Cavafy Read online

  On the Cover

  The image is a Byzantine marble bust of Valentinian II (Flavius Valentinianus), emperor of Rome from 375 to 392, half-brother to Gratian. He ascended the throne at the age of four, and died at twenty-one by hanging—officially a suicide, but many think his former general Arbogast, with whom Valentinian had had a falling out, may have had a hand in his death.

  Valentinan was caught up in the struggle between the powers of the Catholic Church (in the person of Ambrose, the bishop of Milan) and a desire to keep pagan Roman traditions alive (strongly advocated by Valentinian’s mother Justina, and Aurelius Symmachus, the Roman prefect). But as Valentinian was only eleven at the time, he finally acquiesced to Ambrose’s insistence and many pagan temples were despoiled.

  Axios Press

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  Edinburg, VA 22824

  888.542.9467

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  Cavafy: 166 Poems © 2008 by Alan L. Boegehold. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60419-103-5

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Cavafy’s Values

  Poems Walls

  An Old Man

  Achilles’ Horses

  Prayer

  Sarpedon’s Funeral

  Candles

  The First Step

  Old Men’s Souls

  Che Fece . . . il Gran Rifiuto

  Interruption

  Windows

  Thermopylae

  Faithlessness

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  Voices

  Desires

  The Trojans

  King Demetrios

  Dionysos’ Band

  Monotony

  Footsteps

  That’s He

  The City

  The Satrapy

  The Ides of March

  Finalities

  Sculptor of Tyana

  The God Leaves Anthony

  Ionic

  The Glory of the Ptolemies

  Ithaca

  The Dangers

  Philhellene

  Herodes Atticus

  Alexandrian Kings

  Come Back

  At Church

  Very Rarely

  To the Extent that You Can

  The Shop’s

  I Went

  The Tomb of the Grammarian Lysias

  Eurion’s Grave

  Chandelier

  Long Ago

  But Wise Men, Approaching Events

  Theodotos

  At the Café Door

  He Swears

  One Night

  Morning Sea

  Painted

  Orophernes

  The Battle of Magnesia

  Manuel Komnenos

  The Seleucid’s Displeasure

  When They Stir

  On the Street

  Before the Statue of Endymion

  In Osroene’s City

  Passage

  For Ammones Who Died, Age 29, in 610

  A God of Theirs

  At Evening

  To Pleasure

  Grey

  Iasis’ Grave

  In the Month of Athyr

  I’ve Looked So Hard

  Ignatius’ Tomb

  Days of 1903

  The Tobacconist’s Window

  Caesarion

  Body Remember

  Lanes’ Grave

  Recognition

  Nero’s Limit

  Ambassadors from Alexandria

  Aristoboulos

  In Port

  Aimilianos Monai, Alexandrian, 628–655 a.d.

  From Nine O’Clock

  By the House

  Next Table

  Afternoon Sun

  To Stay

  Of the Jews

  Imenos

  On Board

  Demetrios Soter

  If He Did Die

  Young Men of Sidon, 400 a.d.

  So They Come

  Darius

  Anna Komnena

  Byzantine Official in Exile, Poetaster

  Their Origin

  The Benevolence of Alexander Vala

  Melancholy of Jason Kleander, Poet in Commagene, 595 a.d.

  Demaratos

  I Brought to Art

  From the School of the Famous Philosopher

  The Silversmith

  Who Fought for the Achaean League

  To Antiochos Epiphanes

  In an Old Book

  In Despair

  Julian Observing Too Little Esteem

  Epitaph of Antiochos, King of Commagene

  Theater of Sidon (400 a.d.)

  Julian in Nikomedia

  Before Time Changes Them

  He Came to Read

  31 b.c. in Alexandria

  John Kantakouzinos Prevails

  Temethos, Antiochene, 400 a.d.

  Of Colored Glass

  The Twenty-fifth Year of his Life

  On the Italian Shore

  In a Boring Little Town

  Apollonius Tyaneus in Rhodes

  Kleitos Ill

  In a Town of Asia Minor

  Priest at the Serapeion

  In the Taverns

  A Great Train of Priests and Laity

  Sophist out of Syria

  Julian and the Men of Antioch

  Anna Dalassini

  Days of 1896

  Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old

  Greek from Old

  Days of 1901

  You Do Not Comprehend

  A Young Man, for His Art—24 Years Old

  In Sparta

  Picture of a 23 Year Old Young Man Done by a Friend of the Same Age, Amateur

  In a Large Greek Colony, 200 b.c.

  A Duke from Western Libya

  Kimon, Son of Learchos, 22 Years Old, Student of Greek Literature (in Kyrene)

  On the Way to Sinope

  Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11

  Myres: Alexandria. 340 a.d.

  Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra

  Pretty Flowers and White, How Very Right They Were

  Come O King of the Lacedaemonians

  In the Same Place

  The Mirror

  He Asked About the Quality

  They Should Have Concerned Themselves

  By Prescriptions of Greco-Syrian Magicians of Old

  200 b.c.

  Days of 1908

  In the Suburbs of Antioch

  At the Theater

  The Bandaged Shoulder

  Bank of the Future

  Attires

  The Death of the Emperor Tacitus

  Half Hour

  People of Poseidonia

  Return from Greece

  The Saving of Julian (unfinished)

  Symeon

  That Way

  “The Rest I Shall Tell Them Below in the House of Hades”

  Foreword

  Constantine Cavafy was the most improbable, as he remains among the greatest, of modern Greek poets. “He wore a straw hat and stood at an angle to the universe,” said E.M. Forster. He spoke Greek with a noticeable British accent, had no eye for landscape, and lived next door to a brothel in Egyptian Alexandria, a city full of ancient Hellenic ghosts, many of which he brought uncannily to life. The youngest son in a stiflingly respectable mercantile family, he was also a passionate homosexual who treasured his brief encounters for decades, the ultimate apostle of personal nostalgia, before immortalizing them in verse that veered disconcertingly between the sentimental and the
ironic, the mandarin and the vernacular.

  Deceptively simple and with hardly a metaphor in sight, his poetry nevertheless presents an enormous challenge to any modern translator (and since his international discovery in the mid-twentieth century there have been plenty of them). Alan Boegehold has several rare advantages for the task. He is a fine classicist, to whom Cavafy’s forays into the Hellenistic and Byzantine past present no problems. His familiarity with the Greek language, both ancient and modern, makes him sensitive to subtle nuances that many would miss (no accident that he’s an expert on Greek gestures).

  Above all he catches that atmosphere and tone unique to Cavafy, an odd blend of world-weariness, irony, propriety, passion and nostalgia found in no other poet, and does so in a minimalist translation, bare-boned like its original, that never wastes a single word. His introduction, perfect for anyone who comes to Cavafy for the first time, is the work of a devotee who has been living with this elusive and obstinate poet for years. The highest praise I can give Boegehold’s versions, as a fellow translator, is that they will undoubtedly spur many readers to tackle Cavafy’s original Greek, something that would surely delight the old Alexandrian in whatever afterworld he and his straw hat may have ended up.

  PETER GREEN, FRSL

  Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics,

  University of Texas at Austin

  Acknowledgements

  I began to translate Cavafy’s poems one summer when for one reason or another Julie and I found ourselves in other people’s houses in the late afternoon waiting for supper. The impulse came from my dear μπατσανάκη George d’Almeida, artist, poet, and propulsive agent. Once I had started, encouraging spirits appeared along the way. An undergraduate whom I had directed to “Ithaca” (this would have been Rae Dalven’s translation) told me later the reading had changed her life. At a neighbor’s wedding and at a memorial service for a beloved friend, that was the one poem family members requested. Virgil Burnett drew a Fury in ink and (as Pas de Loup Press) printed “Footsteps” on Bristol board and then published translation and drawing in Margins.

  Poetry evenings and nights at Sylvia Moubayed’s were inspiring: there Edwin Honig encouraged me to think of publication. Stuart Blazer’s observations were always encouraging. Faith Sandstrom caused my version of “Orophernes” to appear in Celator. Judith Binder has been a force for the good in most of my adventures in poetry. Sam Abrams has improved various efforts with accurate queries. Once when I read some pieces at the Providence Athenaeum, Michael Harper attended and patted me on the shoulder as he left (I try not to think he was saying, “Nice try, kid”).

  I sent some versions to James Merrill (whom I came to know thanks to John and Edith Camp) after he had published three translations in Grand Street. I said that if he had it in mind to do the whole I would stop. He wrote back saying that he would not and that I should continue. Bob Strassler made an effort to have my versions published in England. Ernst and Annette Schmidt invited friends and colleagues to their home in Tübingen to hear me read some versions aloud. Robert and Barbara Rodgers gave me an opportunity to read and talk about Cavafy at the University of Vermont. My colleagues in the Department of Classics at Brown University, especially William Wyatt, Adele Scafuro, and David Konstan, and now recently Elsa Amanatidou, have always been ready to read and provide informed comment. I was also given space in the Brown Classical Journal for a few versions, and “Caesarion” appeared in our departmental 70th birthday tribute to Michael Putnam. Ruthann Whitten has been a help at every stage. Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan gave good, prompt advice when it was needed. Charles R. Beye brought my work to the attention of Ann Rosener, who published eleven of the poems in her In Simple Clothes, a livre d’artiste, with three etchings by William Brice.

  Lucia Athanassaki pushed me to try Elytis and Seferis as well, and so did Angelos Matthaiou, who, when he learned that I was translating Cavafy, presented me with an armful of relevant texts. Charis Kalliga used my translation of her poems in Minoa Akra. Becky Sinos provided me with relevant background music for a reading on the Amherst College radio, and some relevant questions as well. Diskin Clay and Dia Philippides gave me critical bibliographical help. Despina Mylonas, almost from the very start, read every single translation at least once, and improved them all. Mike Keeley, to whom I sent a whole batch, read them critically and gave me authoritative advice. With Peter Green over the years I have learned about Cavafy and Greece both then and now. Jim Ottaway, George Huxley, Ron and Connie Stroud, and Jane Chaplin have each in one way or another given me heartening encouragement, as have Lindley, Alan, David, and Alison. Hunter Lewis, publisher of Axios Press, has instructed me in various ways, most recently by directing my attention to Cavafy’s values. And indeed I owe my whole exploration of modern Greece to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and these days especially to the Gennadius Library, and always to JEMB.

  A word about my approach to translating Cavafy: He composed in various modes, sometimes combining “purifying,” i.e., old-fashioned Greek and demotic, the language in general use today, in a single poem, sometimes using rhymes, but more often not. I have tried to approach his spare, not to say bony, style, eschewing poetic locutions, and by using fewer rather than more words to convey his meaning.

  I have read and learned from other translations, chiefly those of the following: Rae Dalven, Edmund Keeley, Philip Sherrard, George Savides, Memas Kolaitis, James Merrill, Peter Green, Sam Abrams, Diskin Clay, Evangelos Sachperaglou, John Mavrogordato, Avi Sharon, Glenn Bowersock, Stratis Haviaris,, Theoharis Theoharis, Aliki Barnstone, Robert Elsie, Filippo Maria Pontani.

  For readers who are looking at Cavafy for the first time, I list a few favorites, both my own and those of readers generally: “Ithaca,” “Waiting for the Barbarians,” “King Demetrios,” “The City,” “Footsteps,” “Alexandrian Kings,” “Ides of March,” “Young Men of Sidon.”

  Introduction

  Cavafy’s Values

  The Greek poet Constantine Photiades Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there in 1933. His poems, those that he circulated in his lifetime and those that he did not, have become more and more widely read and influential since his death, thanks to the subsequent publication in book form, first of 154 poems that he had acknowledged and approved, and after that a number of others, some finished, some renounced, and some unfinished. New translations from Greek into English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and other languages continue to appear.

  The details of his life, work, and publication practices are available in an increasing number of studies, A good place to start is the online catalogue, called “Ambrosia,” of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the British School at Athens, where close to 200 entries are listed under the poet’s name. The purpose of the present essay is to introduce Cavafy’s work into a series of books that in varying ways touch on values.

  My own approach to the poet here is personal and without pretensions to an overview of what has been thought, written and said about him over the past hundred years and more. The opinions I record in the following pages are those of an appreciative reader and translator. They concern principally Cavafy’s sense of the worth of various things, as expressed in his poems.

  Throughout the poems there is a keen appreciation of loss, both recent and in the distant past. A recent loss, often enough a lover, when irrecoverable, when repossessed only by memory, becomes, once it is a poem, possibly more valuable than the object of loss ever could be. Losses suffered by figures from antiquity are evaluated paradoxically and in the end recognizably on a scale consonant with the poet’s judgement of the object’s true worth.

  A high evaluation of “courage” and “wisdom” is also constant and unfailing. “Beauty” (mostly as it is to be found in young men and in the constructions of art and poetry) is an absolute. In addition, Greek Orthodox Christianity and Hellenism, the latter understood as an irreducible core of “b
eing Greek,” appear as prominent ideals. “Courage” in the examples he provides is the will and ability to act appropriately, no matter what the cost. “Wisdom” is what informs a precise calibration of appropriate response in a given set of circumstances.

  Where “beauty” is to be considered, process becomes apparent: The excitement of a love affair or a historical moment or a recognition can become beauty in a poem. Process varies when the poet brings Greek Orthodox Christianity or Hellenism into the light. He may create a scenario where recognition of one or the other as an ideal caps the poem. Elsewhere the ideal is to be deduced as being an absolute from how it is shown being misunderstood. At other times, he will adumbrate a yearning for the fulfillment that full commitment can bring.

  His use of paradox and irony requires of a reader or listener a perception of the absolute in question even when, or especially when, it is not named. Comprehension comes to a reader or listener as Cavafy reveals how that absolute loses its identity, its integrity, when misapprehended. It is also helpful to have in mind that Cavafy assigns little value to many things that worldly people desire, things like imperial power, wealth, grand buildings, extensive gardens, military victories, jewels, noble or royal forebears, and popular regard. (This last, his biographers say, he wanted very much, but what his poems reveal is his own amused appreciation: see, e.g., “That’s He.”) In poems where such grandeurs are particularized, he may evaluate them by use of a paradox or an ironical summation.

  Sometimes the spirit of Qoheleth, the Assembler or Preacher, as the author of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament is known, seems to be a presence in Cavafy’s poems. The Preacher starts his enigmatic tract from Hellenistic Judaism with the words (as given in the Septuagint) ματαιώτης ματαιότων, usually translated into English as “vanity of vanities,” “vain” meaning “empty” and “valueless,” “futilely chasing the wind.” He consigns much of what the world strives for to this “vanity” and I have found it illuminating to read some of Cavafy’s poems with the Preacher’s evaluation in mind.

  An early poem, “Monotony,” sounds like Ecclesiastes 1:9. There, the Preacher says: “What has been done is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” (Revised Standard Edition, 1952). Cavafy’s speaker says: “The same things will happen, will happen again. Identical moments both find us and leave us.” He could be doing a riff on the Preacher’s lament.