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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:
