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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reason they are of the deepest significance not merely inasmuch as they illuminate the existing works—the Published, Unpublished, and Repudiated Poems—but as serious works of art in themselves, the deeply wrought products of a great poetic consciousness at its peak.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 Hence the lists strongly indicate that the poet—who, as we know from the manuscripts of his Unpublished Poems, was perfectly willing to mark a finished poem with a note declaring that it “need not be published.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,”
