–1908 (#litres_trial_promo)
Contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook (#litres_trial_promo)
Voices (#litres_trial_promo)
Longings (#litres_trial_promo)
Candles (#litres_trial_promo)
An Old Man (#litres_trial_promo)
Prayer (#litres_trial_promo)
Old Men’s Souls (#litres_trial_promo)
The First Step (#litres_trial_promo)
Interruption (#litres_trial_promo)
Thermopylae (#litres_trial_promo)
Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto (#litres_trial_promo)
The Windows (#litres_trial_promo)
Walls (#litres_trial_promo)
Waiting for the Barbarians (#litres_trial_promo)
Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo)
The Funeral of Sarpedon (#litres_trial_promo)
The Horses of Achilles (#litres_trial_promo)
II: REPUDIATED POEMS (1886–1898) (#litres_trial_promo)
Brindisi (#litres_trial_promo)
The Poet and the Muse (#litres_trial_promo)
Builders (#litres_trial_promo)
Word and Silence (#litres_trial_promo)
Sham-el-Nessim (#litres_trial_promo)
Bard (#litres_trial_promo)
Vulnerant Omnes, Ultima Necat (#litres_trial_promo)
Good and Bad Weather (#litres_trial_promo)
Timolaus the Syracusan (#litres_trial_promo)
Athena’s Vote (#litres_trial_promo)
The Inkwell (#litres_trial_promo)
Sweet Voices (#litres_trial_promo)
Elegy of the Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Hours of Melancholy (#litres_trial_promo)
Oedipus (#litres_trial_promo)
Ode and Elegy of the Streets (#litres_trial_promo)
Near an Open Window (#litres_trial_promo)
A Love (#litres_trial_promo)
Remembrance (#litres_trial_promo)
The Death of the Emperor Tacitus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Eumenides’ Footfalls (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tears of Phaëthon’s Sisters (#litres_trial_promo)
Ancient Tragedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Horace in Athens (#litres_trial_promo)
Voice from the Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
The Tarentines Have Their Fun (#litres_trial_promo)
The Funeral of Sarpedon (#litres_trial_promo)
III: UNPUBLISHED POEMS (1877?–1923) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Beyzade to His Lady-Love (#litres_trial_promo)
Dünya Güzeli (#litres_trial_promo)
When, My Friends, I Was in Love … (#litres_trial_promo)
Nichori (#litres_trial_promo)
Song of the Heart (#litres_trial_promo)
To Stephanos Skilitsis (#litres_trial_promo)
Correspondences According to Baudelaire (#litres_trial_promo)
[Fragment of an untitled poem] (#litres_trial_promo)
“Nous N’osons Plus Chanter les Roses” (#litres_trial_promo)
Indian Image (#litres_trial_promo)
Pelasgian Image (#litres_trial_promo)
The Hereafter (#litres_trial_promo)
The Mimiambs of Herodas (#litres_trial_promo)
Azure Eyes (#litres_trial_promo)
The Four Walls of My Room (#litres_trial_promo)
Alexandrian Merchant (#litres_trial_promo)
The Lagid’s Hospitality (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Cemetery (#litres_trial_promo)
Priam’s March by Night (#litres_trial_promo)
Epitaph (#litres_trial_promo)
Displeased Theatregoer (#litres_trial_promo)
Before Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Second Odyssey (#litres_trial_promo)
He Who Fails (#litres_trial_promo)
The Pawn (#litres_trial_promo)
Dread (#litres_trial_promo)
In the House of the Soul (#litres_trial_promo)
Rain (#litres_trial_promo)
La Jeunesse Blanche (#litres_trial_promo)
Distinguishing Marks (#litres_trial_promo)
Eternity (#litres_trial_promo)
Confusion (#litres_trial_promo)
Salome (#litres_trial_promo)
Chaldean Image (#litres_trial_promo)
Julian at the Mysteries (#litres_trial_promo)
The Cat (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bank of the Future (#litres_trial_promo)
Impossible Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Addition (#litres_trial_promo)
Garlands (#litres_trial_promo)
Lohengrin (#litres_trial_promo)
Suspicion (#litres_trial_promo)
Death of a General (#litres_trial_promo)
The Intervention of the Gods (#litres_trial_promo)
King Claudius (#litres_trial_promo)
The Naval Battle (#litres_trial_promo)
When the Watchman Saw the Light (#litres_trial_promo)
The Enemies (#litres_trial_promo)
Artificial Flowers (#litres_trial_promo)
Strengthening (#litres_trial_promo)
September of 1903 (#litres_trial_promo)
December 1903 (#litres_trial_promo)
January of 1904 (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Stairs (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Theatre (#litres_trial_promo)
Poseidonians (#litres_trial_promo)
The End of Antony (#litres_trial_promo)
27 June 1906, 2 P.M. (#litres_trial_promo)
Hidden (#litres_trial_promo)
Hearing of Love (#litres_trial_promo)
“The Rest Shall I Tell in Hades to Those Below” (#litres_trial_promo)
That’s How (#litres_trial_promo)
Homecoming from Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
Fugitives (#litres_trial_promo)
Theophilus Palaeologus (#litres_trial_promo)
And I Got Down and I Lay There in Their Beds (#litres_trial_promo)
Half an Hour (#litres_trial_promo)
House with Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
A Great Feast at the House of Sosibius (#litres_trial_promo)
Simeon (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bandaged Shoulder (#litres_trial_promo)
Coins (#litres_trial_promo)
It Was Taken (#litres_trial_promo)
From the Drawer (#litres_trial_promo)
Prose Poems (#litres_trial_promo)
The Regiment of Pleasure (#litres_trial_promo)
Ships (#litres_trial_promo)
Clothes (#litres_trial_promo)
Poems Written in English (#litres_trial_promo)
[More Happy Thou, Performing Member] (#litres_trial_promo)
Leaving Therápia (#litres_trial_promo)
Darkness and Shadows (#litres_trial_promo)
IV: THE UNFINISHED POEMS (1918–1932) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Item in the Paper (#litres_trial_promo)
It Must Have Been the Spirits (#litres_trial_promo)
And Above All Cynegirus (#litres_trial_promo)
Antiochus the Cyzicene (#litres_trial_promo)
On the Jetty (#litres_trial_promo)
Athanasius (#litres_trial_promo)
The Bishop Pegasius (#litres_trial_promo)
After the Swim (#litres_trial_promo)
Birth of a Poem (#litres_trial_promo)
Ptolemy the Benefactor (or Malefactor) (#litres_trial_promo)
The Dynasty (#litres_trial_promo)
From the Unpublished History (#litres_trial_promo)
The Rescue of Julian (#litres_trial_promo)
The Photograph (#litres_trial_promo)
The Seven Holy Children (#litres_trial_promo)
Among the Groves of the Promenades (#litres_trial_promo)
The Patriarch (#litres_trial_promo)
On Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
Epitaph of a Samian (#litres_trial_promo)
Remorse (#litres_trial_promo)
The Emperor Conon (#litres_trial_promo)
Hunc Deorum Templis (#litres_trial_promo)
Crime (#litres_trial_promo)
Of the Sixth or Seventh Century (#litres_trial_promo)
Tigranocerta (#litres_trial_promo)
Abandonment (#litres_trial_promo)
Nothing About the Lacedaemonians (#litres_trial_promo)
Zenobia (#litres_trial_promo)
Company of Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Agelaus (#litres_trial_promo)
The Fragmentary Sketches (#litres_trial_promo)
[Bondsman and Slave] (#litres_trial_promo)
[Colors] (#litres_trial_promo)
[My Soul Was on My Lips] (#litres_trial_promo)
[Matthew First, First Luke] (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Textual Permissions (#litres_trial_promo)
A Note About the Translator (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Daniel Mendelsohn (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
INTRODUCTION
The Poet-Historian
“OUTSIDE HIS POETRY Cavafy does not exist.” Today, seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the judgment passed in 1946 by his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh at the time, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious life, no great fame or recognition until relatively late in life (and even then, hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. All this—the ordinariness, the obscurity (whether intentional or not)—stands in such marked contrast to the poetry, with its haunted memories of passionate encounters in the present and its astoundingly rich imagination of the Greek past, from Homer to Byzantium, from the great capital of Alexandria to barely Hellenized provincial cities in the Punjab, that it is hard not to agree with Seferis that the “real” life of the poet was, in fact, completely interior; and that outside that imagination and those memories, there was little of lasting interest.
As the man and everyone who knew him have passed into history, the contrast between the life and the art has made it easy to think of Cavafy in the abstract, as an artist whose work exists untethered to a specific moment in time. This trend has been given impetus by the two elements of his poetry for which he is most famous: his startlingly contemporary subject (one of his subjects, at any rate), and his appealingly straightforward style. Certainly there have always been many readers who appreciate the so-called historical poems, set in marginal Mediterranean locales and long-dead eras and tart with mondain irony and a certain weary Stoicism. (“Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey; / without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road. / But now she has nothing left to give you,” he writes in what is perhaps his most famous evocation of ancient Greek culture, which tells us that the journey is always more important than the inevitably disappointing destination.) But it is probably fair to say that Cavafy’s popular reputation currently rests almost entirely on the remarkably prescient way in which those other, “sensual” poems, as often as not set in the poet’s present, treat the ever-fascinating and pertinent themes of erotic longing, fulfillment, and loss; the way, too, in which memory preserves what desire so often cannot sustain. That the desire and longing were for other men only makes him seem the more contemporary, the more at home in our own times.
As for the style, it is by now a commonplace that Cavafy’s language, because it generally shuns conventional poetic devices—image, simile, metaphor, specialized diction—is tantamount to prose. One of the first to make this observation was Seferis himself, during the same 1946 lecture at Athens in which he passed judgment on Cavafy’s life. “Cavafy stands at the boundary where poetry strips herself in order to become prose,” he remarked, although not without admiration. “He is the most anti-poetic (or a-poetic) poet I know.” Bare of its own nuances, that appraisal, along with others like it, has inevitably filtered into the popular consciousness and been widely accepted—not least, because the idea of a plainspoken, contemporary Cavafy, impatient with the frills and fripperies characteristic of his Belle Epoque youth, dovetails nicely with what so many see as his principal subject, one that seems to be wholly contemporary, too.
No one more than Cavafy, who studied history not only avidly but with a scholar’s respect for detail and meticulous attention to nuance, would have recognized the dangers of abstracting people from their historical contexts; and nowhere is such abstraction more dangerous than in the case of Cavafy himself. To be sure, his work—the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets—is timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing particulars of the poet’s life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him—one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself). His style, to begin with, is far less prosaic, far richer and more musical, and indeed is rooted far more deeply in the nineteenth century—which, astoundingly it sometimes seems, he inhabited for more than half his life—than is generally credited. (Some readers will be surprised to learn that many of Cavafy’s lyrics, until he was nearly forty, were cast as sonnets or other elaborate verse forms.) As for his subject, there is a crucial specificity there as well, one that tends to be neglected because it can strike readers as abstruse. Here I refer to those poems that are deliberately set in the obscurer margins, both geographical and temporal, of the Greek past: poems that, because they seem not to have much to do with our concerns today, are too often passed over in favor of the works with more obvious contemporary appeal.
The aim of the present translation and commentary is to restore the balance, to allow the reader to recapture some of that specificity of both content and, particularly, form. Any translation of a significant work of literature is, to some extent, as much a response to other translations of that work as to the work itself; the present volume is no exception. The most important and popular English translations of Cavafy in the twentieth century were those of John Mavrogordato (1951), Rae Dalven (1961), and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1975); the latter in particular, with its briskly contemporary tone, its spare prosody, and its arresting use of Modern Greek spellings, was instrumental in persuading a new and younger audience that Cavafy’s “unmistakable tone of voice,” as Auden memorably put it, was one worth listening to. And yet precisely because (as Auden went on to observe) that tone of voice seems always to “survive translation,” I have focused my attention on other aspects of the poetry. In attempting to restore certain formal elements in particular, to convey the subtleties of language, diction, meter, and rhyme that enrich Cavafy’s ostensibly prosaic poetry, this translation seeks to give to the interested reader today, as much as possible, a Cavafy who looks, feels, and sounds in English the way he looks, feels, and sounds in Greek. A Greek, to deal with first things first, that is not at all a straightforward and unadorned everyday language, but which, as I explain below in greater detail, was a complex and subtle amalgam of contemporary and archaic forms, one that perfectly mirrored, and expressed, the blurring of the ancient and the modern that is the great hallmark of his subject matter. And a Greek, too, whose internal cadences and natural music the poet exploited thoroughly. There is no question that Cavafy in Greek is poetry, and beautiful poetry at that: deeply, hauntingly rhythmical, sensuously assonant when not actually rhyming. It seemed to me worthwhile to try to replicate these elements whenever it was possible to do so.
Cavafy’s content also merits renewed attention—both the specific subjects of individual poems and also his larger artistic project, which in fact holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace. For this reason I have provided extensive Notes in addition to a general Introduction. A necessary aspect of the project of presenting Cavafy anew to a public that enjoys poetry but is unlikely to be familiar with many of the eras and places where he likes to situate his poems (late Hellenistic Syria, say, or the fourteenth century in Byzantium; Seleucia, Cyrene, Tigranocerta) is to provide readers with the rich background necessary to decipher those works. Cavafy seems to have inhabited the remote past as fully as he inhabited the recent past, and so to appreciate his poems fully, with their nuances and, so often, their ironies—the latter in particular arising from the tension between what the characters in the poem knew while events were transpiring and what we know now, one or two millennia later—the reader also needs to be able to inhabit both of those pasts; to know what they knew then, and to know what we know now, too.
Readers will also find commentary on certain poems with subjects and settings that might not, at first, appear to require elucidation: poetic creation, erotic desire, the recent past. And yet however familiar or obvious to us the emotions that Cavafy describes may seem to be (the feeling of being “special”—of belonging to a rarefied elite—that comes with being a creative artist), or however self-evident or transparent the circumstances about which he writes, it is worth keeping in mind that the poet’s presentation of such themes was often deeply marked by his reading in the poets and authors of his time—or unexpectedly indebted to his lifelong immersion in ancient history. Our understanding of an ostensibly simple short poem like “Song of Ionia,” for instance—a poem that seems to revel straightforwardly in the fizzy possibility that even today the old gods still dart among the hills on the coast of Ionia—is deepened when we learn that it stemmed from the poet’s poignant vision, while reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of the late Roman emperor Attalus (who was born in Ionia) “singing a touching song—some reminiscence of Ionia and of the days when the gods were not yet dead.” By the same token, “But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent,” a poem about the special perception granted to certain gifted men, begins with an epigraph from an ancient biography of the first-century B.C. sage Apollonius of Tyana; but the reader who is given a note explaining who Apollonius was, without being made aware of the strong influence exerted by Baudelaire and the nineteenth-century French Parnassian school on the young Cavafy’s thinking about poetry and “special” vision, is being deprived of a full appreciation of the poem.
That Apollonius poem, which comments implicitly on the role of the artist in the present even as it invokes a very ancient text, embodies a crucial aspect of the entire Cavafian oeuvre. Despite the persistent tendency to divide Cavafy’s poems into two categories—scholarly poems set in the ancient world, and poems about sexual love set in a more or less recognizable present—there is an overarching and crucial coherence to the work as a whole, one we can grasp only when we unravel the meaning of the poet’s famous description of himself as not “a poet only” but as a “poet-historian.” To fail to appreciate his unique perspective, one that (as it were) allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye, is to be deprived of a chance to see the great and moving unity of the poet’s lifelong project.
The Introduction that follows provides a brief survey of the life, in order to give readers a sense of who Cavafy was “outside his poetry”; an extended critical appreciation of the work; a discussion of Cavafy’s handling of formal devices such as rhyme, meter, and enjambment; a note on the arrangement of the various groups of poems in this volume (always a thorny issue in the case of a poet who himself never published a complete collection of his poems); and, finally, an overview of the “Unfinished Poems,” the thirty nearly complete drafts that the poet left among his papers at his death, and which appeared in English for the first time in my translation of The Unfinished Poems (2009). It is my hope that the essay will serve to do what an Introduction is supposed to do if we take seriously the etymology of the word, which is to lead someone into something—the something, in this case, being a destination every bit as worthwhile as the journey.
I
IN ONE SENSE, it was an unexceptional life—or, at least, no more exceptional or distinguished than the lives of certain other great poets, in whom the richness of the work stands in striking contrast to the relative uneventfulness of the life. (Emily Dickinson, say.) Constantine Petrou Cavafy—the Anglicized spelling of the Greek Kavafis was one that Cavafy and his family invariably used—was born in Alexandria in 1863, the youngest of seven surviving sons of parents whose families were not at all untypical of the far-flung Greek diaspora, with its hints of vanished empire. Their roots could be traced not only to the Phanar, the Greek community clustered around the Patriarchate in Constantinople, and to Nichori (Turkish Yeniköy) in the Upper Bosporus, but also to Caesarea, Antioch, and to Jassy, in present-day Moldavia. His father, Peter John Cavafy, was a partner in a flourishing family business devoted to corn and cotton export that eventually had offices in London and Liverpool as well as in several cities in Egypt; after moving from Constantinople to London, he finally settled in Alexandria, which was ruled at the time by the Muslim Khedive but had a large population of Europeans. There he would be considered one of the most important merchants in the mid-1850s—not coincidentally, a time when the Crimean War resulted in a steep rise in the price of grain. The poet’s mother, Haricleia Photiades, the daughter of a diamond merchant from Constantinople, counted an archbishop of Caesarea and a Prince of Samos among her relations. At the height of their wealth and social success in Alexandrian society, the parents of the future poet had, in addition to their other servants, an Italian coachman and an Egyptian groom. Said Pasha, the Egyptian viceroy, paid attentions to Haricleia that were, if we are to judge from the photographs of her, purely a matter of politeness; Peter John received a decoration from the Khedive at the opening of the Suez Canal.
What effect the memory of such glory and prestige—carefully tended and endlessly polished by his mother long after she’d become a widow living in not very genteel poverty—might have had on her impressionable and imaginative youngest son, we can only guess at; but it is surely no accident that so much of Cavafy’s poetry is torn between deep sentiment about the lost riches of the past and the intelligent child’s rueful, sharp-eyed appreciation for the dangers of glib nostalgia. For his father’s premature death, when Constantine was only seven, would bring hard times to Haricleia and her seven sons, from which the family fortunes would never really recover: Peter John had lived well but not wisely. For several years the widow Cavafy and her three younger sons ambled back and forth between Paris and London and Liverpool, relying on the generosity of her husband’s brothers. They stayed in England for five years, where Cavafy acquired the slight British inflection that, we are told, accented his Greek. When it became clear that the surviving brothers had hopelessly bungled their own affairs, Haricleia returned to Alexandria in 1877, when Cavafy was fourteen. With the exception of a three-year sojourn in Constantinople, from 1882 to 1885, following the British bombardment of Alexandria (a response to Egyptian nationalist violence against some of the city’s European inhabitants; the bombardment largely destroyed the family home), Cavafy would never live anywhere else again.
For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:
And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.
At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called Constantinopoliad: An Epic, which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation; he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose Le Côté de Guermantes he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.
At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee of the Hellenistic, the Late Antique peripheries, had always been indifferent to it, the great symbol of High Classicism. He likely fell in love there with a young littérateur called Alexander Mavroudis; but about this, like so much of his erotic life, we will never have more than the odd hint. A few years later—by now his mother had been dead for almost a decade—he came to live at the overstuffed apartment on Rue Lepsius (today the Cavafy Museum), where he would spend the rest of his life. For Sareyannis, who wrote a reminiscence of his friend for an Athens journal in 1944, it is only too clear that the poet’s taste in decor was clearly no better than his taste in fiction:
Cavafy’s flat was on an upper floor of a rather lower-class, unkempt apartment house. Upon entering, one saw a wide hall laden with furniture. No walls were to be seen anywhere, as they were covered with paintings and, most of all, with shelves or Arabian étagères holding countless vases—small ones, large ones, even enormous ones. Various doors were strung along that hall; the last one opened onto the salon where the poet received his visitors. At one time I greatly admired that salon, but one morning in 1929, as I was passing by to pick up some collections of Cavafy’s poetry to be delivered to friends of his in Paris, I waited alone there for quite a while and was able to study it detachedly. With surprise I realized for the first time that it was crowded with the most incongruous things: faded velvet armchairs, old Bokhara and Indian stuffs at the windows and on the sofa, a black desk with gilt ornament, folding chairs like those found in colonial bungalows, shelves on the walls and tables with countless little columns and mother-of-pearl, a koré from Tanagra, tasteless turn-of-the-century vases, every kind of Oriental rug, Chinese vases, paintings, and so on and so on. I could single out nothing as exceptional and really beautiful; the way everything was amassed reminded me of a secondhand furniture store. Could that hodgepodge have been in the taste of the times? I had read similar descriptions of the homes of Anatole France and of Villiers de l’Isle Adam, who were also, both of them, lovers of beauty and gave careful attention to their writing. Whether Cavafy himself chose and collected those assorted objects or whether he inherited them, I do not know; what is certain is that Cavafy’s hand, his design, could not be felt in any of that. I imagine that he just came slowly to love them, with time, as they were gradually covered with dust and memories, as they became no longer just objects, but ambiance. (tr. Diana Haas)
The cluttered, déclassé surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste: Cavafy’s apartment, like his job, gave little outward sign of the presence of a great artistic mind—the place from which the poetry really came. The more you know about the life, the more Seferis’s pronouncement that Cavafy existed only in his poetry seems just.
Most evenings, as he grew older, found him at home, either alone with a book or surrounded by a crowd of people that was, in every way, Alexandrian: a mixture of Greeks, Jews, Syrians, visiting Belgians; established writers such as the novelist and children’s book author Penelope Delta, Nikos Kazantzakis, a critic or two, younger friends and aspiring writers. (Among the latter, eventually, was Alexander Sengopoulos, known as Aleko, who was very possibly the illegitimate son of one of Cavafy’s brothers—acquaintances remarked on a striking family resemblance—and would eventually be his heir.) To these friends and admirers the poet liked to hold forth, in a voice of unusual charm and authority and in the mesmerizing if idiosyncratic manner memorably described by E. M. Forster, who met Cavafy during World War I, when Forster was working for the Red Cross in Alexandria. It was Forster who would do more than anyone to bring Cavafy to the attention of the English-speaking world, and it is to him that we owe the by-now canonical description of the poet as “a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.” Cavafy, the novelist recalled,
may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence—an immense complicated yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed and of reservations that really do reserve; a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. … It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia Minor. It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English, or French. And despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, despite the matured charity of its judgments, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet.
It was, in other words, a life that was a bit of a hybrid: the fervent, unseen artistic activity, the increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence, the tawdry quartier, the abstruse, rather baroque conversation. Not coincidentally, the latter pair of adjectives well describes a particular literary manner—characteristic of the Hellenistic authors who flocked to the era’s cultural capital, and who were so beloved of Cavafy—known as “Alexandrian.”
In 1932, Cavafy, a lifelong smoker, was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. That summer he traveled to Athens for the tracheotomy that would deprive him forever of the famous voice; from that point on, he was forced to communicate in a distorted whisper and, later on, by means of penciled notes. He returned home in the autumn, after declining an invitation from his wealthy friend Antony Benakis, a collector and the brother of Penelope Delta, to stay with him in Athens. (“Mohammed Aly Square is my aunt. Rue Cherif Pasha is my first cousin, and the Rue de Ramleh my second. How can I leave them?”) After first refusing and then allowing himself to be visited by the Patriarch of the city, he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant concentricity, a perfect closure, that are nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by authors when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.
2
“IN THE POEMS of his youth and even certain poems of his middle age he quite often appears ordinary and lacking in any great distinction,” Seferis remarked during his 1946 lecture—another rather severe judgment whose underlying shrewdness cannot be denied, when we go back to so many of the poems Cavafy wrote in his thirties and even early forties, with their obvious debts to other writers and thinkers, their evasions and obfuscations. And then, as Seferis went on to say, “something extraordinary happens.” As will be evident by now, little about the external events of his life helps to account for that remarkable evolutionary leap; in this respect Cavafy resembles, more than a little, his near contemporary Proust, who similarly underwent a profound but invisible metamorphosis that, by his late forties, had transformed him from a dabbling littérateur into a major artist. Only by tracing the course of Cavafy’s interior life, his intellectual development, from the 1890s to the 1910s is it possible to discern the path by which (to paraphrase that other great Greek poet again) Cavafy went from being a mediocre writer to a great one.
In the 1880s and 1890s, when he was in his twenties and thirties, Constantine Cavafy was a young man with modest literary ambitions, steadily writing quantities of verse as well as contributing articles, reviews, and essays, most in Greek but some in English (a language in which he was perfectly at home as the result of those adolescent years spent in England), on a number of idiosyncratic subjects, to Alexandrian and Athenian journals. (“Coral from a Mythological Viewpoint,” “Give Back the Elgin Marbles,” Keats’s Lamia.) Such writings, as well as the historical poems that belong to this early period, already betray not only a deep familiarity with a broad range of modern historians, whom he read in Greek, English, and French, but also the meticulous attentiveness to primary sources in the original languages—the Classical and later Greek and Roman historians, the early Church Fathers, Byzantine chroniclers—that we tend to associate with scholars rather than poets.
The writings of those early years indicate that Cavafy was struggling to find an artistically satisfying way in which to unite the thematic strands that would come to characterize his work, of which the consuming interest in Hellenic history was merely one. (An interest, it is crucial to emphasize, that rather strikingly disdained the conventional view of what constituted “the glory that was Greece”—which is to say, the Archaic and Classical eras—in favor of the long post-Classical phase, from the Hellenistic monarchies through Late Antiquity to the fall of Byzantium.) There was, too, the poet’s very strong identity as a product of the Greek diaspora, an Orthodox Christian and the scion of that once-distinguished Phanariote family who saw, in the thousand-year arc of Byzantine history, not a decadent fall from idealized Classical heights—the standard Western European attitude, crystallized by Gibbon—but a continuous and coherent thread of Greek identity that seamlessly bound the antique past to the present.
And, finally, there was homosexual sensuality. However tormented and secretive he may have been about his desire for other men, Cavafy came, after a certain point in his career, to write about that desire with an unapologetic directness so unsensational, so matter-of-fact, that we can forget that barely ten years had passed since Oscar Wilde’s death when the first of these openly homoerotic poems was published. As the poet himself later acknowledged, he had to reach his late forties before he found a way to unify his passion for the past, his passion for “Hellenic” civilization, and his passion for other men in poems that met his rigorous standards for publication.
The earliest poems we have date to the poet’s late teens, the period when he was sojourning with his mother’s family in and around Constantinople. These include dutiful if unpersuasive exercises on Romantic themes (ecstatic encomia to the lovely eyes of fetching lasses; a Grecified adaptation of Lady Anne Barnard’s ballad on love and loss in the Highlands) and, perhaps predictably, some flights of Turkish Orientalism, complete with smoldering beauties locked up in harems. As time passed, he was drawn more and more to recent and contemporary currents in Continental literature. The Parnassian movement of the 1860s and 1870s, in particular, with its eager response to Théophile Gautier’s call for an “Art for Art’s sake,” its insistence on elevating polished form over earnest subjective, social, and political content, and particularly its invitation to a return to the milieus and models of the antique Mediterranean past, had special appeal. (That a number of Cavafy’s poems from this period are sonnets is surely a testament to the influence of the Parnassians, who prized the form for its rigorous technical requirements.)
From the Parnasse it was but a short step to Baudelaire, a Greek translation of whose “Correspondences” constitutes part of one 1892 poem; and, ultimately, to Symbolism. It is not hard to see the allure that the French writer’s elevation of the poet as a member of an elite—a gifted seer whose special perceptions were denied to the common mass—had for the young Cavafy, in whom a taste for the past, as well as a necessarily secret taste for specialized erotic pleasures, coexisted. Lines from the second half of “Correspondences According to Baudelaire” suggests how thoroughly the young Alexandrian had absorbed the lessons of the pioneering French modernist:
Do not believe only what you see.
The vision of poets is sharper still.
To them, Nature is a familiar garden.
In a shadowed paradise, those other people
grope along the cruel road.
With Cavafy, the inevitably self-justifying preoccupation with the notion of a rarefied artistic elite (“Cavafy’s attitude toward the poetic vocation is an aristocratic one,” wrote Auden, perhaps a trifle indulgently)—an attitude irresistible, as we might imagine, to a painfully closeted gay man—was paralleled by a lifelong fascination with figures gifted with second sight, extrasensory perception, and telepathic knowledge. It found its ideal historical correlative in the first-century A.D. magus and sage Apollonius of Tyana, about whom Cavafy published three poems and, as the corpus of poems left unfinished at the time of his death now makes clear, was working on the draft of another toward the end of his life.
As with Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the later Esoteric and Decadent poets, the furious nineteenth-century obsession with progress, fueled by the technological advances of the industrial age, found no favor with the young Cavafy. His 1891 sonnet “Builders” not only makes clear his allegiance to Baudelaire’s worldview, but also sets the stage for a poetic gaze that would, for so much of his life, be backward-glancing in one way or another:
… the good builders make haste
all as one to shield their wasted labor.
Wasted, because the life of each is passed
embracing ills and sorrows for a future generation,
that this generation might know an artless
happiness, and length of days,
and wealth, and wisdom without base sweat, or servile industry.
But it will never live, this fabled generation;
its very perfection will cast this labor down
and once again their futile toil will begin.
The rejection of modern notions of progress, the inward- and backward-looking gaze, inevitably led to a flirtation with Decadence and Aestheticism as well. The same turbulently formative years of the 1890s produced, for example, a coldly glittering poem, in quatrains, on Salome, in which a young scholar, having playfully asked Salome for her own head—and having been obeyed—“orders this bloodied thing to / be taken from him, and continues / his reading of the dialogues of Plato”; one feels the spirit of Wilde hovering here. More important, the beginning of that decade saw the composition of a cycle of eleven poems, all but two of which we know by their titles alone, which were collected under the heading “Byzantine Days”—Byzantium being a milieu much beloved of the Decadents, who viewed it, of course, from the Western, rather than Eastern, European point of view. Cavafy would come to reject these poems as “unsuitable to his characters”: only two survived the later purge of his early work. It would be some time before he came to appreciate fully just how well Byzantium would serve his artistic and intellectual needs.
Indeed, by the end of the 1890s he was experiencing a profound intellectual and artistic crisis that had been precipitated by his engagement not with other poets, but with two historians. A series of reading notes on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made between 1893 (the year after he wrote the last of his “Byzantine Days” poems) and 1899, indicates a serious ongoing engagement with the great Enlightenment historian. The exasperated rejection of Gibbon’s disdainful view of Byzantium and Christianity that we find in those notes betrays the strong influence exerted by the contemporary Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, whose History of the Greek Nation expounded a Romantic-nationalist vision of a coherent Greek identity continuing unbroken from ancient to Byzantine to modern times. It was Cavafy’s reading in these two historians that led him to reject his earlier, rather facile use of history as merely the vehicle for bejeweled verses in the Parnassian mode on “Ancient Days” (one of the thematic headings into which he’d group his poems: others were “The Beginnings of Christianity,” “Passions,” and “Prisons”), and inspired him to try to find a way to integrate History and Poetry in a more intellectually and aesthetically serious way.
This intellectual crisis coincided with a devastating series of deaths of friends and family members throughout the same decade (his two closest friends, three of his six brothers, an uncle, his mother, and his maternal grandfather would all die between 1886 and 1902) and with what he obscurely referred to as a “crisis of lasciviousness,” which may or may not have had something to do with his intense attraction to Alexander Mavroudis. Together, these cerebral, emotional, and erotic upheavals culminated in a dramatic reappraisal of his life’s work thus far: the “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1902–03, to which the poet, as he turned forty, ruthlessly subjected all of his poems written up to that point, both unpublished and published. (Hence the later appellation “Repudiated” for a group of poems that he’d already published by that time and subsequently disowned.) A contemporary note that he left reveals a writer at a moment that he recognizes as one of deep significance, even if he hasn’t yet seen his way through to his ultimate destination:
After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.
Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.
Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical …
Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet—who even when he works most philosophically, remains an artist—gives one side, which does not mean that he denies the other, or even—though perhaps this is stretching the point—that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling—sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.
Very often the poet’s work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or his immediate readers: Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realizing them themselves …
My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking the poems one by one and settling them at once—following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is finished, or effacing it if vowed to destruction: or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working on them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work …
If a thought has really been true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short-lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically. (tr. Manuel Savidis)
This unsparing (if, typically, not unforgiving) self-examination was the portal to the poet’s mature period, one in which the tripartite division that he had once used to categorize his work—into “philosophical” (by which he meant provocative of reflection), “historical,” and “sensual” poems—began to disintegrate. The enriched and newly confident sense of himself as a Greek and as a man of letters that resulted from the intellectual crisis of the 1890s seems to have resulted in some kind of reconciliation with his homosexual nature, too. (The death of his mother might, in its own way, have been liberating in this respect.)
Indeed, it is no accident that Cavafy himself dated this period to the year 1911—the year in which he published “Dangerous,” the first of his poems that situated homoerotic content in an ancient setting. Nor is it a coincidence that the subject of this poem is a Syrian student living in Alexandria during the uneasy double reign of the sons of Constantine the Great, Constans and Constantius, in the fourth century A.D., at the very moment when the Roman Empire was segueing from paganism to Christianity. As if profiting from that uncertain moment, and reflecting it as well, the young man feels emboldened to give bold voice to illicit urges:
Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all.
Both the setting and the character are typical of what George Seferis described as the characteristic Cavafian milieu: “the margins of places, men, epochs … where there are many amalgams, fluctuations, transformations, transgressions.” (The reader of his poems would, indeed, do well to observe how often, and how strikingly, we encounter the vocabulary of indirect placement—“nearby,” “in front of,” “by,” “next to,” “on the side”—in these poems. The titles alone of many betray this preoccupation with the edges of spaces: “In the Entrance of the Café,” “The Mirror in the Entrance,” “On the Outskirts of Antioch.”) As he neared the age of fifty, Cavafy had at last found a way to write, without shame, about his desire—a way that suggestively conflated the various margins to which he had always been drawn: erotic, geographical, spatial, temporal.
The painfully achieved reconciliation of Gibbon’s eighteenth-century, Enlightenment view of history and Paparrigopoulos’s nineteenth-century, Romantic national feeling, coupled with a startlingly prescient twentieth-century willingness to write frankly about homosexual experience, made possible the “unique tone of voice,” as the admiring Auden described it, that is the unmistakable and inimitable hallmark of Cavafy’s work. Ironic yet never cruel, unsurprised by human frailty, including his own (“Cavafy appreciates cowardice also,” Forster wrote, “and likes the little men who can’t be consistent or maintain their ideals”), yet infinitely forgiving of it, that tone takes its darker notes from the historian’s shrewd appreciation for the ironies of human action (which inevitably result, as did the life-altering business misfortunes of his father and uncles, from imperfect knowledge, bad timing, missed opportunities, or simply bad luck); yet at the same time is richly colored by a profound sympathy for human striving in the face of impossible obstacles. (Which could be the armies of Octavian or taboos against forbidden desires.) And it is inflected, too, by the connoisseur’s unsparing and unsentimental grasp of both the pleasures and the pain to which desire makes us vulnerable.
That appreciation, that sympathy, that understanding are, of course, made possible only by Time—the medium that makes History possible, too. As I have said, for many readers, even sophisticated ones, Cavafy is a poet who wrote essentially two kinds of poems: daringly exposed verses about desire, whose frank treatment of homoerotic themes put them decades ahead of their time—and make them gratifyingly accessible; and rather abstruse historical poems, filled with obscure references to little-known and confusingly homonymous Hellenistic or Byzantine monarchs, and set in epochs that one was never held responsible for learning and places that fringed the shadowier margins of the Mediterranean map. But to divide the poet’s work in this way is to make a very serious mistake: Cavafy’s one great subject, the element that unites virtually all of his work, is Time. His poetry returns obsessively to a question that is, essentially, a historian’s question: how the passage of time affects our understanding of events—whether the time in question is the millennia that have elapsed since 31 B.C., when the Hellenophile Marc Antony’s dreams of an Eastern Empire were pulverized by Rome (the subject of seven poems), or the mere years that, in the poem “Since Nine—,” have passed since those long-ago nights that the narrator spent in bustling cafés and crowded city streets: a space of time that has since been filled with the deaths of loved ones whose value he only now appreciates, sitting alone in a room without bothering to light the lamp. What matters to Cavafy, and what so often gives his work both its profound sympathy and its rich irony, is the understanding, which as he knew so well comes too late to too many, that however fervently we may act in the dramas of our lives—emperors, lovers, magicians, scholars, pagans, Christians, catamites, stylites, artists, saints, poets—only time reveals whether the play is a tragedy or a comedy.
The references to long-vanished eras, places, and figures that we so often find in Cavafy’s poetry, and which indeed are unfamiliar even to most scholars of Classical antiquity, are, for this reason, never to be mistaken for mere exercises in abstruse pedantry. Or, indeed, for abstruseness at all. A poem’s casual allusion to, say, the autumnal thoughts of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus in the year 1180 functions quite differently from the way in which invocations of arcane material can function in (to take the well-known example of a contemporary) The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot—where the self-consciously rarefied quality of the numerous allusions is part of the texture of the poem, part of its Modernist project. Cavafy, by contrast, may be said simply to have inhabited his various pasts so fully that they are all equally present to him. Not for nothing are a striking number of his poems about nocturnal apparitions of those who have vanished into history. In “Caesarion,” for instance, a poem written in 1914 and published in 1918—the intervening years, the years of the Great War, saw the publication of a number of poems on beautiful dead youths—the beautiful (as he imagines) teenage son of Caesar and Cleopatra materializes one night in the poet’s apartment:
Ah, there: you came with your indefinite
charm …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And I imagined you so fully
that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp
went out—I deliberately let it go out—
I dared to think you came into my room,
it seemed to me you stood before me.
Such apparitions do not always belong to the distant past. In “Since Nine—,” published in 1918 and written the year before, an “apparition” of the poet’s own “youthful body” suddenly materializes in front of him one evening as he sits alone in a darkened room; similarly, in an Unfinished Poem of the same period, first drafted in 1919 and bearing the provisional title “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the poet’s own soul appears in the form of a louche youth on a street in Marseille, a place he’d visited years before—this scene replacing a decor that is itself a suggestive mélange of past and present (a commonplace settee, a piece of Archaic Greek statuary). Although in the latter poem the narrator attributes his supernatural vision to the excess of wine he’d drunk the previous night—hence the title—such apparitions are, therefore, hardly anomalous in his creative life, and symbolize a crucial theme of the entire body of work: the presence of the past in our own present. To Cavafy, figures such as those of the dead princeling and his own youthful self all inhabit the same era—the vastly arcing past that his own imagination inhabited so fully—and were therefore as alive and present to him as the whores who lived in the brothel below his apartment on the Rue Lepsius. (“Where could I better live?” he once remarked, in the worldly tone we recognize from his verse. “Under me is a house of ill repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is the church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”) It is the responsibility of the reader to inhabit that past as fully as possible, too, if only during the brief space during which he or she explores these poems. Otherwise, the meaning of many of them will be obscure, if not opaque. And the reader who, put off by that opacity, seeks out the contemporary poems while skipping over the historical poems, is missing the point of Cavafy’s work—is, like so many of his characters both real and imagined, mistaking the clouded part for the clear and illuminating whole.
The rich tension between furious human striving (political, intellectual, or erotic) in the present and the poignantly belated ability to assess the true significance of that striving indeed characterizes the most memorable of Cavafy’s poems. It is there in “Nero’s Deadline,” in which the thirty-year-old emperor, freshly back in Rome from a trip to hedonistic Greece, never dreams that “beware the age of seventy-three,” the Delphic oracle’s stern warning to him, refers not to him but to his aged general, Galba, plotting revolt in Spain, who will replace him on the imperial throne. It is there, too, in the dazzled and uncomprehending gawking on the part of the citizens of Seleucia, in “One of Their Gods,” who can’t possibly know that the stupefyingly beautiful youth whom they see passing through the marketplace on the way to the red-light district is actually one of the Greek gods. Quite typically of the great mature poetry, the confusion of the hapless observers within the poem mirrors a purposeful and productive confusion, for the reader, as to what era we are in, and indeed what order of being—human? divine? real? mythological?—we are reading about:
And as he disappeared beneath the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
making his way to the neighborhood that comes alive
only at night—that life of revels and debauch,
of every known intoxication and lust—
they’d wonder which of Them he really was
and for which of his suspect diversions
he’d come down to walk Seleucia’s streets
from his Venerable, Sacrosanct Abode.
Here we have another inscrutable apparition; and we have, too, the subtle, richly matured transformation of a theme from the early years: a message from the gods that only the elect can decipher.
The poet’s predilection for the historian’s perspective—his interest in the way in which the experiences of the present, always confusing as they occur, can only be properly understood in the future; which is to say, at the moment when the present has become the past—helps to explain why so many of the ostensibly erotic poems are, essentially, poems about the past, too. A significant number of poems about desire in the poet’s own time (or his recent past) are, in fact, cast as memories of love, or of desire. More often than not, when this poet speaks longingly of “skin, as if of jasmine” or eyes that are a “deep blue, sapphirine,” as he does in the 1914 lyric “Far Off,” he does so not as most conventional love poets might extol the virtues of their beloveds, but in his own distinctive way—which is to say, he speaks of them as a memory so far off that we cannot be sure whether the details of skin and eyes that he recalls are quite accurate:
I’d like to talk about that memory …
But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:
because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.
Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …
That August—was it August?—evening …
I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …
Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.
Even in the most intensely erotic verses, poems in which the poet reveals that he knows “love’s body … the lips, / sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness,” as he does in the 1916 poem “One Night,” the celebration of the physical turns out to be a memory:
And there, in that common, vulgar bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—
the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now
as I write, after so many years have passed!,
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.
This poet very seldom writes what we usually think of as love poetry; his verse, which if anything tends to be about desire, is also—if not primarily—about the way in which the passage of time makes possible the poetry about desire that we are reading.
That Cavafy saw not only desirable young men but desire itself through a historian’s appraising eyes helps to account for a distinctive feature of his poetry. In sharp contrast to other Greek poets of his day, he notably shuns elaborate, exotic, or self-consciously “poetic” diction; his language, so famously plain, is striking above all for its lack of precision in descriptions of physical beauty—a choice of arresting significance in a poet greatly preoccupied with desire. More often than not he will resort to abstract adjectives—oréos and émorfos, “beautiful,” idanikós, “ideal,” exaísia, “exquisite,” idonikós, “sensual,” “voluptuous,” esthitikós, “refined,” “sensitive,” “aesthetic”—where another poet might seek to evoke greater detail.
We very seldom know, in fact, just what the beautiful young men in so many of Cavafy’s poems look like. In “One of Their Gods,” the figure seen walking through the marketplace of a great city is simply “tall and perfectly beautiful”; in “Before Time Could Alter Them,” the narrator’s reverie about a long-ago affair whose premature end may have been a blessing (since it preserves the memory of the lovers’ beauty “before Time could alter them”), the lover is described as a “beautiful boy,” oréo pedí. And the climactic vision to which “Days of 1908” inexorably leads—a glimpse of a ravishing youth who is the subject of the narrator’s fascinated gaze, after the boy has stripped for a seaside bathe—reveals only that he is
flawlessly beautiful; a thing of wonder.
His hair uncombed, rising from its peak;
his limbs a little colored by the sun
What is of interest to Cavafy is not so much individual beauty, but the idea of beauty itself—what happens to it when it is filtered through the passage of many years. Significantly, one of the few poems to include some particulars of what a beautiful young man might actually look like is a poem about beauty in the abstract: the short lyric “I’ve Gazed So Much” (whose original title, it’s worth noting, was “For Beauty”):
At beauty I have gazed so much
that my vision is filled with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.
Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:
always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,
and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.
The poet’s descriptive vocabulary, then, while narrow, has the supreme advantage of imparting to his imaginations of the beautiful an abstract, philosophical dimension—and, perhaps more important, of forcing his reader to do what the historian must do, which is to apply his own imaginative powers to subjects of which, so often, few details are extant.
Indeed, if the desire that flares in so many of these poems has, more often than not, been extinguished, the compensation for all those vanished or disappointed or broken-off love affairs is an artistic one: for we are always reminded that the poem itself is the vehicle for the preservation of desire, and of beauty, that otherwise would have disappeared. This important theme has its roots in the young poet’s debt to the Parnasse and to Baudelaire, with their elevation of the poet as a craftsman and seer whose gifts are denied to the common masses. A crucial aspect of this theme, developed as the poet evolved, was that the artistic creation ultimately has a life more substantial than the object that inspired it. Two decades after the early poems of the 1890s, with their heavy debt to those French poets, the theme recurs with greater subtlety, in suggestive ways. In the 1913 poem “In Stock,” for instance, a jeweler—a stand-in for the poet, of course—fashions fabulous pieces that may mimic nature, but are symbols of the superiority of his creative fantasy to any vulgar needs of the public:
Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,
amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,
and judges, and wanted them; not in the way
he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away
in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the store,
he takes other jewels out of the cases to sell—
. . . .
And in another poem of virtually the same period, “Painted,” written in 1914 and published in 1916, the theme of the superior powers of Art is again stressed. Here, however, it is not natural life but a beautiful boy who becomes the object of Art’s transformative, and in this case healing, power:
In this painting, now, I’m looking at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be he’s worn out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.—
Like this, for some time, I sit and look.
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
Another twenty years later, the theme of the artist’s observing gaze and creative powers as the indispensable vehicles for both an emotionally charged reverie and a creative commemoration has its most sublime expression in the magnificent late poem “Days of 1908,” published the year before the poet’s death. Here, the beautiful but down-at-the-heels young Alexandrian, full of his schemes to make, win, or borrow money (a character we have met before, to be sure), never dreams, as he strips for his seaside swim, that the beauty by which he may well end up making his living will be immortalized in unimagined ways by the poem’s anonymous speaker. Or, rather, by Time itself, since the “you” to whom this speaker addresses himself is, in fact, the days of the long-past summer of 1908:
Your vision preserved him
as he was when he undressed, when he flung off
the unworthy clothes, and the mended underwear.
And he’d be left completely nude; flawlessly beautiful;
a thing of wonder.
His hair uncombed, springing back;
his limbs a little colored by the sun
from his nakedness in the morning at the baths,
and at the seashore.
The hotly yearning heart, with its ambitions, its strivings; the coolly assessing mind, to which those yearnings can appear so puny, even absurd, when measured against the epic forces of history and time and chance. Beauty, yes—the red lips, the jasmine skin, the sapphire eyes: but we can only know that beauty, know about the red and jasmine and sapphire, because of the assessing, measured gaze of the observing artist who beheld and touched and looked; and remembered. The rich, perfervid, sensuous present of most lives is lost forever to recollection: only the living memory of that past, memory that is itself alchemized into something permanent, and permanently beautiful, by poetry, “preserves” them forever. The past and the present; the past in the present. Small wonder that Cavafy, toward the end of his life, insisted that “plenty of poets are poets only, but I am a historical poet.” Those last two words are one way of rendering what he said in Greek, which was piïtís istorikós; but the adjective istorikós can also be a substantive, “historian.” There is no way to prove it, but I suspect that what he meant was precisely what his work makes clear: that he was a “poet-historian.”
3
THE READER WHO takes the time to immerse himself in Cavafy’s rich and idiosyncratic poetic world should be aware of certain technical features, not least because they raise questions about the aims and strategies of any given translation.
One of the techniques of which Cavafy made use to convey the suggestive interplay of past and present so important to his work is one that poses particularly thorny difficulties for the English translator. As a Greek author writing at the turn of the last century, Cavafy had available to him two quite different registers of the language: demotic Greek, the vernacular spoken by the people, and the far more formal Katharevousa, or “pure” Greek, the high language of literature, intellectual life, and officialdom. (The accent falls on the third syllable.) This artificial form of the language, invented at the turn of the nineteenth century by an eminent literary and political figure who had studied Classics, grafted much of the vocabulary and many of the more complicated grammatical forms of Classical Greek onto the everyday language as a means of “purifying” it of non-Greek elements that had accreted during centuries of foreign influence and occupation; its adoption was, therefore, a political gesture as much as anything else. Katharevousa became the official language of the state, and was used in newspapers, official publications, and government edicts. It was, moreover, de rigueur in institutions of higher learning.
Katharevousa savored, then, of official culture, the classical past, and high art. (To Forster, it “has tried to revive the classical tradition, and only succeeds in being dull.”) Just as Cavafy began writing, however, katharevousa—after having achieved preeminence over the years as the primary vehicle for literary expression, one increasingly characterized by an elaborate diction and style—was being rejected by the so-called Generation of 1880, a literary movement led by the prolific poet, dramatist, and critic Kostas Palamas, who advocated the use of demotic in literature. Cavafy’s earliest works were written in katharevousa, but in the early 1890s he had begun using demotic; the unpublished poem “Good and Bad Weather” (1893) was the first poem written entirely in demotic.
And yet he often chose not to write entirely in demotic. A distinctive feature of Cavafy’s style—perhaps the distinctive feature—is that he continued to mingle katharevousa diction and grammar (as well as pure Classical Greek words from time to time, to say nothing of citations from ancient texts) with demotic. The result is a poetry that has a unique and inimitable texture, very often plain and admirably direct but starched, too, with a loftier, more archaic and ceremonious language—like the talk of a fluent and charming raconteur (like Cavafy himself) that is sprinkled with locutions from the King James Bible. For this reason, it is a mistake to overemphasize, as many critics and admirers (and translators) have done, the laconic plainness of Cavafy’s diction; such an emphasis fails to convey the frequent strangeness of the diction, the “unique and cunning alloy,” as the great English travel writer and Hellenophile Patrick Leigh Fermor so marvelously put it in his essay “Landmarks in Decline,”
in which the fragments of legal diction and ancient Greek and inscriptions on tombs and old chronicles—one can almost hear the parchment creak and the flutter of papyrus—are closely haunted by the Anthology and the Septuagint; it is contained in a medium demotic perversely stiffened with mandarin and beaten at last into an instrument of expression which is austere and frugal in the extreme.
Those strange irruptions of mandarin stiffness deserve to be heard. When, in “Philhellene,” Cavafy ends a monologue by a vulgar eastern potentate—eager to indulge in superficial shows of Hellenic style despite that fact (which his monologue inadvertently betrays) that he is crassly disdainful of its substance—with an awkward shift into Classical Greek (on the word “unhellenized,” no less), he tells us more about the speaker’s pretensions than a laborious exposition could.
The deployment of this hybrid language—a verbal expression, you could say, of that larger and abiding fascination with margins, amalgams, cultural “alloys”—is, indeed, crucial for the interpretation of many poems. Two examples, one from a poem that treats a contemporary erotic theme, the other from a poem with an ancient setting, will help illuminate Cavafy’s subtle technique, while showing my own strategies for rendering them in English.
The 1928 poem “Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11” treats a favorite theme: the squalid life of an impoverished young man whose spectacular beauty stands in stark contrast to his humble circumstances—and, in this case, to his convenient morals. (We’re told that the lovely blacksmith’s assistant is willing to sell his favors, if necessary, in order to buy a coveted tie or expensive shirt.) In the poem’s final stanza, the narrator wonders whether even ancient Alexandria, famed for its louche and comely youths, could claim a young man as lovely as this down-at-the-heels boy. Here, the contrast between the allure of the youths in the glittering ancient city and that of a common blacksmith’s boy is suggestively conveyed by the shift in tone between the adjective used of the former, perikallis, and the noun used of the latter, agori: for the former is a high-flown katharevousa word taken directly from the Ancient Greek (which I translate by means of the rather stiff “beauteous”), while the latter is a noun as worn and plain as a pebble: “lad.”
Even more strikingly, in “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” first written in 1910 and published in 1916, a large part of the meaning of the entire poem rests on the difference between a katharevousa and a demotic word, both of which mean the same thing. Set in the second century B.C., as the Hellenistic monarchies founded after the death of Alexander were crumbling before an emergent Rome, the poem treats the painful disappointment felt by one Greek monarch, Demetrius I Soter of the Seleucid house in Asia, on hearing that his Egyptian counterpart, Ptolemy VI, had cast aside his royal dignity and traveled to Rome as a supplicant in order to appeal for help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. The first two stanzas evoke Demetrius’s grandiose regard for the dignity “befitting … an Alexandrian Greek monarch”: to the impoverished Ptolemy he offers lavish clothing, jewels, and a retinue for his presentation to the Senate.
The Seleucid monarch’s attitude is pointedly contrasted with Ptolemy’s canny appreciation for political realities; he knows that he’s likelier to obtain Roman aid if he appears humble when he makes his appeal. His abject willingness to come down off his royal pedestal is brilliantly evoked in the Greek. In the first line of the stanza he is described as having come for the purposes of epaiteia, a noun with roots in Classical and Byzantine Greek that means everything from “a request” to “begging”; but in the last line, the verb used for the reason for his visit is the demotic zondanevo, “to beg.” Hence the shift from the high to the demotic forms, both words meaning the same thing, itself beautifully reflects the demotion in his status from an ostensibly independent ruler to a supplicant reliant on the power of others. In my rendering of these lines, I have attempted to suggest this tonal shift by using an abstruse term in the first instance, and a familiar, monosyllabic word in the second:
But the Lagid, who had come a mendicant,
knew his business and refused it all:
He didn’t need these luxuries at all.
Dressed in worn old clothes, he humbly entered Rome,
and found lodgings with a minor craftsman.
And then he presented himself to the Senate
as an ill-fortuned and impoverished man,
that with greater success he might beg.
As these two examples indicate, I have tried to convey distinctions between katharevousa and demotic, when possible, by using high Latinate forms in the case of the former, and ordinary, plain Anglo-Saxon derivations in the case of the latter—an imperfect, but I hope suggestive, means of conveying this vital aspect of Cavafy’s technique. In certain cases, moreover (“Philhellene,” for one), I have used British spellings when rendering katharevousa, since these—as indeed with the archaic spellings of certain words that Cavafy often favored—instantly and quite effectively (to the American eye) signal a different, often elite cultural milieu, which is part of katharevousa’s flavor.
There are other stylistic matters, resulting in other choices I have made, with which the reader should be acquainted. However much Cavafy’s language may eschew the devices—metaphor, simile, figurative and “lyrical” language—that we normally associate with poetry, his verse, in Greek, is unmistakably musical. This music results principally from two stylistic features, which I have taken pains, whenever possible, to reproduce.
The first is meter. Very often Cavafy’s lines have a strong iambic rhythm; very often, too, he favors a five-beat line that English speakers are familiar with—as Cavafy himself was, from his deep reading of British poets. (There is, indeed, a distinctly English cast to many of his poems, as commentators have observed.) Although he will often preserve a strict iambic pentameter, he just as often loosens the line when it suits his purposes. In “Nero’s Deadline,” for instance, we first learn about the Delphic oracle’s warning (that the emperor should “beware the age of seventy-three”), as the direct object of the verb “heard,” in a line with a strictly iambic beat with precisely ten syllables (I have marked the stresses with acute accents):
tou Dhélfikoú mantíou tón khrismó
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle
Here, the preciseness of the meter vividly suggests the ineluctable character of the oracle itself. By contrast, the first line of the second stanza, in which the poet describes how Nero returns to Rome from a pleasure trip to Athens exhausted by his sensual indulgences, Cavafy maintains a five-beat line while padding it with five extra syllables:
Tóra stin Rhómi tha epitrépsei kourasménos lígo
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little bit wearied
The subtle loosening of the line nicely conveys the relaxation of the self-involved Nero, who is blithely unaware that his days of aesthetic and erotic pleasure are numbered.
These strong and suggestive rhythms structure much of the verse, from the early sonnets of the 1890s to the poems of his last decade; without them, the poetry, already devoid of the usual devices, might well seem flat-footed in a way that indeed reminds us that both the Ancient and the Modern Greek word for prose, pezos, literally means “pedestrian”—that is, language that lumbers along arhythmically instead of dancing. Fortunately for the English translator, English itself falls quite naturally into the rhythms that Cavafy favored.
Cavafy is, indeed, endlessly inventive with his meters. In certain early lyrics, for example “La Jeunesse Blanche” (1895) and “Chaldean Image” (1896), the very elaborate metrical schemes betray the young poet’s infatuation with the Continental poetry of the day; while in others, like the Repudiated Poem “A Love” (1896), we hear the thrumming fifteen-syllable beat characteristic of the Greek popular songs so beloved of this poet. (In a famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Cavafy rather suggestively casts the anxious questions of the speakers in this “Greek” rhythm, while the answers that come back are in “English” iambics.) One particularly noteworthy metrical innovation can be observed in a number of lyrics composed in what George Seferis, in commenting on these poems, referred to as a “tango” rhythm. Each line of these poems is composed of two half lines of three beats each; the lines are separated by white space. Hence, for instance, the opening of “In Despair” looks like this:
These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watches Roman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.
The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.
“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:
because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.
The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word
, “shame,” which is pronounced ehdhó, while line 3 (literally, “And I sit and lose all hope now here”) ends with the demotic word
, “here,” which has the identical pronunciation. In the first two couplets, moreover, the katharevousa usages are associated with the oppressive “them” (without shame, walls), while the demotic usages are associated with the imprisoned “I” (here, this fate). The only pairing in which the rhymed words are both in the demotic is that of lines 6 and 8.The former (literally, “O while they built the walls, how could I not pay attention?”) ends with the verb proséxo, “pay attention”—but to the Greek ear, the word is indistinguishable from the prepositional phrase pros éxo, “towards the outside”: which is to say, the very direction in which the speaker failed to look. (To the Greek ear, it sounds as if the line is going to be something like, “O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look towards the outside?”) In my translation I have tried to convey this provocative confusion by translating the first word by means of the casual English expression “look out,” which has the further advantage of enabling the loaded repetition, which we find in the Greek, of the word “out.”
Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a. Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme to hammer home a crucial point. The first stanza provides a useful example:
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (thaméni, the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek, tha méni, “will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of thaméni, inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (khalassa, “wasted”/thalassa, “sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.
In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:
Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá
That year he found himself without a job;
ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá
and so he made a living from cards,
apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.
from backgammon, and what he borrowed.
The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of the boy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in the second:
His clothes were in a dreadful state.
There was one suit that he would always wear,
a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.
Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,
your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared
that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.
But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.
As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.
A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.
Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack of any spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.
Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium.
The first instance of enjambment—“came out in droves / to have a look”—underscores the ardent curiosity of the local populace, and hence emphasizes the dazzling nature of the occasion (while hinting at the locals’ cynicism about political displays, which is, in fact, emphasized later on in the poem). The second instance—“who for the first / time were being taken”—places extraordinary emphasis on the noun time by separating it from its adjective, first, which is also thereby emphasized: an emphasis that reminds us of the youth and inexperience of the children who are being so cynically exploited by their parents.
To turn to a work from the poet’s latest phase, the final stanza of the great 1930 poem “The Mirror in the Entrance” suggests how Cavafy continued to hone his handling of this technique. The poem describes an occasion on which a beautiful youth employed by a tailor makes a delivery to a wealthy home; while he waits for a receipt, alone in the vestibule, he approaches an old mirror and fixes his tie, unaware that the mirror itself—here a double for the poet—is, as it were, “watching” him. The poem ends with a description of the mirror’s feelings:
But the ancient mirror, which had seen and seen again,
throughout its lifetime of so many years,
thousands of objects and faces—
but the ancient mirror now became elated,
inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself
perfect beauty, for a few minutes.
Except for the final two lines, each line is a grammatically independent unit ending with some kind of punctuation—a comma or a dash. Coming at the end of this series of discrete phrases, the penultimate line, which can only be logically and grammatically completed by the line that follows, takes on a tremendous drama and excitement: by withholding the object of the verb “received” until the next line, the poet gives the all-important word “beauty” an enormous climactic force.
Given the importance of this technique in Cavafy’s prosody, the meticulous care with which he constructed each line, I’ve tried to structure the English of these translations so that it achieves the same effect.
One final note, concerning a choice on my part that might strike some readers as controversial. In rendering Greek names from the Classical, Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Byzantine past, I have consistently chosen to eschew a phonetic rendering of the way those names sound in Greek, opting instead to adopt the traditional, Latinate forms—which is to say, the forms that will be familiar to English speakers. To my mind, mimicking the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the names of the historical or pseudohistorical characters is, at best, inappropriate and indeed unhelpful in an English translation. When the Greek eye sees the name
, the person brought to mind is the person brought to mind when the eye of an English-speaking person comes across the name “Justinian”; transliterating it as “Ioustinianos” is to obscure, rather than translate, Cavafy’s text.
Worse, a misguided allegiance to the sound of Modern Greek can lead to a serious misrepresentation of a poem’s deeper meanings. To take “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” once more: certain translators have chosen to render the title of this poem as “The Displeasure of Selefkidis”—that last word being an accurate phonetic reproduction of what the Greek word
, which indeed appears in the poem’s title, sounds like. But this choice conveys the entirely false impression that “Selefkidis” is someone’s name, whereas, as we know, the word refers here to a member of the Seleucid dynasty—someone whose name was, in fact, Demetrius. The word “Seleucid” in this poem is therefore a crucial part of its meaning, one that rests on our ability to grasp the great, if rather pathetic, pride that Demetrius took in the fact that he was a Hellenistic monarch—a Seleucid. A fluent speaker and tireless reader of English, Cavafy himself was familiar with the Latinate forms of these names from his extensive reading in English works of history and philology—Gibbon, J. B. Bury, many others—and used these forms himself when writing in English. Not least for that reason, I have done the same.
4
THE PRESENT VOLUME collects all of the known poetic work of Cavafy. Because of the complexities of their publication history, the organization of the poems in the pages that follow merits brief comment.
Although he published a small number of verses, most of them when he was young, in literary journals and annuals, Cavafy had for most of his career a highly idiosyncratic method of presenting his poems, and never published a definitive collection of them in book form. He preferred, instead, to have poems printed at his own expense as broadsheets or in pamphlets, which he would distribute to a select group of friends and admirers. Among other things, this method allowed the poet to treat every poem as a work in progress; friends recalled that he often went on emending poems after they had been printed. In an essay called Independence, the poet articulated what was clearly a kind of anxiety about the finality associated with publication:
When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought … he obtains a great freedom in his creative work. The writer who has in view the certainty, or at least the probability of selling all his edition, and perhaps subsequent editions, is sometimes influenced by their future sale … almost without meaning to, almost without realizing—there will be moments when, knowing how the public thinks and what it likes and what it will buy, he will make some little sacrifices—he will phrase this bit differently, and leave out that. And there is nothing more destructive for Art (I tremble at the mere thought of it) than that this bit should be differently phrased or that bit omitted.
Still, after a time he would periodically order modest printings of booklets that contained small selections of the poems, arranged thematically. The first of these, Poems 1904, contained just fourteen poems; a second, Poems 1910, added seven more, and a later manuscript of that booklet (known, because the poet copied it out by hand as a gift to his friend and heir, as the “Sengopoulos Notebook”) added one more early poem—“Walls”—which had been written in 1897 and much anthologized, bringing the total to twenty-two. These and subsequent booklets (and sometimes the poems in them) were constantly being revised, added to, and subtracted from: hence Poems 1910 became Poems (1909–1911), and then Poems (1908–1914), and so on, according to which works the poet had decided to add or remove.
By the time Cavafy died, there were three such collections in circulation. Two were bound, and arranged thematically: Poems 1905–1915, containing forty poems (the dates refer to the year of first publication), and Poems 1916–1918, containing twenty-eight poems. The third, Poems 1919–1932, a collection of sixty-nine poems arranged chronologically by date of first publication, was merely a pinned-together sheaf of individual sheets. These 137 poems, together with one poem that Cavafy had corrected for the printer in the weeks before his death, “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” and sixteen early poems from the Sengopoulos Notebook, all first published between 1897 and 1904, that had not already been collected in Poems1905–1915, are the 154 poems that appeared in the first commercial collection of his work, lavishly published (in a chic Art Deco style) in Alexandria two years after Cavafy’s death, edited by Rika Sengopoulou, the first wife of his heir.
Although this group of poems is now often referred to as “the Canon”—a word, one suspects, that would have caused Cavafy to raise an eyebrow, given his sardonic appreciation for the difference between the judgments we pass and those that history passes—I refer to them here as the Published Poems, since these are the works that this most fastidious of poets published, or approved for publication, during his own lifetime, precisely as he wanted them to be read. They appear here in the following order: (1) Poems 1905–1915; (2) Poems 1916–1918; (3) Poems 1919–1933 (including “On the Outskirts of Antioch”); a fourth section, which I have entitled “Poems Published 1897–1908,” offers the contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook, minus of course the six poems that already appear in Poems 1905–1915. (It is worth remembering that Cavafy was eager to take Poems 1910, the basis for the Sengopoulos Notebook, out of circulation in the years after its publication.) It is true that this presentation of the latter group wrests them from the poet’s careful thematic arrangement, in which each poem is meant to comment on and, as it were, converse with its neighbor; but it would be awkward, to say nothing of pedantic, to repeat six poems in two successive sections. For the sake of readers who want to experience the Sengopoulos Notebook as Cavafy arranged it, I have included, before this final section of the Published Poems, a list of the poems giving the order in which they appeared in the Notebook.
Because they were works about which the poet had mixed feelings, I have decided to place the remaining poems, some of which are very early, after those that the poet approved for publication. These appear in roughly chronological order. First come the twenty-seven Repudiated Poems, originally published between 1886 and 1898 and subsequently renounced by the poet. These are followed by the Unpublished Poems. The latter is a group of seventy-seven texts (including three written in English) that Cavafy completed but never approved for publication, and which he kept among his papers, many of them bearing the notation “Not for publication, but may remain here.” The first of these was written when the poet was around fourteen; the last was written in 1923, when he was sixty. Thirteen found their way into print after World War II, and a complete scholarly edition of the entire group, edited by George Savidis, was published in Athens, in 1968. A subsequent edition, published by Mr. Savidis in 1993, gives to them a new name, “Hidden Poems,” but I have retained the old designation, “Unpublished,” both in my text and in my notes, since I believe that “unpublished” adequately suggests the poet’s attitude toward those works without introducing speculative psychological overtones. In the present volume I have included translations of all seventy-four of the Unpublished Poems that were written in Greek, as well as the texts of the three poems Cavafy wrote in English, since they are original works; I have omitted from the present translation the poet’s five translations into Greek of works in other languages, of which three are from English. Readers will also find translations of the three remarkable Prose Poems among the Unpublished Poems.
The fourth and final section of this volume contains the Unfinished Poems, drafts that Cavafy had begun between 1918 and 1932 (see the discussion below).
A final word, about the appearance of the poems on the page. As we know, the dates of composition and subsequent publication of Cavafy’s poems is often suggestive: it surely meant something that he spent fifteen years returning to and polishing “The City” before he chose to publish it. According to Sarayannis,
Cavafy himself told me that he never managed to write a poem from beginning to end. He worked on them all for years, or often let them lie for whole years and later took them up again. His dates therefore only represent the year when he judged that one of his poems more or less satisfied him.
Given the importance of those dates, I have chosen to note them at the bottom of the page(s) on which the poems appear in the main portion of this text, rather than cluttering the notes at the back with one-line items (“Written in 1917, published in 1918”). To do so, I have adopted the following system of notation. When known, the year of original composition (and of subsequent rewriting, if there was one and if we know when it occurred) appears in italics; the year (or years) of publication appear in roman type. Hence, for example, in the case of the Published Poem “Song of Ionia,” of which an early version was written at some point before 1891 and then published in 1896, only to be subsequently revised in 1905 and published in its final form in 1911, the notation reads as follows: [1891; 1896; 1905; 1911].
In the case of the Unpublished Poems—the date of whose first publication, long after the poet’s death, does not, by contrast, shed any light on his feelings or intentions—I have merely added the year of composition, in parentheses, after the title of each poem. In the case of the Unfinished Poems, the year that appears in parentheses refers to what George Savidis, who discovered the drafts, called “the date of first conception,” which Cavafy noted on the dossier for each draft. In both cases, the addition of the date to the title has, I think, the virtue of making those poems visually distinct from the ones that Cavafy himself chose to publish—however he may have subsequently felt about them. Readers today are, indeed, likely to find more to admire, or at the very least to learn from, in the poems that Cavafy suppressed than the poet himself would have suspected.
5
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1932, at the end of a four-month sojourn in Athens that also marked the beginning of the end of his life, Cavafy revealed with some agitation that he had important unfinished business to attend to. “I still have twenty-five poems to write,” he declared to some friends, in the distorted whisper to which his famously mellifluous and enchanting voice had been reduced following the tracheotomy that was meant to save him from throat cancer, and which was the reason he’d come to Athens from Alexandria. “Twenty-five poems!”
The conversation, recalled by one of the friends to whom he’d spoken that day and reported after Cavafy’s death in April of the following year, was merely the first of what turned out to be several tantalizing references to a body of unfinished work that the poet was desperately trying to complete as death closed in. Ten years later, in 1943, someone who’d been engaged in compiling Cavafy’s bibliography during the very year in which the poet had traveled to Athens seeking medical help revealed that Cavafy had made it plain to him that the bibliography was far from complete. In 1963, on the thirtieth anniversary of Cavafy’s death, someone else wrote in to a newspaper claiming that, during those last months, the dying poet had written him to say that he still had fifteen poems to finish.
The mysterious texts to which these various hints alluded were finally identified, also in 1963, by the scholar George Savidis, Cavafy’s great editor, after an inspection of the Cavafy Archive, which Savidis himself eventually came to possess after acquiring it from Cavafy’s friend and heir, Alexander Sengopoulos. A year later, in an article about material in the Archive that had yet to be published (some of which—those poems that Cavafy had completed but did not approve for publication—he would publish in 1968 as “The Unpublished Poems”), Savidis revealed, with the deep emotion of an archaeologist making a great discovery, the existence of a cache of incomplete drafts, composed between 1918 and 1932, that the poet had left, meticulously labeled and organized, among his papers:
More interesting still are the sketches of 25 poems that Cavafy was unable to finish, and on which he was working, with great difficulty, during the last months of his life. Carefully wrapped by him in makeshift envelopes, each with its provisional title and the date, I imagine, of its first conception, they proceed from 1918 to 1932, and along with the very full drafts of some of the published work (like “Caesarion”) and some of the unpublished but completed poems, they give us a unique, unhoped-for, and tremendously moving look at the stages of Cavafian creation.
Closer inspection eventually revealed that there were, in fact, thirty drafts in all, along with a handful of fragmentary texts. In time, Savidis entrusted the task of editing these drafts, some of them awaiting the most minor of finishing touches, others apparently in the final stages of preparation but complicated by various textual problems, to the Italian scholar Renata Lavagnini. A professor of Modern Greek at the University of Palermo and member of the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici (the Sicilian Institute of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, founded by her father, the great Byzantinist and Neohellenist Bruno Lavagnini), she is both an authority on the literary aspects of Cavafy’s work and a meticulous philologist. As a specialist in textual criticism, Professor Lavagnini was particularly well equipped to tackle the technical problems associated with editing a mass of manuscript drafts into coherent texts—although, as she herself would be the first to emphasize, these texts must always remain, at best, hypothetical; something the reader must bear in mind.
The heroic task of sifting through these sometimes illegible sketches, of teasing out, from crossed-out lines and scribbled-in insertions, each discrete stage (or, as the poet called it, morfí, “form”) in the evolution of a given poem, of arriving at the likely last form taken by each work, and of meticulously annotating textual issues, as well as providing a thoroughgoing literary and historical commentary, took decades, but there can be no doubt that the result was worth the wait. The fruits of Professor Lavagnini’s labor, published as a scholarly Greek edition in 1994, gives this important body of poetic work to the world in a lucidly presented form; it bears the title chosen by Savidis, by which it will hereafter be known: Ateli piimata, the “Unfinished Poems.” (The adjective ateli in Greek suggests, too, a state of “imperfection.”) Thanks to the generous cooperation of the Cavafy Archive, I have the privilege of making this vitally important addition to our understanding of one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets available to English speakers for the first time.
The Unfinished Poems are unusual in at least one crucial respect. More often than not, when previously unknown manuscripts by major authors unexpectedly come to light, the material in question is juvenilia: immature work from the earliest phase of the artist’s career, which he or she has discarded or repressed and which, either through the dogged detective work of dedicated scholars or through happy accidents, suddenly sees the light of day once more. The discovery, in 1994, of Louisa May Alcott’s first novel, which languished in the Harvard University Library until it was discovered by a pair of professors researching Alcott’s papers, and the 2004 discovery of the complete draft of an early novel of Truman Capote among some papers and photographs that had passed into the hands of a former house sitter, are but two recent examples. And yet as exciting and dramatic as these revelations can be, such work tends, inevitably, to be interesting less for any inherent artistic value it possesses than for the light it can shed on the writer’s creative development.
The thirty Unfinished Poems of Cavafy, by contrast, represent the last and greatest phase of the poet’s career: the decade and a half from 1918, when Cavafy was fifty-five—and when, too, he published the first of his “sensual” (or “aesthetic”) poems that were explicitly homosexual in nature—until the year before his death at the age of seventy. For this reason they are of the deepest significance not merely inasmuch as they illuminate the existing works—the Published, Unpublished, and Repudiated Poems—but as serious works of art in themselves, the deeply wrought products of a great poetic consciousness at its peak.
The publication of a writer’s unfinished work is, inevitably, an enterprise that raises complicated questions. This is particularly true in the case of a writer like Cavafy, who ruthlessly culled his own work every year, suppressing anything that did not meet his exacting standards—a process that suggests a stringent adherence to the very highest criteria of polish and perfection. But there is persuasive evidence that Cavafy considered the thirty drafts presented here as work he eventually meant to be recognized and published. The Cavafy Archive contains two lists that the poet made of work in progress: one dates to 1930, and the other was kept and constantly revised between 1923 and 1932. The former contains the titles of twenty-nine poems, of which twenty-five are all of the Unfinished drafts he’d composed by that time, and the latter records the titles of fifty poems, a figure that includes all thirty of the Unfinished drafts. All of the other poems listed in these indices are works Cavafy eventually sent to the printer. Hence the lists strongly indicate that the poet—who, as we know from the manuscripts of his Unpublished Poems, was perfectly willing to mark a finished poem with a note declaring that it “need not be published. But it may continue remaining here. It does not deserve to be suppressed”—made no distinction between those poems that he published and the ones he did not, in the end, have time to complete and publish. It was only time, and finally death, that consigned them, for a while, to obscurity.
“Light on one poem, partial light on another.” Cavafy’s 1927 remark is perhaps nowhere more apt than in the case of the Unfinished Poems. Readers encountering these works will immediately see how fully they partake of Cavafy’s special vision as I have described it above, and part of the excitement of reading them for the first time comes, indeed, from the way they seem to fit into the existing corpus, taking their place beside poems that are, by now, well known; there is a deep pleasure in having, unexpectedly, more of what one already loves. But a great deal of the excitement generated by the Unfinished Poems derives, even more, from the new “light,” as the poet put it, that they now shed on existing work—on our knowledge of the poet, his techniques, methods, and large ambitions.
Of these thirty texts, nine treat contemporary subjects that will be familiar to readers already at home in the poet’s world. There are evocative treatments of the memory of a deliciously illicit encounter on a wharf (“On the Jetty”), and an elderly poet’s reverie about long-past days in which he was a member of a gang of rough young men living at the fringes of society—and on the wrong side of the law (“Crime”). One has as its subject a photograph that elicits thoughts of a bygone love (“The Photograph”); it is a crucial addition to a small but vivid group of poems already known (“That’s How,” “From the Drawer,” “The Bandaged Shoulder”) that indicate how intrigued the poet was by photography and how suggestively it could figure in his work. A short but vivid lyric, entitled simply “Birth of a Poem,” casts a gentle, lunar light on our understanding of the way in which the poet imagined his own creative process to have worked (“imagination, taking / something from life, some very scanty thing / fashions a vision. …”).
A striking longer work, “Remorse,” takes its place beside the most emphatic of Cavafy’s philosophical poems—“Hidden Things,” “Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto”—while expanding their moral vision, adding a new note of gentle forgiveness for the unwitting cruelties to which fear and repression condemn us. Surely two of the most remarkable of these contemporary poems are “The Item in the Paper,” where the melodramatic donnée—a young man is reading an item in a paper about the murder of a youth with whom he’d had a liaison—becomes the vehicle for a tender and devastating exploration of a favorite theme, the soul-destroying effects of taboos against illicit love, and the hypocrisy of those who impose them; and “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” the lyric (discussed above, p. XXXVII), about the nocturnal apparition of Cavafy’s younger self, a work in which, as in some of Cavafy’s greatest poems with this motif—“Since Nine—,” “Caesarion”—past and present, the quotidian and the intensely erotic, become disorientingly, thrillingly blurred.
The remaining twenty-one lyrics are historical in nature, although here, as with the best of Cavafy’s work, this label is often a matter of convenience. They have familiar Cavafian settings. There are Hellenistic powers teetering—often unbeknownst to the poems’ smug narrators—on the brink of implosion (“Antiochus the Cyzicene,” “Tigranocerta,” “Agelaus,” “Nothing About the Lacedaemonians”); the corrupted Egypt of the incestuous Ptolemies (“The Dynasty,” “Ptolemy the Benefactor [or Malefactor]”); the Greek-speaking margins of the Roman Empire (the setting of “Among the Groves of the Promenades,” the fourth and last of Cavafy’s Apollonius of Tyana poems, this one about the sage’s sudden, telepathic apprehension, in Ephesus, of Domitian’s murder back in Rome). The early Christian era is vividly represented (“Athanasius,” about the Christian bishop who was ill treated by Julian the Apostate, a recurring Cavafian character), as are the peripheries of the Greek-speaking world during the twilight of Late Antiquity (“Of the Sixth or Seventh Century”). And of course there is the vast arc of Byzantium, from Justinian (the subject of the spooky short lyric “From the Unpublished History”) to the empire’s final days.
To the latter epoch, poignant to any Greek, belongs what is surely one of the most striking of any of Cavafy’s poems, finished or unfinished: “After the Swim.” Here the poet, as often in his greatest mature creations, dissolves the distinctions between “historical” and “erotic” poetry, seducing the reader into thinking that the setting is, in fact, that of the late masterpiece “Days of 1908”—a hot Mediterranean day, a seaside swim, naked ephebic bodies—only to reveal, somewhat disorientingly, that we are in the waning days of Byzantium, haunted by the memory of the great scholar Gemistus Plethon, whose own identity (loyally Christian? covertly pagan?) was itself rather vexed.
Of these historical poems, two groups in particular are worthy of special attention because of their immense value to our understanding of the poet’s imaginative world. The first is a pair of poems, “The Patriarch” and “On Epiphany,” both written in the first half of 1925, whose subject is the fourteenth-century Byzantine ruler John VI Cantacuzenus, “the reluctant emperor”—the regent who felt compelled to take the throne after the foolish widow and conniving ministers of the late emperor, his bosom friend, staged a coup d’état and dragged the empire into a devastating civil war. We know from two Published Poems that date to almost exactly the same period, “John Cantacuzenus Triumphs” and “Of Colored Glass,” that this figure evoked a particularly strong emotion in Cavafy, who deeply admired Cantacuzenus’s steadfast loyalty, devotion to principle, and—once he had been forced to abdicate, after his enemies’ ultimate triumph—great dignity in defeat, along with an impressive piety. The existence of the two Unfinished Poems now makes it clear that during the mid-1920s the poet was hard at work on what amounts to an entire cycle of poems on this poignant and noble figure, a small but significant lyric corpus whose celebration of “the worthiest man whom our race then possessed, / wise, forbearing, patriotic, brave, adroit” sheds greater light on our understanding of the qualities that the mature Cavafy associated with the unique Greek identity for which Byzantium was the conduit. This Cantacuzenus cycle may now take its place alongside the previously known cycles of poems about certain historical figures who similarly evoked a particularly strong response in the poet, not least because of the way their lives shed light on something about what it was to be Greek, or a poet, or both: Marc Antony, Apollonius of Tyana, the apostate emperor Julian.
The other group of historical poems worthy of special note consists, in fact, of no less than four new texts about Julian, now revealed as the figure from the ancient past to whom the poet returned with greatest frequency and intensity: a total of eleven poems in all. (An embryonic twelfth is one of the four fragments in the Cavafy Archive; see here (#litres_trial_promo) in this volume.) Cavafy’s poetic engagement with this complex and enigmatic emperor, who wanted to return the empire to pagan worship not long after it had been converted by his uncle Constantine to Christianity, began early in his creative life, with the Unpublished Poem “Julian at the Mysteries” (1896), and continued virtually to his last days: he had just finished correcting the proofs to “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” about Julian’s contemptuous treatment of the Antiochene Christians, when he died. The four Unfinished drafts give expression to a wide range of favorite themes and motifs, all clustered around the figure of the emperor, who, in his scheme to impose a dour, humorless, and rigid paganism on the newly Christianized empire, embodied an intolerance, a rigidity of thought, and, worst of all, a profound hypocrisy that to Cavafy represented everything the true Hellenic spirit was not.
And so we have “The Rescue of Julian,” with its terse closing reminder, bare of any editorial comment whatever, that the emperor owed his life to the Christian priests he later tormented—a poem that savors of the tart ironies that give works like “Nero’s Deadline” their jaundiced effectiveness. “Athanasius,” which dramatizes the moment in which two Christian monks in Egypt have a vision of the death of Julian half a world away, in Persia, returns us to the milieu of telepathic perception that had so fascinated the young poet thirty years before. “The Bishop Pegasius,” about the still secretly pagan young Julian’s encounter with a secretly pagan bishop at an ancient Trojan shrine to Athena, is memorably irradiated by the aura of illicit homosexual attraction that haunts a masterpiece like the Published Poem “He Asked About the Quality.” And the perplexed narrator of “Hunc Deorum Templis” must grope in helpless ignorance like the unlucky masses in the early poem “Correspondences According to Baudelaire,” which owes so much to the Parnassians’ vision of the poet as someone granted a special vision. Contemplating the scene in which, during Julian’s triumphant entry into Vienne, an old woman cries out that “here is the man who will restore the [pagan] temples” (the exclamation to which the title refers), this narrator is forced to wonder, rather querulously, whether she is speaking in elation or despair—whether, that is to say, she is a secret pagan sympathizer or a loyal Christian. More secret identities.
The foregoing overview of these rich and quite beautiful works is, of necessity, brief. But in sketching the ways in which the present poems partake so richly of the themes and qualities of the poems already well known to us, I hope to have made clear what will, on a close reading of the poems themselves, be evident: that the Ateli not only complement our knowledge of the great poet’s output, but complete it. The addition of these poems to the canon of Cavafy’s published poetry allows us to say, three-quarters of a century after he died on his seventieth birthday—a perfect concentricity, a polished completion—that his work has, at last, been truly finished.
Although much of Professor Lavagnini’s edition is, necessarily, devoted to discussions of intricate issues related to textual criticism—material that I have not reproduced in this translation—I suspect that even the casual reader is likely to want to know something about the physical state in which these Unfinished Poems were found. As George Savidis observed in the comment that I cited above, it is clear that the poet carefully organized his work in progress. Each of the poems had its own “dossier.” Out of some thick paper—quite often the covers of his own printed collections, which he would appropriate for their new role—Cavafy would fashion a kind of rudimentary envelope (only once did he use an actual envelope), in which he would keep the various bits of paper pertinent to a given poem in progress: drafts, notes, passages from source texts that he had copied out, and so forth. On the outside of the envelope he would write the title (sometimes marked as “provisional”) and a date, consisting of the month and year: the moment, as Savidis argues, when Cavafy conceived the poem.
The meticulousness with which the poet conserved his drafts and materials stands, as Professor Lavagnini has noted, in stark and rather amusing contrast to the often quite random nature of his writing materials. These consisted all too obviously of whatever he had to hand at the moment of inspiration—letters that had been addressed to him, invitations to conferences, and, in one memorable case, a scrap of a cigarette box. One thing that this haphazard physical evidence does suggest bears importantly on our understanding of the poet’s creative process: clearly, when the moment of inspiration struck, he seized on whatever was immediately available and started writing. Each of my Notes begins with a brief summary, based on the Lavagnini commentary, of the contents of the relevant dossier; I have provided fuller discussion of those contents and the state of the manuscript when I thought such material would be of interest to the general reader.
Many readers are also likely to be curious about the physical appearance of the pages themselves, which Professor Lavagnini has rendered accessible through her labors. As is already well known due to the reproduction of some of his manuscripts, Cavafy’s handwriting was, generally speaking, forceful and clear (a godsend to the textual critic); he generally wrote in pencil. Divisions between strophes are often clearly marked, as are deletions, which the poet indicated by means of a line through the rejected verses—or, in cases of major deletions, a large wavy line over the entirety of the material to be deleted. Substitutions and additions are written in the space above the original text, and are, in general, made only after the material to be deleted was clearly marked. For this reason, there are relatively few instances in which variant readings appear without any clear indication of what the poet’s preference was. (It should, however, be said that in a number of cases, the manuscript pages are somewhat illegible, or show signs of vacillation, with confusingly repeated crossings-out and reinsertions; it is in these cases that Professor Lavagnini’s skills as a textual critic have done us the greatest service.)
When there are cases of variant readings in which Professor Lavagnini has been unable to establish priority, I have reproduced these variants (when they are significant, and not merely cases in which the drafts give us one or more synonyms for a given word, as is often the case) in the Notes, with commentary where appropriate. In no case have I chosen to present as part of the translation a variant that has been rejected by Professor Lavagnini. Only in the case of “Epitaph of a Samian” have I deviated from her printed text, for reasons I explain in the note to that poem.
In the interests of making these poems accessible to the general reader, I am not reproducing what textual scholars refer to as the “diplomatic text”—a text that indicates, by means of a series of conventional notations, all of the additions, deletions, insertions, and emendations that were made at each stage of composition. The texts of the poems themselves, therefore, simply reproduce what Professor Lavagnini, with admirable scrupulousness, refers to as “the last” (rather than “the final”) of the “forms” that can be construed from Cavafy’s manuscript pages. In this I feel licensed by, and am indeed following the example of, none other than Professor Lavagnini herself. In a Note to her late father’s translation of Cavafy into Italian (which includes translations of the Unfinished Poems based on these “last” forms), she writes that
The well-known caution that Cavafy showed in deciding when and how to entrust his poems to the printer can make the decision to publish these [Unfinished] texts today seem arbitrary—texts that the author considered still incomplete, and which, indeed, must be read in the contexts of the drafts and variants that precede them in order to be fully understood: something that is possible only for those who can read them in the original. But we nonetheless believe that, even granting those reservations, no reader of Cavafy would give up the chance to get to know these new, precious fragments which have been patiently gleaned from the poet’s workshop.
The only poem in this translation that bears visible witness to the textual uncertainties which I have mentioned above is, necessarily, one called “Zenobia,” in which the editor herself was unable to make out the poet’s writing at one point. There I have reproduced, in the appropriate spot in the main text of the translation, the standard notation for illegible characters: a small square cross, each one representing approximately two characters in the original manuscript. It seemed to me that the reader deserves to know where it is simply impossible to make out the poet’s intention—an uncertainty, we must always remember, that haunts all of these beautiful but unfinished works.
But then, as Cavafy himself knew better than most, the meanings, intentions, and ambitions of those who inhabited the past are nearly always smoothed away by the passage of the millennia, the centuries, the years. Time, in the end, is the final arbiter—of literary reputations, as well as other things. In the second of the essays he wrote about Cavafy, in the hopes of alerting English speakers to a poet “whose attitude to the past did not commend him to some of his contemporaries,” E. M. Forster, writing in 1951, recalled a conversation he had with the poet in 1918:
Half humorously, half seriously, he once compared the Greeks and the English. The two peoples are almost exactly alike, he argued; quick-witted, resourceful, adventurous. “But there is one unfortunate difference between us, one little difference. We Greeks have lost our capital—and the results are what you see. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital.”
“His words made one think,” Forster went on, after ruefully observing that, while British insolvency had seemed impossible in 1918, the passage of three decades and a world war had made “all things possible.” Now, when twice as many decades have passed since Forster wrote those words, there is once more occasion to “think” about the themes—the unexpected faltering of overconfident empires; the uneasy margins where West and East meet, sometimes productively but often not; how easy it is, for polities as well as for people, to “lose one’s capital”—which once again turn out to be not “historical” but, if anything, very contemporary indeed; themes that the “very wise, very civilized man” kept returning to, knowing full well, as historians do, that the backward glance can, in the end, be a glimpse into the future.
Costantino Kavafis: Poesie, tr. Bruno Lavagnini (Palermo: Edizioni Novecento, 1996), p. 159; translation mine.
A NOTE ON
PRONUNCIATION OF PROPER NAMES
The rhythm and assonance of Cavafy’s poetry depends in many cases on the correct pronunciation of proper names; fortunately, a more or less standard pronunciation of Greek and Byzantine names as traditionally spelled in English, which I have chosen to follow, often allows for scansion and sound patterns not dramatically different from the ones produced by the Modern Greek pronunciation of those names.
The consonant combination ch, representing the Greek letter χ, is generally pronounced as a hard c or k whether at the beginning of a word or in the middle; hence the name Charmides is KAHR-mih-deez, not Tchar-mih-deez.
An initial i is consonantal, pronounced as a y: hence the name Iases is pronounced Yah-SEEZ. Otherwise, the vowel i is pronounced ee, and never rhymes with the word eye.
The final -es in masculine nouns and names is invariably voiced, and pronounced eez, like the -es at the end of the name Socrates. Hence the name Mebes is pronounced Meebeez, never Meebs.
In the case of Classical Greek names, the final e in feminine nouns and names is always sounded as ay: hence the name Stratonice is Strah-toe-NEE-kay. In the case of Byzantine names, the final e is pronounced as ee: hence the second part of the empress Anna Dalassene’s name is Dah-lah-see-NEE, never Dah-lah-SEEN.
I
Poems 1905–1915
The City
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been illfated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.
[1894; 1910]
The Satrapy
What a pity, given that you’re made
for deeds that are glorious and great,
that this unjust fate of yours always
leads you on, and denies you your success;
that base habits get in your way,
and pettinesses, and indifference.
How terrible, too, the day when you give in
(the day when you let yourself go and give in),
and leave to undertake the trip to Susa,
and go to the monarch Artaxerxes,
who graciously establishes you at court,
and offers you satrapies, and the like.
And you, you accept them in despair,
these things that you don’t want.
But your soul seeks, weeps for other things:
the praise of the People and the Sophists,
the hard-won, priceless “Bravos”;
the Agora, the Theatre, and the victors’ Crowns.
How will Artaxerxes give you them,
how will you find them in the satrapy;
and what kind of life, without them, will you live.
[1905; 1910]
But Wise Men Apprehend What Is Imminent
The gods perceive what lies in the future, and mortals, what occurs in the present, but wise men apprehend what is imminent.
—PHILOSTRATUS, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, VIII, 7
Mortal men perceive things as they happen.
What lies in the future the gods perceive,
full and sole possessors of all enlightenment.
Of all the future holds, wise men apprehend
what is imminent. Their hearing,
sometimes, in moments of complete
absorption in their studies, is disturbed. The secret call
of events that are about to happen reaches them.
And they listen to it reverently. While in the street
outside, the people hear nothing at all.
[1896; 1899; <1915]
Ides of March
Of glory be you fearful, O my Soul.
And if you are unable to defeat
your ambitions, then hesitantly, guardedly
pursue them. And the further you proceed,
the more searching, the more attentive must you be.
And when at last you reach your apogee—a Caesar;
and cut the figure of one who’s much renowned,
then take heed more than ever as you go out on the street,
a man of power, conspicuous with your retinue,
when someone approaches you out of the crowd,
a certain Artemidorus, bringing a letter,
and hurriedly says “Read this right away,
it’s something important that concerns you,”
don’t fail to stop; don’t fail to put off
all talk and business; don’t fail to
brush off all and sundry who salute and fawn
(you can see them later); let even
the Senate wait, and find out at once
the weighty contents of Artemidorus’s letter.
[1906; 1910]
Finished
Deep in fear and in suspicion,
with flustered minds and terrified eyes,
we wear ourselves out figuring how
we might avoid the certain
danger that threatens us so terribly.
And yet we’re mistaken, that’s not it ahead:
the news was wrong
(or we didn’t hear it; or didn’t get it right).
But a disaster that we never imagined
suddenly, shatteringly breaks upon us,
and unprepared—no time left now—we are swept away.
[1910; 1911]
The God Abandons Antony
When suddenly, at midnight, there comes the sound
of an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music playing, with voices raised—
your good fortune, which now gives way; all your efforts’
ill-starred outcome; the plans you made for life,
which turned out wrong: don’t mourn them uselessly.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
Above all do not fool yourself, don’t say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don’t stoop to futile hopes like these.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who’s been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.
[1910; 1911]
Theodotus
If you are among the truly elect,
watch how you achieve your predominance.
However much you’re glorified, however much
your accomplishments in Italy and Thessaly
are blazoned far and wide by governments,
however many honorary decrees
are bestowed on you in Rome by your admirers,
neither your elation nor your triumph will endure,
nor will you feel superior—superior how?—
when, in Alexandria, Theodotus brings you,
upon a charger that’s been stained with blood,
poor wretched Pompey’s head.
And do not take it for granted that in your life,
restricted, regimented, and mundane,
such spectacular and terrifying things don’t exist.
Maybe at this very moment, into some neighbor’s
nicely tidied house there comes—
invisible, immaterial—Theodotus,
bringing one such terrifying head.
[<1911; 1915]
Monotony
On one monotone day one more
monotone, indistinct day follows. The same
things will happen, then again recur—
identical moments find us, then go their way.
One month passes bringing one month more.
What comes next is easy enough to know:
the boredom from the day before.
And tomorrow’s got to where it seems like no tomorrow.
[1898; 1908]
Ithaca
As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you won’t find such things on your way
so long as your thoughts remain lofty, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you won’t encounter them
unless you stow them away inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.
Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire the finest wares:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
Many Egyptian cities may you visit
that you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.
Always in your mind keep Ithaca.
To arrive there is your destiny.
But do not hurry your trip in any way.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;
without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road.
But now she has nothing left to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you.
As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.
[1910; 1911]
As Much As You Can
And even if you cannot make your life the way you want it,
this much, at least, try to do
as much as you can: don’t cheapen it
with too much intercourse with society,
with too much movement and conversation.
Don’t cheapen it by taking it about,
making the rounds with it, exposing it
to the everyday inanity
of relations and connections,
so it becomes like a stranger, burdensome.
[1905; 1913]
Trojans
Our efforts, those of the ill-fortuned;
our efforts are the efforts of the Trojans.
We will make a bit of progress; we will start
to pick ourselves up a bit; and we’ll begin
to be intrepid, and to have some hope.
But something always comes up, and stops us cold.
In the trench in front of us Achilles
emerges, and affrights us with his shouting.—
Our efforts are the efforts of the Trojans.
We imagine that with resolve and daring
we will reverse the animosity of fortune,
and so we take our stand outside, to fight.
But whenever the crucial moment comes,
our boldness and our daring disappear;
our spirit is shattered, comes unstrung;
and we scramble all around the walls
seeking in our flight to save ourselves.
And yet our fall is certain. Up above,
on the walls, already the lament has begun.
They mourn the memory, the sensibility, of our days.
Bitterly Priam and Hecuba mourn for us.
[1900; 1905]
King Demetrius
Not like a king, but like an actor, he exchanged his showy robe of state for a dark cloak, and in secret stole away.
—PLUTARCH, Life of Demetrius
When the Macedonians deserted him,
and made it clear that it was Pyrrhus they preferred
King Demetrius (who had a noble
soul) did not—so they said—
behave at all like a king. He went
and cast off his golden clothes,
and flung off his shoes
of richest purple. In simple clothes
he dressed himself quickly and left:
doing just as an actor does
who, when the performance is over,
changes his attire and departs.
[1900; 1906]
The Glory of the Ptolemies
I’m the Lagid, a king. The possessor absolute
(with my power and my riches) of pleasure.
There’s no Macedonian, no Eastern foreigner
who’s my equal, who even comes close. What
a joke, that Seleucid with his vulgar luxe.
But if there’s something more you seek, then simply look:
the City is our teacher, the acme of what is Greek,
of every discipline, of every art the peak.
[1896; 1911; 1911]
The Retinue of Dionysus
Damon the artisan (none as fine
as he in the Peloponnese) is
fashioning the Retinue of Dionysus
in Parian marble. The god in his divine
glory leads, with vigor in his stride.
Intemperance behind. Beside
Intemperance, Intoxication pours the Satyrs wine
from an amphora that they’ve garlanded with vines.
Near them delicate Sweetwine, his eyes
half-closed, mesmerizes.
And further down there come the singers,
Song and Melody, and Festival
who never allows the hallowed processional
torch that he holds to go out. Then, most modest, Ritual.—
That’s what Damon is making. Along with all
of that, from time to time he gets to pondering
the fee he’ll be receiving from the king
of Syracuse, three talents, quite a lot.
When that’s added to the money that he’s got,
he’ll be well-to-do, will lead a life of leisure,
can get involved in politics—what pleasure!—
he too in the Council, he too in the Agora.
[1903; 1907]
The Battle of Magnesia
He’s lost his former dash, his pluck.
His wearied body, very nearly sick,
will henceforth be his chief concern. The days
that he has left, he’ll spend without a care. Or so says
Philip, at least. Tonight he’ll play at dice.
He has an urge to enjoy himself. Do place
lots of roses on the table. And what if
Antiochus at Magnesia came to grief?
They say his glorious army lies mostly ruined.
Perhaps they’ve overstated: it can’t all be true.
Let’s hope not. For though they were the enemy, they were kin to us.
Still, one “let’s hope not” is enough. Perhaps too much.
Philip, of course, won’t postpone the celebration.
However much his life has become one great exhaustion
a boon remains: he hasn’t lost a single memory.
He remembers how they mourned in Syria, the agony
they felt, when Macedonia their motherland was smashed to bits.—
Let the feast begin. Slaves: the music, the lights!
[1913; 1916]
The Seleucid’s Displeasure
The Seleucid Demetrius was displeased
to learn that a Ptolemy had arrived
in Italy in such a sorry state.
With only three or four slaves;
dressed like a pauper, and on foot. This is why
their name would soon be bandied as a joke,
an object of fun in Rome. That they have, at bottom,
become the servants of the Romans, in a way,
the Seleucid knows; and that those people give
and take away their thrones
arbitrarily, however they like, he knows.
But nonetheless at least in their appearance
they should maintain a certain magnificence;
shouldn’t forget that they are still kings,
that they are still (alas!) called kings.
This is why Demetrius the Seleucid was annoyed,
and straightaway he offered Ptolemy
robes all of purple, a gleaming diadem,
exceedingly costly jewels, and numerous
servants and a retinue, his most expensive mounts,
that he should appear in Rome as was befitting,
like an Alexandrian Greek monarch.
But the Lagid, who had come a mendicant,
knew his business and refused it all;
he didn’t need these luxuries at all.
Dressed in worn old clothes, he humbly entered Rome,
and found lodgings with a minor craftsman.
And then he presented himself to the Senate
as an ill-fortuned and impoverished man,
that with greater success he might beg.
[1910; 1916]
Orophernes
He, who on the four-drachma piece
seems to have a smile on his face,
on his beautiful, refined face,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
A child, they chased him out of Cappadocia,
from the great ancestral palace,
and sent him away to grow up
in Ionia, to be forgotten among foreigners.
Ah, the exquisite nights of Ionia
when fearlessly, and completely as a Greek,
he came to know pleasure utterly.
In his heart, an Asiatic still:
but in his manners and in his speech a Greek,
bedecked with turquoise, yet Greek-attired,
his body scented with perfume of jasmine;
and of Ionia’s beautiful young men
the most beautiful was he, the most ideal.
Later on, when the Syrians came
to Cappadocia, and had made him king,
he threw himself completely into his reign,
that he might enjoy some novel pleasure each new day,
that he might horde the gold and silver, avaricious,
that over all of this he might exult, and gloat
to see the heaped-up riches glittering.
As for cares of state, administration—
he didn’t know what was going on around him.
The Cappadocians quickly threw him out.
And so to Syria he fled, to the palace of
Demetrius, to entertain himself and loll about.
Still, one day some unaccustomed thoughts
broke in on his total idleness:
he remembered that through his mother, Antiochis,
and through that ancient lady, Stratonice,
he too descended from the Syrian crown,
he too was very nearly a Seleucid.
For a while he emerged from his lechery and drink,
and ineptly, in a kind of daze,
cast around for something he might plot,
something he might do, something to plan,
and failed miserably and came to nothing.
His death must have been recorded somewhere and then lost.
Or maybe history passed it by,
and very rightly didn’t deign
to notice such a trivial thing.
He, who on the four-drachma piece
left the charm of his lovely youth,
a glimmer of his poetic beauty,
a sensitive memento of an Ionian boy,
he is Orophernes, son of Ariarathes.
[1904; 1916]
Alexandrian Kings
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium,
that they might proclaim them kings
before the brilliant ranks of soldiers.
Alexander: they declared him king
of Armenia, of Media, of the Parthians.
Ptolemy: they declared him king
of Cilicia, of Syria, of Phoenicia.
Caesarion was standing well in front,
attired in rose-colored silk,
on his chest a garland of hyacinths,
his belt a double row of sapphires and amethysts,
his shoes laced up with white
ribbons embroidered with pink-skinned pearls.
Him they declared greater than the boys:
him they declared King of Kings.
The Alexandrians were certainly aware
that these were merely words, a bit of theatre.
But the day was warm and poetic, the sky pale blue,
the Alexandrian Gymnasium
a triumphant artistic achievement,
the courtiers’ elegance exceptional,
Caesarion all grace and beauty
(Cleopatra’s son, of Lagid blood):
and the Alexandrians rushed to the festival,
filled with excitement, and shouted acclaim
in Greek, and in Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
enchanted by the lovely spectacle—
though of course they knew what they were worth,
what empty words these kingdoms were.
[1912; 1912]
Philhellene
Take care the engraving’s artistically done.
Expression grave and majestic.
The diadem better rather narrow;
I don’t care for those wide ones, the Parthian kind.
The inscription, as usual, in Greek:
nothing excessive, nothing grandiose—
the proconsul mustn’t get the wrong idea,
he sniffs out everything and reports it back to Rome—
but of course it should still do me credit.
Something really choice on the other side:
some lovely discus-thrower lad.
Above all, I urge you, see to it
(Sithaspes, by the god, don’t let them forget)
that after the “King” and the “Savior”
the engraving should read, in elegant letters, “Philhellene.”
Now don’t start in on me with your quips,
your “Where are the Greeks?” and “What’s Greek
here, behind the Zágros, beyond Phráata?”
Many, many others, more oriental than ourselves,
write it, and so we’ll write it too.
And after all, don’t forget that now and then
sophists come to us from Syria,
and versifiers, and other devotees of puffery.
Hence unhellenised we are not, I rather think.
[1906; 1912]
The Steps
On an ebony bed that is adorned
with eagles made of coral, Nero sleeps
deeply—heedless, calm, and happy;
flush in the prime of the flesh,
and in the beautiful vigor of youth.
But in the alabaster hall that holds
the ancient shrine of the Ahenobarbi
how uneasy are his Lares!
The little household gods are trembling,
trying to hide their slight bodies.
For they’ve heard a ghastly sound,
a fatal sound mounting the stairs,
footsteps of iron that rattle the steps.
And, faint with fear now, the pathetic Lares,
wriggle their way to the back of the shrine;
each jostles the other and stumbles
each little god falls over the other
because they’ve understood what kind of sound it is,
have come to know by now the Erinyes’ footsteps.
[1893; 1897; 1903; 1909]
Herodes Atticus
Ah, Herodes Atticus, what glory is his!
Alexander of Seleucia, one of our better sophists,
on arriving in Athens to lecture,
finds the city deserted, since Herodes was
away in the country. And all of the young people
followed him out there to hear him.
So Alexander the sophist
writes Herodes a letter
requesting that he send back the Greeks.
And smooth Herodes swiftly responds,
“I too am coming, along with the Greeks.”
How many lads in Alexandria now,
in Antioch, or in Beirut
(tomorrow’s orators, trained by Greek culture)
when they gather at choice dinner parties
where sometimes the talk is of fine intellectual points,
and sometimes about their exquisite amours,
suddenly, abstracted, fall silent.
They leave their glasses untouched at their sides,
and they ponder the luck of Herodes—
what other sophist was honored like this?—
whatever he wants and whatever he does
the Greeks (the Greeks!) follow him,
neither to criticize nor to debate,
nor even to choose any more; just to follow.
[1900; 1911; 1912]
Sculptor from Tyana
As you will have heard, I’m no beginner.
Lots of stone has passed between my hands.
And in Tyana, my native land,
they know me well. And here the senators
commission many statues.
Let me show
a few to you right now. Notice this Rhea;
august, all fortitude, quite archaic.
Notice the Pompey. The Marius,
the Aemilius Paullus, and the African Scipio.
The likenesses, as much as I was able, are true.
The Patroclus (I’ll touch him up soon).
Near those pieces of yellowish
marble there, that’s Caesarion.
And for some time now I’ve been involved
in making a Poseidon. Most of all
I’m studying his horses: how to mold them.
They must be rendered so delicately that
it will be clear from their bodies, their feet,
that they aren’t treading earth, but racing on water.
But this work here is my favorite of all,
which I made with the greatest care and deep feeling:
him, one warm day in summer
when my thoughts were ascending to ideal things,
him I stood dreaming here, the young Hermes.
[1893; 1903; 1911]
The Tomb of Lysias the Grammarian
Just there, on the right as you go in,
in the Beirut library we buried him:
the scholar Lysias, a grammarian.
The location suits him beautifully.
We put him near the things that he
remembers maybe even there—glosses, texts,
apparatuses, variants, the multivolume works
of scholarship on Greek idiom. Also, like this,
his tomb will be seen and honored by us
as we pass by on our way to the books.
[1911; 1914]
Tomb of Eurion
Inside of this elaborate memorial,
made entirely of syenite stone,
which so many violets, so many lilies adorn,
Eurion lies buried, so beautiful.
A boy of twenty-five, an Alexandrian.
Through the father’s kin, old Macedonian;
a line of alabarchs on his mother’s side.
With Aristoclitus he took his philosophical instruction;
rhetoric with Parus. A student in Thebes, he read
the sacred writings. He wrote a history
of the Arsinoïte district. This at least will endure.
Nevertheless we’ve lost what was most dear: his beauty,
which was like an Apollonian vision.
[1912; 1914]
That Is He
Unknown, the Edessene—a stranger here in Antioch—
writes a lot. And there, at last, the final canto has
appeared. Altogether that makes eighty-three
poems in all. But the poet is worn out
from so much writing, so much versifying,
the terrific strain of so much Greek phrasing,
and every little thing now weighs him down.
A sudden thought, however, pulls him out
of his dejection—the exquisite “That is he”
which Lucian once heard in a dream.
[1898; 1909]
Dangerous
Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria; during the reign
of the augustus Constans and the augustus Constantius;
partly pagan, and partly Christianized):
“Strengthened by contemplation and study,
I will not fear my passions like a coward.
My body I will give to pleasures,
to diversions that I’ve dreamed of,
to the most daring erotic desires,
to the lustful impulses of my blood, without
any fear at all, for whenever I will—
and I will have the will, strengthened
as I’ll be with contemplation and study—
at the crucial moments I’ll recover
my spirit as it was before: ascetic.”
[?; 1911]
Manuel Comnenus
The emperor Lord Manuel Comnenus
one melancholy morning in September
sensed that death was near. The court astrologers
(those who were paid) were nattering on
that he had many years left yet to live.
But while they went on talking, the king
recalls neglected habits of piety,
and from the monastery cells he orders
ecclesiastical vestments to be brought,
and he puts them on, and is delighted
to present the decorous mien of a priest or friar.
Happy are all who believe,
and who, like the emperor Lord Manuel, expire
outfitted most decorously in their faith.
[1905; 1916]
In the Church
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
[1892; 1901; 1906; 1912?]
Very Rarely
He’s an old man. Worn out and stooped,
crippled by years, and by excess,
stepping slowly, he moves along the alleyway.
But when he goes inside his house to hide
his pitiful state, and his old age, he considers
the share that he—he—still has in youth.
Youths recite his verses now.
His visions pass before their animated eyes.
Their healthy, sensuous minds,
their well-limned, solid flesh,
stir to his own expression of the beautiful.
[1911; 1913]
In Stock
He wrapped them up carefully, neatly
in green silken cloth, very costly.
Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,
amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,
and judges, and wanted them; not in the way
he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away,
in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the store,
he takes other jewels from the cases to sell—fabulous things—
bracelets, chains, necklaces, rings.
[1912; 1913]
Painted
To my craft I am attentive, and I love it.
But today I’m discouraged by the slow pace of the work.
My mood depends upon the day. It looks
increasingly dark. Constantly windy and raining.
What I long for is to see, and not to speak.
In this painting, now, I’m gazing at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be that he’s worn himself out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.—
Like this, for some time, I sit and gaze.
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
[1914; 1916]
Morning Sea
Here let me stop. Let me too look at Nature for a while.
The morning sea and cloudless sky
a brilliant blue, the yellow shore; all
beautiful and grand in the light.
Here let me stop. Let me fool myself: that these are what I see
(I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)
instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,
my recollections, the ikons of pleasure.
[?; 1916]
Song of Ionia
Because we smashed their statues all to pieces,
because we chased them from their temples—
this hardly means the gods have died.
O land of Ionia, they love you still,
it’s you whom their souls remember still.
And as an August morning’s light breaks over you
your atmosphere grows vivid with their living.
And occasionally an ethereal ephebe’s form,
indeterminate, stepping swiftly,
makes its way along your crested hills.
[1891; 1896; 1905; 1911]
In the Entrance of the Café
Something they were saying close to me
drew my attention to the entrance of the café.
And I saw the lovely body that looked as if
Eros had made it using all his vast experience:
crafting with pleasure his shapely limbs;
making tall the sculpted build;
crafting the face with emotion
and leaving behind, with the touch of his hands,
a feeling in the brow, the eyes, and the lips.
[1904?; >1915]
One Night
The room was threadbare and tawdry,
hidden above that suspect restaurant.
From the window you could see the alley,
which was filthy and narrow. From below
came the voices of some laborers
who were playing cards and having a carouse.
And there, in that common, vulgar bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—
the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now
as I write, after so many years have passed!,
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.
[1907; 1916]
Come Back
Come back often and take hold of me,
beloved feeling come back and take hold of me,
when the memory of the body reawakens,
and old longing once more passes through the blood;
when the lips and skin remember,
and the hands feel like they’re touching once again.
Come back often and take hold of me at night,
when the lips and skin remember …
[1904; 1909; 1912]
Far Off
I’d like to talk about that memory …
But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:
because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.
Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …
That August—was it August?—evening …
I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …
Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.
[1914; 1914]
He Swears
Now and then he swears to begin a better life.
But when the night comes on with its own counsels,
its own compromises, and with its promises:
but when the night comes on with a power of its own,
of a body that desires and demands, he returns,
lost, once more to the same fateful pleasure.
[1905; >1915]
I Went
No restraint. I surrendered completely and I went.
To gratifications that were partly real,
partly careening within my mind—
I went in the illuminated night.
And I drank powerful wines, just as
the champions of pleasure drink.
[1905; 1913]
Chandelier
In a small and empty room, four lone walls,
covered in a cloth of solid green,
a beautiful chandelier burns and glows
and in each and every flame there blazes
a wanton fever, a wanton need.
In the small room, which has been set
aglow by the chandelier’s powerful flames,
the light that appears is no ordinary light.
The pleasure of this heat has not been fashioned
for bodies that too easily take fright.
[1895; 1914]
Poems 1916–1918
Since Nine—
Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp
and sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,
without speaking. With whom should I speak,
so utterly alone within this house?
The apparition of my body in its youth,
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp,
has come and found me and reminded me
of shuttered perfumed rooms
and of pleasure spent—what wanton pleasure!
And it also brought before my eyes
streets made unrecognizable by time,
bustling city centres that are no more
and theatres and cafés that existed long ago.
The apparition of my body in its youth
came and also brought me cause for pain:
deaths in the family; separations;
the feelings of my loved ones, the feelings of
those long dead which I so little valued.
Half past twelve. How the time has passed.
Half past twelve. How the years have passed.
[1917; 1918]
Comprehension
The years of my youth, my pleasure-bent existence—
how plainly do I see their meaning now.
What useless, foolish regrets …
But I didn’t see their meaning then.
In the dissolute life I led in my youth
my poetry’s designs took shape;
the boundaries of my art were drawn.
That is why the regrets were never firm.
And my resolutions—to master myself, to change—
would keep up for two weeks at the most.
[1895; 1917/1918]
In the Presence of the Statue of Endymion
On a chariot of white, drawn by four
snow-white mules caparisoned in silver,
I have arrived at Latmus from Miletus. I sailed over
from Alexandria in a purple trireme to perform
holy rites for Endymion, sacrifices and libations.
Behold the statue. With rapture I now look upon
the fabled beauty of Endymion. My slaves
empty panniers of jessamine; and well-omened acclamations
have awakened the pleasure of ancient days.
[1895; 1916]
Envoys from Alexandria
They hadn’t seen, in Delphi, such beautiful gifts in centuries
as those that were sent by the two, the Ptolemies,
the rival brother kings. Ever since the priests accepted them,
though, they’ve been worried about the oracle. To frame it
with finesse they’ll need all of their expertise:
which of the two, two such as these, must be displeased.
And they convene at night, secretly,
to confer about the Lagid family.
But look, the envoys have come back. They take their leave.
Returning to Alexandria, they say. They no longer have
need of oracles. The priests are overjoyed to hear this
(it’s understood they’ll keep the fabulous gifts)
but they’re also bewildered in the extreme,
clueless as to what this sudden lack of interest means.
For yesterday the envoys had grim news of which priests are unaware:
At Rome the oracle was handed down; destinies were meted there.
[1915; 1918]
Aristobulus
The palace is in tears, the king’s in tears,
King Herod inconsolably laments,
the entire country is in tears for Aristobulus
who so needlessly, accidentally drowned
playing in the water with his friends.
And also when they hear the news elsewhere,
when it gets as far as Syria,
even many of the Greeks will be distressed:
the poets and the sculptors all will mourn,
for the renown of Aristobulus had reached them,
and any vision of theirs of what a youth could be
never matched the beauty of this boy.
What statue of a god could Antioch boast
that was the like of this boy of Israel?
The Throne Princess laments and weeps:
his mother, the greatest of the Jewesses.
Alexandra laments and weeps over the calamity.—
But when she finds herself alone her anguish alters.
She groans; she seethes; she swears; she calls down curses.
How they made a fool of her! How they gulled her!
How, in the end, they had got their way!
They’ve laid the house of the Hasmoneans in ruins.
How did he manage it, that criminal of a king;
that charlatan, that miscreant, that scoundrel?
How did he manage it? What a diabolical plan,
for Mariamne not to have noticed a thing.
Had Mariamne noticed, or suspected,
she’d have found a way to save her little brother;
she’s queen after all, she could have managed something.
How they’ll gloat now, how they’ll exult in secret,
those spiteful women, Cypros and Salome;
those vile trollops, Cypros and Salome.—
And to be powerless, to be compelled
to pretend as though she believed their lies;
to be unable to go to the people,
to go outside and cry out to the Jews,
to tell, to tell how the murder had been done.
[1916; 1918]
Caesarion
In part to ascertain a certain date
and in part to while away the time,
last night I took down a collection
of Ptolemaic inscriptions to read.
The unstinting laudations and flatteries
are the same for all. All of them are brilliant,
glorious, mighty, beneficent;
every undertaking utterly wise.
As for the women of the line, they too,
all the Berenices and the Cleopatras, are wonderful too.
When I successfully ascertained the date
I’d have finished with the book, if a tiny,
insignificant reference to King Caesarion
hadn’t attracted my attention suddenly. . . . . .
Ah, there: you came with your indefinite
charm. In history there are only a few
lines that can be found concerning you;
and so I could fashion you more freely in my mind.
I fashioned you this way: beautiful and feeling.
My artistry gives to your face
a beauty that has a dreamy winsomeness.
And so fully did I imagine you
that yesterday, late at night, when the lamp
went out—I deliberately let it go out—
I dared to think you came into my room,
it seemed to me you stood before me: as you must have been
in Alexandria after it had been conquered,
pale and wearied, perfect in your sorrow,
still hoping they’d have mercy on you,
those vile men—who whispered “Surfeit of Caesars.”
[1914; 1918]
Nero’s Deadline
Nero wasn’t worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”
He still had time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,
this deadline that the god is giving him,
for him to think about dangers yet to come.
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,
but exquisitely wearied by this trip
which had been endless days of diversion—
in the theatres, in the gardens, the gymnasia. …
Evenings of the cities of Achaea …
Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all …
So Nero. And in Spain, Galba
was secretly assembling his army and preparing it:
the old man, seventy-three years old.
[1915; 1918]
Safe Haven
Emes, a young man of twenty-eight, came by a Tenian
ship (meaning to learn the incense trade) to this Syrian
haven. But during the voyage he took sick,
and just after he had disembarked,
he died. His burial, the very cheapest kind,
took place there. A few hours before he died,
he whispered something about “home” and “elderly parents.”
But no one knew who they might have been;
nor what his native land might be, in all the wide Greek world.
Better this way. For this way, while
he lies dead in this safe haven,
his parents will keep hoping he’s still alive.
[1917; 1918]
One of Their Gods
Whenever one of Them would cross Seleucia’s
marketplace, around the time that evening falls—
like some tall and flawlessly beautiful boy,
with the joy of incorruptibility in his eye,
with that dark and fragrant hair of his—
the passersby would stare at him
and one would ask another if he knew him,
and if he were a Syrian Greek, or foreign. But some,
who’d paid him more attention as they watched,
understood, and would make way.
And as he disappeared beneath the arcades,
among the shadows and the evening lights,
making his way to the neighborhood that comes alive
only at night—that life of revels and debauch,
of every known intoxication and lust—
they’d wonder which of Them he really was
and for which of his suspect diversions
he’d come down to walk Seleucia’s streets
from his Venerable, Sacrosanct Abode.
[1899; 1918]
Tomb of Lanes
The Lanes whom you loved is not here, Marcus,
in the tomb where you come to cry, and stay for hours and hours.
The Lanes whom you loved you have much closer to you,
at home, when you shut yourself in and look at his picture:
it preserves some part of what was precious in him,
it preserves some part of what you’d loved.
Remember, Marcus, how you brought the famed
Cyrenian painter back from the proconsul’s palace,
and with what artful cunning he attempted
to persuade you both, no sooner had he seen your friend,
that he simply had to do him as Hyacinth
(which would make his portrait so much better known).
But your Lanes didn’t loan out his beauty like that;
and objecting firmly he told him to represent
neither Hyacinth nor anyone else,
but Lanes, son of Rhametichos, an Alexandrian.
[1916; 1918]
Tomb of Iases
Here I lie: Iases. Throughout this great city I was renowned
for being the most beautiful boy.
Admired by men of deep learning—and also by the less profound,
the common folk. Both gave equal joy
to me. But they took me so often for a Narcissus or a Hermes
that excess wore me out, and killed me. Passerby,
if you’re an Alexandrian you won’t judge me. You know the yearnings
of our life; what heat they hold; what pleasures most high.
[1917; 1917]
In a City of Osrhoene
From the tavern brawl they brought him back to us, wounded—
our friend Rhemon, around midnight yesterday.
Through the windows we’d left open all the way
the moon illumined his beautiful body on the bed.
We’re a hodgepodge here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Rhemon too is such a one. But yesterday, as the moon
shone its light upon his sensuous face
we were put in mind of Plato’s Charmides.
[1916; 1917]
Tomb of Ignatius
Here I’m not the Cleon who’s renowned
in Alexandria (where they aren’t easily impressed)
for my fabulous houses, for my gardens,
for my horses and for my chariots,
for the diamonds and the silks I wore.
Far from it: here I’m not that Cleon.
May those twenty-eight years be erased.
I am Ignatius, a Lector, who very late
came to my senses. But still I lived ten blessed months
in the serenity and security of Christ.
[1916; 1917]
In the Month of Hathor
With difficulty I read upon this ancient stone
“O Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.” I can just discern a “So[u]l.”
“In the mon[th] of Hathor” “Leuciu[s] went to his re[s]t.”
Where they record his age “The span of years he li[ve]d”
the Kappa Zeta is proof that he went to his rest a youth.
Amidst the erosion I see “Hi[m] … Alexandrian.”
Then there are three lines radically cut short;
but some words I can make out— like “our t[e]ars,” “the pain,”
“tears” again further down, and “grief for [u]s, his [f]riends.”
In love, it seems to me, Leucius was greatly blessed.
In the month of Hathor Leucius went to his rest.
[1917; 1917]
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610
Raphael, they want you to compose
some verses as an epitaph for the poet Ammon.
Something very artistic and polished. You’ll be able,
you’re the perfect choice, to write what’s suitable
for the poet Ammon, one of our own.
Certainly you’ll talk about his poetry—
but do say something, too, about his beauty,
about the delicate beauty that we loved.
Your Greek is always beautiful and musical.
But now we want all of your craftsmanship.
Into a foreign tongue our pain and love are passing.
Pour your Egyptian feeling into a foreign tongue.
Raphael, your verses should be written
so that they have, you know, something of our lives within them,
so that the rhythm and every phrasing makes it clear
that an Alexandrian is writing of an Alexandrian.
[1915; 1917]
Aemilian Son of Monaës, an Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D.
From my speech, and looks, and from my mien
I shall make an excellent panoply;
and so I’ll stand before those wicked men
without fear, without debility.
They will want to harm me. But none of those
who come close to me will ever see
where my vulnerable places are, my wounds,
beneath the falsehoods that will cover me.—
Boastful words of Aemilian son of Monaës.
I wonder if he ever made that suit of armor?
In any event, he didn’t wear it much:
At twenty-seven, in Sicily, he died.
[1898?; 1918]
Whenever They Are Aroused
Try to keep watch over them, poet,
for all that few of them can be restrained:
Your eroticism’s visions.
Place them, partly hidden, in your phrases.
Try to keep hold of them, poet,
whenever they’re aroused within your mind,
at night or in the brightness of midday.
[1913; 1916]
To Pleasure
Joy and balm of my life the memory of the hours
when I found and held on to pleasure as I wanted it.
Joy and balm of my life—for me, who had no use
for any routine enjoyment of desire.
[1913; 1917]
I’ve Gazed So Much—
At beauty I’ve gazed so much
that my vision is filled with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.
Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:
always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,
and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.
Faces of love, exactly as
my poetry wanted it … in the nights of my youth,
secretly encountered in my nights. …
[1911; 1917]
In the Street
His appealing face, somewhat pallid;
his chestnut eyes, looking tired;
twenty-five years old, but looks more like twenty;
with something artistic about his clothes
—something in the color of the tie, the collar’s shape—
aimlessly he ambles down the street,
as if still hypnotized by the illicit pleasure,
by the very illicit pleasure he has had.
[1913; 1916]
The Window of the Tobacco Shop
Nearby the illuminated window
of a tobacco shop they stood, in the midst of many others.
Quite by chance their glances happened to meet,
and timorously, hesitantly expressed
the illicit longing of their flesh.
Later, on the pavement, a few nervous steps—
until they smiled, and nodded very faintly.
And afterward the closed carriage. …
the sensitive nearing of their bodies;
the hands as one, the lips as one.
[1907; 1917]
Passage
What he timidly imagined in his school days, is opened up,
revealed to him. And he makes the rounds, stays out all night,
gets swept up in things. And as is (for our art) only right,
pleasure rejoices in his fresh, hot blood,
an outlaw sensual abandon overcomes
his body; and his youthful limbs
give in to it.
And so a simple boy
becomes, for us, worth looking at, and passes through the High
World of Poetry, for a moment—yes, even he;
this aesthete of a boy, with his blood so fresh and hot.
[1914; 1917]
In Evening
At any rate it wouldn’t have lasted long. Years
of experience make that clear to me. But still, Fate
came and ended things in too much of a hurry.
The life of loveliness was brief.
But how powerful our perfumed unctions were,
how exquisite the bed in which we lay,
to what pleasure we gave our bodies away.
A reverberation of the days of pleasure,
a reverberation of those days drew near me,
something we two had in youth, the fire;
once more I took a letter in my hands,
and read it over and over, till the light had failed.
And I went out onto the balcony, melancholy—
went out so I might clear my head by seeing at least
a little of this town I love so well,
some little movement in the street, and in the shops.
[1916; 1917]
Gray
Looking at an opal of medium gray,
I remembered two beautiful gray eyes
that I saw; it must be twenty years ago. …
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
For one month we were in love.
Then the departure, for Smyrna I daresay,
to get work there, and we never saw each other again.
Those gray eyes—if they’re alive—will have lost their beauty;
the beautiful face will have fallen into ruins.
O my memory, keep them as they were.
And, memory, whatever you can bring back from that love of mine,
whatever you can, bring back to me tonight.
[1917; 1917]
Below the House
Yesterday while strolling through a neighborhood
on the edge of town, I passed below the house
I used to go in when I was very young.
There Eros had taken possession of my body
with his exquisite force.
And yesterday
as I passed along that ancient street,
suddenly everything was made beautiful by desire’s spell:
the shops, the pavements, the stones,
and walls, and balconies, and windows;
there was nothing ugly that remained there.
And while I was standing, gazing at the door,
and standing, tarrying by the house,
the foundation of all my being yielded up
the sensual emotion that was stored inside.
[1917; 1919]
The Next Table
Can’t be more than twenty-two years old.
And yet I’m sure that, just about the same
number of years ago, I enjoyed that very body.
It’s not at all a flaring of desire.
And I only came to the casino a little while ago;
I haven’t even had time to drink a lot.
This very body: I enjoyed it.
And if I don’t remember where—one slip doesn’t signify.
Ah there, sitting at the next table now:
I recognize each movement—and beneath the clothes
I see once more the naked limbs I loved.
[1918; 1919?]
Remember, Body
Body, remember not just how much you were loved,
not just the beds where you have lain,
but also those longings that so openly
glistened for you in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice—and some
chance obstacle arose and thwarted them.
Now that it’s all finally in the past
it almost seems as if you gave yourself to
those longings, too—remember how
they glistened, in the eyes that looked at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you; remember, body.
[1916; 1917/1918]
Days of 1903
I never found them, ever again—all so quickly lost …
the poetic eyes, the pallid
face. … in the gloaming of the street. …
I’ve not found them since—things I came to have completely by chance,
things that I let go so easily;
and afterwards, in anguish, wanted back.
The poetic eyes, the pale face,
those lips, I haven’t found them since.
[1909; 1917]
Poems 1919–1933
The Afternoon Sun
This room, how well I know it.
Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door,
for commercial offices. The entire house has now become
offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies.
Ah, this room, how familiar it is.
Near the door, here, was the sofa,
and in front of it a Turkish rug;
Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases.
On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror.
In the middle, the table where he’d write;
and the three big wicker chairs.
Near the window was the bed
where we made love so many times.
They must be somewhere still, poor things.
Near the window was the bed:
the afternoon sun came halfway up.
… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted
for one week only … Alas,
that week became an eternity.
[1918; 1919]
To Stay
One in the morning it must have been,
or half past one.
In a corner of that dive;
in back of the wooden partition.
Apart from the two of us, the place completely empty.
A kerosene lamp barely shed some light.
The vigilant servant was sleeping by the door.
No one would have seen us. But
we were so on fire for each other
that caution was beyond us anyway.
Our clothes were half undone—we weren’t wearing much,
since it was blazing hot, a heavenly July.
Delight in flesh amidst
clothes half undone:
quick baring of flesh—the image of it
has crossed twenty-six years; and now has come
to stay here in this poetry.
[1918; 1919]
Of the Jews (50 A.D.)
Painter and poet, runner and thrower,
Endymion’s beauty: Ianthes, son of Antonius.
From a family close to the Synagogue.
“The days that I most value are the ones
when I abandon the aesthetic quest,
when I forsake the beauty and rigor of the Hellenic,
with its overriding preoccupation
with perfectly formed and perishable white limbs.
And I become what I would like
always to remain: of the Jews, of the holy Jews, the son.”
A bit too heated, this declaration of his. “Always
remain of the Jews, of the holy Jews—”
But he didn’t remain one at all.
the Hedonism and Art of Alexandria
made the boy into their devotee.
[1912; <1919?]
Imenus
“… it should be loved all the more,
the pleasure that’s attained unwholesomely and in corruption;
only rarely finding the body that feels things as it wants to—
the pleasure that, unwholesomely and in corruption, produces
a sensual intensity, which good health does not know …”
A fragment of a missive
from the youth Imenus (of patrician stock), infamous
in Syracuse for dissipation,
in the dissipated times of Michael the Third.
[1915; 1919; 1919]
Aboard the Ship
It certainly resembles him, this small
pencil likeness of him.
Quickly done, on the deck of the ship:
an enchanting afternoon.
The Ionian Sea all around us.
It resembles him. Still, I remember him as handsomer.
To the point of illness: that’s how sensitive he was,
and it illumined his expression.
Handsomer, he seems to me,
now that my soul recalls him, out of Time.
Out of Time. All these things, they’re very old—
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.
[1919; 1919]
Of Demetrius Soter (162–150 B.C.)
His every expectation turned out wrong!
He used to imagine that he’d do celebrated deeds,
would end the shame that since the time of the Battle
of Magnesia had ground his homeland down.
That Syria again would be a mighty power,
with her armies, with her fleets,
with her great encampments, with her wealth.
He endured it, grew embittered in Rome
when he sensed, in the conversation of his friends,
the scions of the great houses,
in the midst of all the delicacy and politesse
that they showed toward him, toward the son
of King Seleucus Philopator—
when he sensed that nonetheless there was always a hidden
disdain for the dynasties of the Greek East:
which were in decline, not up to serious affairs,
quite unfit for the leadership of peoples.
He’d withdraw, alone, and grow indignant, and swear
that it wouldn’t be the way they thought, at all.
Look, he has the will:
would struggle, would do it, would rise up.
If only he could find a way to reach the East,
manage to get away from Italy—
and all of this power that he has
in his soul, all this vehemence,
he’d spread it to the people.
Ah, if only he could be in Syria!
He was so little when he left his homeland
that he only dimly remembers what it looks like.
But in his thoughts he’s always studied it
like something sacred you approach on bended knee,
like an apparition of a beautiful place, like a vision
of cities and of harbors that are Greek.—
And now?
Now, hopelessness and dejection.
They were right, those lads in Rome.
It’s not possible for them to survive, the dynasties
that the Macedonian Conquest had produced.
No matter: he himself had spared no effort;
as much as he was able, he’d struggled on.
Even in his black discouragement,
there’s one thing that still he contemplates
with lofty pride: that even in defeat
he shows the same indomitable valor to the world.
The rest—was dreams and vain futility.
This Syria—it barely even resembles his homeland;
it is the land of Heracleides and of Balas.
[1915; 1919]
If Indeed He Died
“Where has he gone off to, where did the Sage disappear?
Following his many miracles,
and the great renown of his instruction
which was diffused among so many peoples,
he suddenly went missing and no one has learned
with any certainty what has happened
(nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).
Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.
But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never
wrote about the death of Apollonius.
Others said that he went missing on Lindos.
Or perhaps that other story is
true, that his assumption took place on Crete,
in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—
But nonetheless we have the miraculous,
the supernatural apparition of him
to a young student in Tyana.—
Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,
for him to appear before the world again;
or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us
unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again
as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then
he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,
and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”
So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—
after a reading of Philostratus’s
“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—
one of the few pagans, the very few
who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant
and timid man—he, too, outwardly
played the Christian and would go to church.
It was the period during which there reigned,
with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,
and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,
showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.
[1897; 1910; 1920; 1920]
Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)
The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them
declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.
The salon opened onto the garden;
and had a delicate fragrance of blooms
that was mingled together with the perfumes
of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.
Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.
But when the actor had declaimed
“Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”
(stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary
the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),
at once a spirited boy sprang up,
mad for literature, and cried out:
“Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.
Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.
Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,
all your care, and remember your work once more
in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.
That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.
And don’t dismiss completely from your mind
the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—
that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,
those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,
that Seven Against Thebes—and leave, as your memorial,
only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—
that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”
[1920; 1920]
That They Come—
One candle is enough. Its faint light
is more fitting, will be more winsome
when come Love’s— when its Shadows come.
One candle is enough. Tonight the room
can’t have too much light. In reverie complete,
and in suggestion’s power, and with that little light—
in that reverie: thus will I dream a vision
that there come Love’s— that its Shadows come.
[?; 1920]
Darius
The poet Phernazes is working on
the crucial portion of his epic poem:
the part about how the kingdom of the Persians
was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our
glorious king is descended from him:
Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator.) But here
one needs philosophy; one must explicate
the feelings that Darius must have had:
arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more
like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.
Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.
But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes
running and delivers the momentous intelligence:
The war with the Romans has begun.
Most of our army has crossed the border.
The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!
How, now, can our glorious king,
Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,
be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?
In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.
Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!
Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”
to make his name, and to reduce his critics,
those envious men, to silence at long last.
What a setback, what a setback for his plans!
And if it had only been a setback: fine.
But let’s see if we are really all that safe
in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.
The Romans are most fearsome enemies.
Is there any way we can get the best of them,
we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?
Can we measure up to the legions now?
Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—
And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,
a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—
far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;
arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.
[<1897?; 1917; 1920]
Anna Comnena
She laments in the prologue to her Alexiad,
Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.
Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with
freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge
mine eyes. … Alack the breakers” of her life,
“alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her
“unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”
Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one
mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:
that she had only one profound regret
(even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:
for all of her dexterity she didn’t manage
to secure the Throne; instead he took it
practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.
[1917; 1920]
Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying
Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.
In serious matters I have always been
most diligent. And on this I will insist:
that no one has a better knowledge of
Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.
On every question that he had, Botaniates—
every difficult ecclesiastical matter—
would take counsel with me, me first of all.
But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful
Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,
it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself
by crafting verses of six or seven lines—
divert myself with mythological tales
of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,
or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;
or with composing strict iambic lines
such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs
of Constantinople don’t know how to write.
That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.
[1921; 1920]
Their Beginning
The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure
is accomplished. They’ve risen from the bed,
and dress themselves quickly without speaking.
They emerge separately, covertly, from the house. And while
they walk rather uneasily in the street, it seems
as if they suspect that something about them betrays
what kind of bed they’d fallen into just before.
Nonetheless, how the artist’s life has gained.
Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write
powerful lines, that here was their beginning.
[1915; 1921]
Favour of Alexander Balas
Oh I’m not put out because my chariot’s
wheel was smashed, and I’m down one silly win.
I shall pass the night among fine wines
and lovely roses. All Antioch is mine.
I am the most exalted of young men.
I’m Balas’s weakness, the one he worships.
Tomorrow, you’ll see, they’ll say the race wasn’t proper.
(But if I were vulgar, and had secretly given the order—
they’d even have placed my crippled chariot first, the flatterers.)
[1916?; 1921]
Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.
The aging of my body and my looks
is a wound from a terrible knife.
I have no means whatsoever to endure it.
Unto you I turn, Art of Poetry,
you who know something of drugs;
of attempts to numb pain, in Imagination and Word.
It’s a wound from a terrible knife.—
Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,
which make it impossible—for a while—to feel the wound.
[1918?; 1921]
Demaratus
The theme, “The Character of Demaratus,”
which Porphyry has suggested to him in conversation,
the young scholar outlined as follows
(intending, afterwards, to flesh it out rhetorically).
“At first the courtier of King Darius, and then
a courtier of King Xerxes;
and now accompanying Xerxes and his army,
to vindicate himself at last: Demaratus.
“A great injustice had been done to him.
He was the son of Ariston. Shamelessly
his enemies had bribed the oracle.
Nor did they fail to deprive him of his throne;
but when at last he yielded, and decided
to resign himself to living as a private person
they had to go and insult him before the people,
they had to go and humiliate him, in public, at the festival.
“And so it is that he serves Xerxes with such great zeal.
Accompanying the enormous Persian army
he too will make his return to Sparta;
and, a king once more, how swiftly
he will drive him out, will degrade
that conniving Leotychides.
“And so his days pass by, full of concerns:
giving the Persians counsel, explaining to them
what they need to do to conquer Greece.
“Many worries, much reflection, which is why
the days of Demaratus are so dreary.
Many worries, much reflection, which is why
Demaratus doesn’t have a moment’s pleasure;
since pleasure isn’t what he’s feeling
(it’s not; he won’t acknowledge it;
how can he call it pleasure? it’s the acme of his misfortune)
when everything reveals to him quite clearly
that the Greeks will emerge victorious.”
[1904; 1911; 1921]
I Brought to Art
I’m sitting and musing. I brought to Art
longings and feelings— some half-glimpsed
faces or lines; some uncertain mem’ries
of unfulfilled loves. Let me submit to it.
It knows how to shape the Form of Beauty;
almost imperceptibly filling out life,
piecing together impressions, piecing together the days.
[1921; 1921]
From the School of the Renowned Philosopher
He remained Ammonius Saccas’s student for two years;
but of philosophy and of Saccas he grew bored.
Afterward he went into politics.
But he gave it up. The Prefect was a fool;
and those around him solemn, pompous stiffs;
their Greek horribly uncouth, the wretches.
His curiosity was aroused,
a bit, by the Church: to be baptized,
to pass as a Christian. But he quickly
changed his mind. He’d surely get in a row
with his parents, so ostentatiously pagan:
and they’d immediately put an end—an awful thought—
to his extremely generous allowance.
Still, he had to do something. He became an habitué
of the depraved houses of Alexandria,
of every secret den of debauchery.
In this, fortune had been kind to him:
had given him a form of highest comeliness.
And he delighted in that heavenly gift.
For at least another ten years yet
his beauty would endure. After that—
perhaps to Saccas he would go once more.
And if in the meantime the old man had died,
he’d go to some other philosopher or sophist;
someone suitable can always be found.
Or in the end, it was possible he’d even return
to politics—admirably mindful
of his family traditions,
duty to one’s country, and other pomposities of that sort.
[1921; 1921]
Maker of Wine Bowls
On this mixing-bowl of the purest silver—
which was made for the home of Heracleides,
where great elegance always is the rule—
note the stylish blooms, and the brooks, the thyme;
and in the middle I put a beautiful young man,
naked, sensuous; he still keeps one leg,
just one, in the water.— O Memory, I have begged
to find in you the best of guides, that I might make
the face of the youth I loved as it really was.
This has proved to be very difficult since
some fifteen years have passed since the day on which
he fell, a soldier, in the defeat at Magnesia.
[1903; 1912; 1921]
Those Who Fought on Behalf of the Achaean League
You brave, who fought and fell in glory:
who had no fear of those who’d conquered everywhere.
You blameless, even if Diaeus and Critolaus blundered.
Whensoever the Greeks should want to boast,
“Such are the men our race produces,” is what they’ll say
about you. That’s how marvelous the praise for you will be.—
Written in Alexandria by an Achaean:
in the seventh year of Ptolemy, the “Chickpea.”
[1922; 1922]
For Antiochus Epiphanes
The young Antiochene said to the king,
“In my heart there beats a single precious hope:
the Macedonians again, Antiochus Epiphanes,
the Macedonians are back in the great fight again.
If only they would win— I’ll give to anyone who wants them
the horses and the lion, the Pan made out of coral,
and the elegant mansion, and the gardens in Tyre,
and everything else you’ve given me, Antiochus Epiphanes.”
Maybe he was moved a little bit, the king.
But he recalled at once his father and his brother,
and so made no response. Some eavesdropper might
go and repeat something.— Anyway, as expected,
at Pydna there swiftly came the horrible conclusion.
[1911?; 1922; 1922]
In an Old Book
In an old book—about a hundred years old—
I found, neglected among the leaves,
a watercolour with no signature.
It must have been the work of a very powerful artist.
It bore the title “Representation of Love.”
But “—of the love of extreme sensualists” would have been more fitting.
For it was clear as you looked at this work
(the artist’s idea was easily grasped)
that the youth in this portrait wasn’t meant
for those who love in a somewhat wholesome way,
within the limits of what is strictly permitted—
with his chestnut-brown, intensely colored eyes;
with the superior beauty of his face,
the beauty of unusual allures;
with those flawless lips of his that bring
pleasure to the body that it cherishes;
with those flawless limbs of his, made for beds
called shameless by the commonplace morality.
[1892?; 1922]
In Despair
He’s lost him utterly. And from now on he seeks
in the lips of every new lover that he takes
the lips of that one: his. Coupling with every new
lover that he takes he longs to be mistaken:
that it’s the same young man, that he’s giving himself to him.
He’s lost him utterly, as if he’d never been.
The other wished—he said— he wished to save himself
from that stigmatized pleasure, so unwholesome;
from that stigmatized pleasure, in its shame.
There was still time, he said— time to save himself.
He’s lost him utterly, as if he’d never been.
In his imagination, in his hallucinations
in the lips of other youths he seeks the lips of that one;
He wishes that he might feel his love again.
[1923; 1923]
Julian, Seeing Indifference
“Seeing, then, that there is great indifference
among us toward the gods”—he says with that solemn affect.
Indifference. But what then did he expect?
Let him organize religion as much as he pleased,
let him write the high priest of Galatia as much as he pleased,
or to others like him, exhorting, giving directions.
His friends weren’t Christians: that much is certain.
But even so they weren’t able to
play the way that he did (brought up as a Christian)
with the system of a new religion,
ridiculous in theory and in practice.
In the end they were Greeks. Nothing in excess, Augustus.
[1923?; 1923]
Epitaph of Antiochus, King of Commagene
After she returned from his funeral, greatly bereaved,
the sister of him who had temperately and sweetly lived—
the exceedingly scholarly Antiochus, king
of Commagene—she wanted an epitaph for him.
And the Ephesian sophist Callistratus—who sojourned
often in the principality of Commagene,
and who in the royal household had been
so pleasantly and frequently received—
wrote it, at the suggestion of Syrian courtiers,
and sent it to her aged ladyship.
“May the renown of Antiochus the benevolent king
be meetly extolled, O Commagenians.
He was the provident captain of the land.
The life he lived was just, and wise, and gallant.
The life he lived, still more, was that finest thing: Hellenic—
mankind holds no quality more precious:
among the gods alone does anything surpass it.”
[1923?; 1923]
Theater of Sidon (400 A.D.)
A respectable citizen’s son— above all else, a beauteous
youth who belongs to the theatre, agreeable in so many ways:
I now and then compose, in the language of the Greeks,
exceedingly daring verses, which I circulate
very secretly, of course— gods! they mustn’t be seen
by those who prate about morals, those who wear gray clothes—
verses about a pleasure that is select, that moves
toward a barren love of which the world disapproves.
[1923?; 1923]
Julian in Nicomedia
Foolhardy doings, full of risks.
The encomia for the ideals of the Greeks.
The white magic and the visits to the pagans’
temples. The raptures over the ancient gods.
The frequent conversations with Chrysanthius.
The theories of the (quite clever) philosopher Maximus.
And look at the result. It’s obvious that Gallus
is very anxious. Constantius is suspicious.
Ah, his advisors weren’t wary in the least.
This story’s gone too far, Mardonius says,
and it’s got to stop at once, all this furore.—
Julian is going back, a Lector once more,
to the church at Nicomedia,
where, loudly and with considerable
piety, he reads the holy Scriptures,
and at his Christian reverence the people wonder.
[1892?; 1924?; 1924]
Before Time Could Alter Them
They were very pained when they parted company.
They themselves didn’t want it; it was just the way things were.
The need to make a living was forcing one of them
to go far away— New York or Canada.
Certainly their love wasn’t the same as before;
the attraction had been gradually diminished,
its attraction had been very much diminished.
But still, that they should part— that they didn’t want.
It was just the way things were.— Or perhaps it was that Fate
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Daniel Mendelsohn
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Стихи и поэзия
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy’s poetry makes the historical personal – and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian’s assessing eye as well as the poet’s compassionate heart.After more than a decade of work, Daniel Mendelsohn – an acclaimed, award-winning author and classicist who alone among Cavafy’s translators shares the poet’s deep intimacy with the ancient world – is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy’s genius. This volume includes the first-ever English translation of thirty unfinished poems that Cavafy left in drafts when he died – a remarkable, hitherto unknown discovery that remained in the Cavafy Archive in Athens for decades. With Mendelsohn’s in-depth introduction and commentary situating each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation is a literary event – the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.