Greek Bearing Gift

...Because it’s night now and the barbarians haven’t shown up...

...Cavafy created his own blend of the two, sometimes quite unusual and even ungrammatical, but exerting a peculiar charm...

...The expectant crowd is “suddenly ill at ease”: Why are the streets and the squares all at once empty, as everyone heads for home, lost in their thoughts...

...In Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard: “you will have understood by then what Ithacas mean...

...and Alexandria, T.S...

...If you fi nd Ithaka wanting, it’s not that she’s deceived you...

...The sensual ones deal with fulfi lled or unfulfi lled physical relationships, often mere pickups, very rarely love, and then almost always one-sided...

...About another relationship, Cavafy writes with medial breaks as in some old Greek hymns: . . . perhaps it was Fate become an artist, that required them to part before time had changed them, before their feelings failed...

...Quickly sketched on the deck of the ship, on an enchanted afternoon, the Ionian sea all about us...

...Take that closing line of “Ithaka...

...The company went bust, but not before Constantine developed considerable skill in English, adopted English manners and, apparently, even a lifelong slight British accent in his Greek...

...Dalven has a much-quoted introduction by Auden, as well as her exemplary biography of the poet...

...The philosophical poems feature cogent speculations of existential, occasionally religious or mythological, nature...

...the great orators curiously absent...

...and the popular speech, demotike, which eventually prevailed in literature as well...

...Indeed, every English edition of Cavafy’s poems has its particular virtue...

...He switched citizenship from British to Greek, and kicked around in various professions—journalist, broker, Cotton Stock Exchange employee, and, fi nally, apprentice in the Irrigation Offi ce of the Ministry of Public Works, where he was to become a clerk for 30 years until his retirement...

...In a diary, Cavafy described desperate but futile attempts to rid himself of his erotic passions...

...Here Cavafy uses Odysseus’ long homeward journey as a symbol for Everyman’s progress through life...

...Auden, Lawrence Durrell, Stephen Spender, James Merrill, Paul Muldoon, Christopher Middleton, Peter Porter, Roy Fuller, Rachel Hadas, and Duane Michaels...

...Those people would have been a solution, of sorts...

...He deserves more than one translation...

...Why are the senators sitting around, making no laws...

...In Aliki Barnstone: “you understand by now what Ithakas mean...

...When Paul moved to Paris in 1908, Cavafy became sole owner of the modest fl at...

...There was quite a bit of overlapping: Greek spelling, itself divergent, has been rendered in English in Hellenic or Latinately Anglicized forms—e.g., Phoibos or Phoebus—causing confusing inconsistency...

...This is a good example of Cavafy’s celebrated irony, informing so much of the poetry...

...So in “Orophernes,” a poem about a Cappadocian king, we read: “In his heart he was ever an Asiatic, / but in his conduct and discourse a Greek,” which stands for Cavafy’s private hedonism and public discretion...

...But you are not to expect riches when reaching the home shores of old age: Ithaka bestowed upon you the marvelous journey: if not for her you would never have set out...

...Or consider “Nero’s Tenure,” which begins: “Nero wasn’t particularly troubled to / learn of the Delphic oracle’s pronouncement: / ‘Watch out for the age of seventy-three.’ / There’s more than enough time to enjoy himself...

...as they stroll a bit uneasily down the street, it’s as though they imagine that some aspect of them betrays the sort of bed they lay upon just minutes ago...

...When the barbarians arrive, they’ll do the legislating...

...A tracheotomy in Athens yielded a brief reprieve, but lost him the capacity of speech...

...Coetzee, whose novel Waiting for the Barbarians takes its title from Cavafy’s best known poem...

...Although Seamus Heaney’s Foreword here is too skimpy, Manuel Savidis’s Introduction is helpful, though it contains one curious slip, making 1963 50 rather than (correctly) 30 years after the poet’s death...

...Refusing last rites at fi rst, he fi nally accepted them “with compunction...

...In very cosmopolitan Alexandria (Egyptian, British, Greek, French), homosexuality was rampant...

...For the next fi ve years mother Charikleia and several of her brood lived in Alexandria, where Constantine attended a school of commerce...

...On top of Latin and classical Greek, he was fl uent in English, French, Italian, and Arabic, and so useful to the Irrigation Offi ce as to earn afternoons off for the stock exchange and homosexual pursuits...

...A famous poem, “The God Abandons Antony,” has Mark Antony, after his defeat at Actium, gazing out of a window and imagining Dionysus and his revelers leaving the Roman’s adopted city...

...Cavafy from the Greek Konstantinos Petrou Kab aphes, which would fall like lead on Greekless ears...

...To begin with, whatever the subject of his poems, their tone, the sensibility behind them, is a thoroughly cosmopolitan one, as Cavafy’s life bears out...

...Enright correctly observed in Conspirators and Poets, Cavafy “is a major poet...

...Outspokenness is evident...

...John Mavrogordato had an excellent introduction by Rex Warner...

...Which means, as Heaney further notes, Cavafy’s going toward what the gaze focuses on “calmly and clearsightedly, more coroner than commentator, equally disinclined to offer blame or grant the benefi t of the doubt...

...There are English translations of most of these, one even of all...

...The poem then evokes some of the young emperor’s pleasures and hopes, and ends: “So it goes for Nero...

...Note also that Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations contains a goodly number of quotations from him...

...Now that my soul conjures him out of time he certainly appears to be more attractive...

...but also lesser kingdoms of Asia Minor, as well as mainland Greece and Macedon, all eventually conquered by Rome, except for Byzantium, which fell to the Turks...

...In the same vein, consider “On the Ship...

...some other translations have had one or the other, but not both...

...Out of time...

...I would like to add France’s Marguerite Yourcenar, painting’s David Hockney, and South Africa’s J.M...

...after three years, another move took them to London for a further four...

...Thereupon the poem brilliantly evokes various attitudes: the emperor, ceremonially attired, holding a scroll of tribute...

...Theoharis C. Theoharides intro duces commas with ironic implication: “you will have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean...

...All have been published, which has been variously saluted and deplored...

...The next year Forster returned to Alexandria, and sang his praises in interviews...

...There is no reliance on metaphor, simile, or other tropes...

...He was voluptuous to an almost painful degree, and this animated his expression...

...The chief historic periods are the Hellenistic (4th century to 1st century B.C...

...So we get a person’s “behaviors” in the plural, “work as best as you can,” “he could care less,” “this one gone waste,” “he lay the fl owers,” and a few others...

...The barbarians are supposed to show up today...

...Political unrest and British bombardment drove Charikleia and a few sons to Constantinople and the home of her rich, civilized diamond-merchant father...

...What in the world will we do without barbarians...

...In Rae Dalven, it is “you must surely have understood by then what Itahacas mean...

...What cannot be rendered is Cavafy’s idiosyncratic, purist/demotic language and the verbal music at which he excelled...

...hear, as a last pleasure, those sounds, the delightful music of the invisible procession, and bid farewell to the Alexandria you are losing...

...It resembles him, but I remember him as more attractive...

...Cavafy’s infl uence on Anglophone literati has been impressive, as several have acknowledged in writing...

...But now there is no more time...

...the Roman (1st century B.C...

...Cavafy famously remarked, “I am a poet-historian...

...But she has nothing left to impart to you...

...And there are others, just back from the borderlands, who claim that the barbarians no longer exist...

...Sir Maurice Bowra, in the creative experiment put it this way: “He pierced through the local and ephemeral qualities of a situation to its permanent character and created not a record of history but an imaginative criticism of life...

...Why is there such indolence in the senate...

...The “Translator’s Preface” usefully explains Haviaras’s methodology...

...Near death, he approved 154 for book publication...

...In 1932 Cavafy developed throat cancer...

...Good at languages, he read Dante in Italian and perused much contemporary English and French poetry, notably the Parnassians and Symbolists...

...Cavafy usually wrote about 70 poems a year and destroyed all but four or fi ve...

...Other poems, now known as “Unpublished” or “Hidden,” he did preserve, still others he repudiated, and some he did not fi nish...

...The historical poems, which preponderate, are of two kinds: about actual historical fi gures, although often minor ones, or fi ctional characters that nevertheless compellingly evoke past ages and events...

...It is in dialogue form, and begins in his rendering (I omit the blank spaces between line clusters): What are we waiting for, gathered here in the agora...

...Barnstone features a good foreword by Gerald Stern, and though all versions have explanatory notes, hers are particularly helpful, as in her discussion of transliteration...

...How do I rate this newest translation...

...His total output was about 300, printed on broadsheets for his friends’ approval, or published in slim chapbooks—never in book form...

...How that last line resonates, even in English...

...Let us look at Haviaras’s version of Cavafy’s most famous poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians...

...Forster, who made him known to English writers and readers...

...the consuls and praetors in their most opulent fi nery...

...What makes Cavafy internationally famous...

...This despite modern Greek being a language much less known abroad than German or Spanish...

...Come 1928, much was published about him everywhere...

...In 1872, upon his father’s death, the family, in straitened circumstances, moved to Liverpool, where the import-export fi rm had an offi ce...

...In England Cavafy read Shakespeare, Wilde, and Browning, whose dramatic monologues he later emulated...

...Rainer Maria Rilke comes closest, and behind him Pablo Neruda...

...and the late Byzantine (11th to 14th centuries A.D...

...Having previously lived with his cherished mother, upon her death he moved in with his brother Paul...

...But on the positive side there is also the handsome, generous-sized, typeface, and Haviaras captures what Heaney rightly calls the “indefi nable, locked-up quality of Cavafy’s gaze...

...Alexandria, 340 A.D.,” which dramatically contrasts Alexandria’s simultaneous paganism and Christianity...

...While in Spain, the general Galba / clandestinely marshals and trains his troops, / a very old man of seventythree...

...Perhaps even more effective are the philosophical poems, such as “Ithaka...

...As D.J...

...They leave the house furtively: fi rst one, then the other...

...The locales are the Syria of the Seleucids, with their capital in Antioch, and the Egypt of the Ptolemies, with their capital in Alexandria...

...In Constantinople (1882-85) he got deeply involved with Hellenistic and Byzantine history as well as the Greek classics...

...Why should the senators trouble themselves with laws...

...It resembles him, of course, this modest penciled drawing...

...As I see it, Cavafy has managed the neat trick of transmuting terse, unadorned lines into, as he says in a poem, “utter feeling...

...Even his name had to be adapted by himself for us foreigners into C.P...

...printed posthumously in 1935, they are known as “the Canon...

...Back in Alexandria from 1885, he continued to write poetry in Greek and prose in English...

...Modern Greek is twofold: the formal katharevussa or purist, long used in journalism, literature, and politics...

...Though not here, Cavafy sometimes rhymes, which Haviaras (unlike most translators) often renders in rhyme...

...Eliot published him in the Criterion, Dimitri Mitropoulos was setting him to music, and he became friends with Nikos Kazantzakis...

...to 4th century A.D...

...Because the barbarians are to show up today...

...He did well at both, and his salary grew as well, though he remained, as a Greek citizen, in title only “provisional clerk...

...And yet how the artist has profi ted from all this: tomorrow, or the day after, or years from now, he’ll write the crucial verses that had their beginnings here...

...Bedridden for months back in Alexandria, he was writing poems to the last...

...As most likely the fi rst candidly homosexual modern poet, Cavafy gained a sizable constituency, but historicism also has attracted numerous readers fascinated by the past...

...Evangelos Sachperoglou is chattier: “you will have come to know what Ithacas really mean...

...That you have gained so much wisdom and experience will have told you everything of what such Ithakas mean...

...so that now one for the other will always remain as though he were still a handsome young man of twenty-four...

...I could never write a novel or a play, but I feel in me a hundred and twenty-fi ve voices that tell me I could write history...

...the Italian Futurist Marinetti called on him and, later, wrote about him...

...Here is how it ends: listen closely with your heart, not with cowardly pleas and protests...

...All these things are really quite old— the drawing, and the ship, and the afternoon...

...The various translations all have their merits...

...A similar duality pervades “Myres...

...Forster, W.H...

...Rising from the bed, they dress quickly, not speaking...

...But he was always idiosyncratic, albeit often under an alias...

...Some Cavafi an characteristics are apparent...

...Sachperoglou has the most extensive and informative historical-critical introduction (by Peter Mackridge) and handy chronologies of both the poems and Cavafy’s life, which I have much relied on...

...Cavafy learned a lot from historians such as Plutarch, and old Alexandrian epigrammatist poets such as Callimachus and Meleager...

...Theoharides is the only one who includes every available scrap of Cavafy...

...The sensual poems are almost always memory poems, such as “Their Beginnings,” as translated by Haviaras: Their illicit wanton lust has been satisfi ed...

...The meter, even in English, is chiefl y iambic and the lines (at least in the Greek) are usually of 12 to 17 syllables...

...Consider the roster: E.M...

...By 1903, on the basis of magazine publication, his poems were becoming noticed and written about in Greece...

...Born into a prosperous Greek Orthodox merchant family in Alexandria in 1863, he was the youngest of nine children...

...As for his subjects, they were designated by himself as historical, philosophical, or sensual (hedonistic)—these last-named always homosexual...

...By 1924 there were intense discussions about Cavafy’s work in Athens John Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News...

...Yet Cavafy exists in eight more or less complete English versions, the six in my possession still in print, the most recent, Stratis Haviaras’s The Canon my subject here...

...Stratis Haviaras has some, though not all, of the rhyming as well as the Greek text on facing pages...

...During World War I he met E.M...

...He warns: “take care not to travel too hastily” even if Ithaka “is the goal of your journey,” supposed to be “always in your thoughts...

...In Greece, every major poet is in Cavafy’s debt, notably the Nobel laureate George Seferis and the remarkable Iannis Ritsos...

...This strikes me as solid, although it must be conceded that Havarias’s English is occasionally faulty...

...His last gesture was to draw a symbolic circle with a dot inside as, having reached the biblical three score and ten, he died from a stroke on his seventieth birthday, April 29, 1933...

...With various brothers (most of whom died young), Constantine did some traveling, sometimes to Athens, but also to London and Paris...