But never ask the one-foot snail
Which way you went.
DISCANT (His mother said)
His mother said
(Who long since in her mother is been hid)
“I am the birth-place and the dead.”
“Indeed” he said
“Let it be done;
Let us give our tigers, each one to the other one.”
DISCANT (He said to the Don)
He said to the Don, “My Lord
Your dangling man’s not crucified
He’s gored.”
The picador replied:
“Truth is an handled fruit:
Isn’t that your finger in His side?”
AS CRIED
And others ask, “What’s it to be possessed
Of one you cannot keep, she being old?”
There is no robin in my eye to build a nest
For any bride who shakes against the cold,
Nor is there a claw that would arrest
—I keep the hoof from stepping on her breath—
The ravelled clue that dangles crock by a thread,
Who hooked her to the underworld. I said in a breath
I keep a woman, as all do, feeding death.
AS CRIED
“If gold falls sick, being stung by mercury”
What then, being stung by treason and surprise?
Will turn its other cheek?
And He replies (who is misquoted ere he speak),
“Why She
Who keeps the minerals of Paradise.”
THEREFORE SISTERS
Therefore sisters now begin
With time-locked heel
To mourn the vanishing and mewing;
Taboo becomes obscene from too much wooing:
Glory rots, like any other green.
Therefore daughters of the Gwash
Look not for Orpheus the swan
Nor wash
The Traveller his boot
Both are gone.
Seven Unfinished Poems
C. P. Cavafy
—Translated from Greek by John C. Davis
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
WHEN THE GREEK ALEXANDRIAN C. P. Cavafy died in 1933 at the age of seventy, his published poetic corpus amounted to 154 poems. Most of these poems—printed at his own expense and distributed by him—were produced on a very small scale, and, as scholars have noted, Cavafy thereby succeeded to a large extent in determining his readership and its reaction to his work. E. M. Forster first brought international attention to this extraordinary literary figure who, in Forster’s words, stood “at a slight angle to the universe.” The English author also described Cavafy in another way that was both pertinent, yet as time was to prove, mistaken: “Such a writer can never be popular. He flies both too slowly and too high.” Since then, of course, Cavafy has become perhaps the best-known modern Greek poet outside of Greece, more so perhaps than Odysseus Elytis or George Seferis, both Nobel Prize winners.
The seven poems published here in English translation for the first time comprise a selection from a total of thirty-four unfinished works by the Alexandrian. These were first identified in the poet’s papers, long after his death, by the literary scholar George Savidis in 1963. It was not until 1994, however, that the Italian neo-Hellenist Renata Lavagnini finally published all of them in a single volume (K. P. Kavafis, Ateli poiimata 1918-1932, ed. Renata Lavagnini [Ikaros: Athens 1994]). Her edition contains detailed notes and a typographically elaborate presentation of the works’ compositional evolution: the printed page graphically reproduces the layers of revisions and alterations that Cavafy made to his handwritten drafts. These poems, as Evripidis Garandoudis recently commented, constituted—until Lavagnini’s edition—the only remaining poetic work of Cavafy still to await publication.
The draft poems come to complement the other poetical work of Cavafy. He had kept them carefully in his files for the purpose of working into final form and, presumably, publishing them. It is tempting to speculate on the choices the poet might have made had he lived longer to devote further time to them. They deal with themes familiar from Cavafy’s other poetry: history (“Never fail to mention Cynegeirus,” “In the wooded glades” and “At Epiphany”), moral speculation (“Guilt”) and love (specifically, homoeroticism, as in “The news in the paper,” “That my soul would pass through my lips” and “On the seafront”). Some, such as “Guilt,” show a combination of these themes.
THE NEWS IN THE PAPER
There was also something about blackmail.
On this point, again, the paper stressed
its utter contempt for such depraved,
shameless and corrupt morals.
“Contempt” … while he, grieving inside,
remembered a night last year
they spent together in a room
of a hotel-cum-brothel: but afterwards
they never met—not even in the street.
“Contempt” … while he remembered those sweet
lips, and the white, exquisite,
divine flesh which he hadn’t kissed enough.
Sadly he read the news while on the tram
The body had been found last night at eleven
down on the seafront. It wasn’t certain
if a crime had been committed. The paper
expressed regret, but, ever righteous,
declared its utter contempt for the depraved life of the victim.
—May 1918
THAT MY SOUL WOULD PASS THROUGH MY LIPS
There was absolutely nothing dramatic
in his tone when he said “Perhaps I shall die.”
He said it in jest. In a way that any
twenty-three year old would say it.
And I—twenty-five—took it lightly.
No air (thankfully) of poetic sentimentality
that moves (vacuous) elegant ladies,
who sigh at the sound of mere trivialities.
But when I came up
to the door of his house
the idea came to me that it was no joke.
Perhaps he had died. And, filled with alarm,
I ran up the stairs: his was the third floor.
And without so much as saying a word,
I kissed his brow, his eyes, his mouth,
his breast, his hands, and every single limb;
I thought—as the divine verses
of Plato say—that my soul would pass through my lips.
I didn’t go to the funeral. I was ill.
Alone, his mother wept for him, quite
innocently, over his white coffin.
—1918?
NEVER FAIL TO MENTION CYNEGEIRUS
Because he is from a noble Italian family,
and because he is twenty years old,
and because this is the way things are done in high society,
he has come to Smyrna to learn the art of rhetoric
and to perfect his knowledge of the Hellenic tongue.
And today, without paying the slightest
attention, he is listening to the famous sophist
lecture on Athens. Gesticulating,
full of passionate enthusiasm, the sophist tells
of Militiades, and the glorious battle of Marathon.
But he’s thinking of the banquet he will attend tonight,
and his imagination conjures up a delicate face,
beloved lips which he is impatient to kiss …
He thinks of how much he enjoys himself here.
But his funds are running low. In a few months
he will return to Rome. And he recalls
that there, too, he owes much money. And that once again
he will have to find ways of avoiding payments
and of securing the means to live in a manner fitting
for someone of his station (he is, after all, from a noble Italian family).
If only he could set his eyes on the will
of
old Fulvius. If only he knew
just what he is to get from that lecherous old goat
(two years, three … how much longer will he last!)
Will he leave him half, a third? Admittedly,
he’s already paid off his debts twice.
The sophist is in raptures, almost in tears,
as he perorates on Cynegeirus.
—July 1919
ON THE SEAFRONT
An intoxicating night, in the dark, on the seafront.
And later in the small room of a disreputable
hotel—where we wholly unleashed our sweet, sick passion,
we gave ourselves for hours to “our own kind of love”—
until the windows shone with the new day.
Tonight is like that night:
it has revived for me a night from the distant past.
No moon, utter darkness
(this served our plans), when we met
on the seafront, far away
from the cafés and bars.
—April 1920
IN THE WOODED GLADES, OR,
IN THE WOODS NEAR EPHESUS APOLLONIUS OF TYANA HAS A VISION OF EVENTS IN ROME
Domitian had become quite wild,
and the provinces suffered grievously under him.
In Ephesus, as elsewhere, discontent was rife.
But one day, while Apollonius
was discoursing in the wooded glades, quite suddenly
he appeared abstracted and seemed to speak
mechanically. Then he stopped his speech
and cried out—“Smite the tyrant!”—
in the midst of his many amazed listeners.
For at that very moment his soul had perceived
Stephanos in Rome striking with his sword
Domitian, who sought to defend himself with a golden goblet.
And finally he saw the horde of guards enter
and promptly slay the heinous,
half-dead emperor.
—1925
AT EPIPHANY
When at Epiphany they plotted the same
as they had done at Christmas,
to drag out the rabble again,
hoping to stir up once more
popular support for the child (alas for little Yannis,
son of good Sire Andronicus, who would have been in safer hands
with her and her son);
when at Epiphany they plotted the same,
inciting the rabble once again to obscenities
and vulgar insinuations about her,
she could not bear the strain a second time,
and, inside the wretched room to which she was confined,
Cantacuzene gave up the ghost.
The death of Queen Cantacuzene, so wretched as it was,
I have taken from the History of Nikephoros Gregoras.
Somewhat different, though no less pitiful, is the version
given in Emperor John Cantacuzenus’ historical excursus.
—May 1925
GUILT
Tell that feeling of guilt to moderate itself,
for fine though it may be, it is dangerously one-sided.
Do not let yourself be obsessed or tormented so by the past.
Do not attach such importance to yourself.
The wrong you committed was less serious
than you think, far less serious.
The virtue which led you this way now
was, even then, latent within you.
Look, an instance comes
suddenly to mind explaining
an act of yours which then seemed
less than praiseworthy, but now must be excused.
Trust not your memory absolutely;
there is much you’ve forgotten—insignificant,
trivial things—that vindicated you enough.
And as for the one you wronged, do not think
you knew him so well. He must have had joys
that you were unaware of.
So little did you really know about his life
that those deep wounds you thought you’d dealt him
may have been no more than mere scratches.
Trust not your feeble memory.
Moderate that feeling of guilt which, always one-sided,
will go to any length to twist the truth against you.
—October 1925
Cavafy’s Ithaka
George Seferis
—Translated from Greek by Susan Matthias
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
THE HOMERIC HERO ODYSSEUS—“the man of twists and turns,” as Robert Fagles has translated it—remains very much alive for modern Greek poets, and the best-known poem of C. P. Cavafy, at least for English language readers, is certainly “Ithaka.” Cavafy reinterprets Odysseus’s decade-long search for his homeland after the end of the Trojan War as an end in itself: “… hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery.”
In this 1952 essay, written nine years before he won the Nobel Prize and published here for the first time in English, George Seferis identifies Ithaka with Cavafy’s birthplace, Alexandria, Egypt. Cavafy rarely traveled outside Alexandria as an adult, and yet as a Greek living abroad (albeit in a primarily Greek community) he felt, understandably, to be somewhat an exile. Seferis sees Cavafy’s personal odyssey as the gradual recognition and acceptance of his authentic poetic voice, deeply rooted in Alexandria and symbolized by the “poor” Ithaka that nevertheless offered Odysseus—and Cavafy—their “marvelous journey” of self-discovery.
For his part, Seferis returned again and again in his own poetry to the figure of Odysseus, at times in the guise of a sailor, “A large man, whispering through his whitened beard words in our language spoken as it was three thousand years ago” (“Reflections on a Foreign Line of Verse”), and at other times as the travel-weary man seeking a warm hearth in a harsh world that has “become an endless hotel,” as he wrote in Thrush. Seferis was born in Smyrna in 1900 and after the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1922 he could never return to his birthplace. He was also often away from Greece, serving as part of the Greek government in exile during World War II and in the diplomatic corps (he was ambassador to England from 1957 to 1962).
Cavafy and Seferis, then, two of Greece’s greatest poets in the Modernist tradition, shared similar Odyssean experiences that shaped their lives and work. As Seferis put it in a 1968 interview with translator and scholar Edmund Keeley: “Greece is a continuous process. In English, the expression ‘ancient Greece’ includes the meaning of ‘finished,’ whereas for us Greece goes on living …”
This text comes from Dokimes, Volume III. Citations from “Ithaka” and “Waiting for the Barbarians” are from Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, C. P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.
IN THE POEMS OF CAVAFY, we often find the tone of an internal dialogue, as if we were hearing the whisper of the poet conversing with himself. This tone is very obvious in poems triggered by personal reminiscences. But I believe it is also present where we would least expect it: in the historical poems or in poems that offer advice.
In one of his earliest poems, for instance, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” where—in the form of a dialogue heard among a crowd gathered in the marketplace—he describes for us a town ready to fall, like a ripe fruit, we notice suddenly that the final stanza seems to be uttered by a man who belongs, yet does not belong, to the psychological makeup of the poem’s characters: someone who participates in this unfolding event but who is at the same time its despondent eyewitness:
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians!
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
This tone, this “monologue to himself,” is, I believe, very deserving of notice for the understanding of Cavafy’s poetry. It is this very tone which renders so inexplicably alive certain fragments fashioned from forgotten details of old manuscripts. It is the hidden sound which connects
them to the life experience of the poet. I believe that those who have not paid attention to this tone, which comes so naturally to a man of solitude, call Cavafy cerebral—an indefinite enough adjective.
The isolation of Greek poets is great, whether the poet be named Kalvos, Palamas or Papadiamantis. But when I contemplate the life of Cavafy, I think that no one’s isolation surpassed Cavafy’s own. For this reason, I very much like Takis Papatsonis’s remark that Cavafy’s humor is of the “cloister” variety:
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians!
This too is the humor of a monk, the bitter humor of a man enclosed within high walls. One can note such humor elsewhere as well.
Moreover, even in poems that would seem at first glance to be impersonal images taken from a bygone life, the life experience of the poet is nonetheless always present in one form or another, more hidden or more obvious. That is why his works seem so deeply rooted in our contemporary life. This is indeed a very broad subject and today I can do nothing more than barely scratch its surface by offering one or two examples. The main example I have in mind is “Ithaka.”
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
But, really, what do these Ithakas mean?
For the Greeks, seamen or expatriates, people of the Nation or of Greek communities scattered throughout the world, the meaning of Ithaka is inexhaustible. Cavafy is the poet of the Greek diaspora. He gave us, I feel, the most epigrammatic verse about the Greek who achieves greatness outside his fatherland:
with the variegated action of adjusted mental processes.
All of expatriate Greece is contained within this phrase: it is fitting that Cavafy wrote about Ithaka. But let us take a closer look at how this poem is connected more deeply to his life. Here we must consider that when it was written, somewhere around 1911, the poet seemed to be completing a great “circumnavigation” that lasted about twenty-five years, namely the long wandering towards a poetic expression faithful to himself and to his world. We are witnessing a veritable Odyssey. From 1886, when he publishes his first verses—verses of a mediocre disciple of Paparrigopoulos—until the moment when we see him now, he has spent more than a third of his life trying out forms, styles, eras, modes of expression, which he ultimately rejects. Had he died at forty, he would be remembered in Greek literature by two or three good poems, about as many “endearing” ones and a great stack of very bad versifications. Among these latter ones, I count of course some fifty poems unknown to most of the reading public, the so-called “rejected” poems. Now, as he is writing his “Ithaka,” all this has been left far behind, along with the frequent complaints of the poet who resents his vain labors and realizes with impatience that he is still “on the first step of the ladder of poetry.” Cavafy has discovered his true nature as a poet by now, he has found his characteristic voice; and, strange to say, only now, a little before the composition of “Ithaka,” has he found the great capital he was seeking all these many years: Alexandria, with “The God Abandons Antony.” One is startled at the thought that this man, who was born in this city and has lived in it so tenaciously, only now, in his forty-eighth year, discovers it. The gestures of a blind man, the tyranny of light which we note in poems such as “The Windows,” no longer exist: the poet sees and induces others to see:
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