Cavafy Read online

and is lost—The Law is like that—

  at least he will honor him dead.

  Look, he sends Apollo down to the plain,

  given instructions to care for the body.

  The corpse of the hero, Apollo with care

  sorrowfully raises and takes to the river.

  He washes away the dust and the blood.

  He closes the terrible wound, not leaving any

  trace to show. He pours ambrosial fragrance

  over Sarpedon and clothes him

  in radiant Olympian attire.

  He whitens his skin and combs with a pearl

  comb the black, black hair.

  The fair limbs he composes and puts to rest.

  Now he’s like a young king, a charioteer,

  in his twenty -fifth, his twenty-sixth year,

  at rest after winning

  with his golden chariot and fastest horses

  in a famous competition, the prize.

  So when Apollo had done as ordered

  he called his two brothers,

  Sleep and Death, dispatching them

  to take the body to Lycia, a rich place.

  And down to that rich place, that Lycia,

  these two brothers travelled,

  Sleep and Death, and when they reached

  the door of the royal house,

  passed on the glorified body

  and returned to their other concerns and tasks.

  Once they had him at the house, there began

  with processions and honors and lamentations,

  and rich libations from holy bowls,

  with all that was fit, the grievous interment.

  Then seasoned state laborers came

  and workers of high renown in stone.

  They came to make grave and marker.

  Candles

  The days of the future stand in front of us

  Like a row of lighted candles.

  Golden, warm, lively little candles.

  Days past stay behind

  A mournful line of extinguished candles.

  The nearest ones still smoke,

  Cold candles, melted, and lumpy.

  I do not want to look at them. Their shape hurts me,

  And it hurts me to remember their first light.

  I look ahead at my lighted candles.

  I do not want to turn around, to look and shiver,

  How quickly the dark line grows longer,

  How quickly the dead candles multiply.

  The First Step

  To Theokritos, the young poet

  Eumenes complained one day,

  “Two years now I’ve tried

  and only one idyll written:

  it is my only complete piece.

  Alas—it is high—I see,

  very high, the ladder of Poetry,

  and from the first step where I am,

  I’ll never go up, unhappy me.”

  Theokritos said, “These words

  are unfit and blasphemies:

  if you are on the first step

  you must be proud and happy.

  Here where you’ve arrived is no small thing.

  There is great glory in as much as you have done.

  Again, this very first step

  is a long way from ordinary folk:

  to stand on this step

  you have to have a righeous claim

  to be citizen of the city of ideas.

  And it is hard to be in that city

  and rarely do they make you a citizen.

  In their Agora you find legislators

  whom no fortune-hunter fools.

  Here where you’ve gotten is no small thing.

  There is great glory in as much as you have done.

  Old Men’s Souls

  In their old used up bodies

  old men’s souls reside.

  How pitiable the beggars are,

  how bored with the wretched life they lead,

  how afraid they are to lose it, and how they love it,

  confused and contradictory

  souls that reside—grotesque—

  in their ruined old hides.

  Che Fece . . . il Gran Rifiuto

  To certain persons there comes one day

  when they must say the one Yes or the one No.

  He can promptly be seen, the man who has

  ready within him the Yes:

  Saying it he goes on to honor and trust.

  He who said No does not repent: if asked again

  he would again say No; yet it continues to undo him

  that No—the right one—for the rest of his life.

  Interruption

  The gods’ work we interrupt,

  hasty beings, momentary, ignorant:

  at Eleusis’ and Phthia’s palaces,

  Demeter and Thetis begin their fair works

  in huge flames and dense smoke, but

  always Metaneira rushes from the rooms

  of the king, hair undone and trembling,

  and Peleus always takes fright and intervenes.

  Windows

  In these dark rooms

  where I pass days

  that weigh me down

  I pace up and back

  trying to find the windows.

  If one window opens,

  there will be relief.

  But the windows are not there.

  Or it is I who cannot find them.

  And maybe it’s better

  that I do not find them.

  The light could be a new oppressor.

  Who knows what new things it will show?

  Thermopylae

  Honor to those who in their lives

  have defined and guard a Thermopylae

  never moving from their obligation

  honest and fair in all transactions

  although with pity and fellow-feeling

  generous when rich, and when poor

  generous yet again in small ways

  helping as much as they can

  always telling the truth

  but not with hatred for liars.

  And more honor is due them

  when they see ahead—many do—

  that Ephialtes will appear at the end

  and the Medes will finally get through.

  Faithlessness

  We continue to praise much in Homer but we shall not praise this . . . and not Aeschylus either when Thetis claims that Apollo, in song at her wedding celebrated “my happy children, their freedom from illness, their long lives. After telling all that he raised the paean for my blessings from the gods, delighting me. And I expected Phoebus’ divine mouth to be without falsehood, full of prophetic skill. But he, the singer himself, . . . is himself the killer of my child.”

  Plato, Republic 2.338

  When Peleus and Thetis were married,

  Apollo stood up at the bright wedding table

  To bless the new couple

  And the child to come of their union.

  Sickness he said will never touch him.

  His life will be long. And when he said this,

  Thetis rejoiced. For the words

  Of Apollo, expert in prophecy,

  Seemed to her surety for her child.

  As Achilles grew, his beauty

  Was all the talk of Thessaly,

  And Thetis remembered the words of the god.

  But old men came one day with tidings:

  They told of Achilles’ death at Troy.

  Thetis tore her scarlet clothes,

  Removed her rings and bracelets,

  Threw them to the ground.

  In her pain she remembered the past.

  She asked what the wise Apollo was doing,

  Where was the poet who told at the table

  Such wonders, where was the prophet,

  When they killed her son,

  Just in the prime of his youth.

  Apollo, the old men answered,

  Came his very own se
lf to Troy

  On the side of the Trojans

  And killed Achilles.

  Waiting for the Barbarians

  What are we waiting for, gathered here in the market?

  The barbarians will arrive today.

  Why such inactivity in the Senate?

  Why do the senators sit, and not pass their laws?

  Because the barbarians will arrive today.

  Why should the senators pass laws any more?

  The barbarians when they come will pass the laws.

  Why did the emperor get up so early?

  Why does he sit on his throne

  at the greatest gate of the city

  robed and wearing his crown?

  Because the barbarians will arrive today.

  The Emperor waits to receive their leader

  has made ready indeed to give him a parchment

  which grants him in writing titles and attributes.

  Why did our two consuls and praetors

  come out today with their red embroidered togas?

  Why the bracelets with so many amethysts

  rings with emeralds that flash and shine?

  Why hold today costly batons

  Unusually worked with silver and gold?

  Because the barbarians will arrive today

  and such things dazzle the barbarians.

  Why do not the meritorious orators come as always

  to give their speeches, to say their own things?

  Because the barbarians will arrive today

  and they are bored with eloquence and speeches.

  Why all at once this unease and confusion?

  How serious the faces become.

  Why do the streets and squares quickly empty

  and all go home deeply concerned?

  Because night came on and the barbarians did not come

  and certain people have arrived from the border;

  they say there are no more barbarians.

  And now what will become of us without barbarians?

  These people were in a way a solution.

  Voices

  Ideal voices, loved,

  Of those who died and those lost

  For us as though they’d died,

  In our dreams they speak sometimes.

  The mind hears them sometimes in thought.

  And there returns with them for an instant

  Sounds from our life’s first poetry,

  Like music in the night far away that dies.

  Desires

  Like bodies of beatiful dead

  they hadn’t grown old—

  closed with tears in a splendid tomb,

  roses at head and and jasmine at foot,

  so the desires that passed one by,

  not fulfilled, not having earned

  any night of pleasure or its shining morn.

  The Trojans

  Our efforts are those of people caught in a disaster

  our efforts are like those of the Trojans:

  we succeed a little, do

  a little better, and we start

  having heart and good hope.

  But something always turns up to stop us:

  Achilles at the ditch ahead comes out

  and scares us with loud shouts.

  Our efforts are like those of the Trojans:

  we assume that with decision and nerve

  we’ll change the downward course of our luck,

  and we take our stand outside to fight.

  But when the big trial comes,

  nerve and decision get lost:

  our spirits are troubled, paralyzed,

  and all around the walls we run

  trying to escape by flight.

  Our fall nevertheless is sure. Above

  on the walls, the lament has already begun:

  they are mourning memories and impressions of our days,

  bitterly Priam and Hecuba weep for us.

  King Demetrios

  Just like, not a king but an actor, he changed into a gray cloak instead of that tragic one and retired without notice.

  Plutarch, Demetrios

  When the Macedonians retired him,

  showed they wanted Pyrrhos more,

  King Demetrios—great soul he had—

  did not at all—so they say—

  react as a king. He went

  and doffed his golden raiment

  and threw his purple shoes away.

  In simple clothes he quickly dressed

  and escaped, acting like an actor,

  who when the performance is over,

  changes his clothes and goes off.

  Dionysos’ Band

  Damon the artisan

  (in the Peloponnese none better)

  works out completes in Parian marble

  the band of Dionysos:

  the god divine in his glory

  ahead, power in his stride,

  License behind, and next to License

  Tipsy pours wine for the Satyrs

  from an amphora wreathed with ivy,

  languid Sweetwine nearby

  eyes half-shut, sleepy-making

  and the singers come after,

  Melody, Sweetsong, and Revel

  who never lets die the party’s

  honored torch that he holds

  and most majestic, Ceremony.

  Damon fashions them and

  at the same time thinks

  now and again about

  his return from the Syracusan king:

  three talents, a goodly sum.

  With his other funds and this

  when it comes in, how seriously

  rich he will be and able

  to go into politics—joy!—

  himself in the Council,

  himself in the Agora.

  Monotony

  One monotonous day another

  monotonous day impermutable follows.

  The same things will happen, will happen again.

  Identical moments both find us and leave us.

  A month passes and brings another month.

  What is coming is easy for one to envision.

  It is yesterday’s business, those boring things.

  A tomorrow turns out to be not tomorrow.

  Footsteps

  On an ebony bed adorned with coral eagles

  Nero sleeps deeply,

  conscienceless, easy and happy,

  at peak in his flesh’s strength

  and the lovely bloom of his youth.

  But in the alabaster hall that keeps

  the old Lararium of the Bronzebeards,

  how uneasy his Lares are:

  they tremble, little gods of the household

  and try to hide their irrelevant selves,

  for they hear a dreadful sound,

  a sound of death go up the steps,

  and an iron tread that shakes the stairs.

  The wretched Lares fainting now

  burrow to the depth of their shrine

  one pushing and bumping another:

  one little god falls on top of another

  for they know what kind of sound this is:

  they recognize now

  the footsteps of the Furies.

  That’s He

  Unknown, stranger at Antioch, Edessene,

  writes a lot. There, at last, the final hymn:

  eighty-three poems in all with that

  Except that so much writing tires

  the poet, so much versifying,

  such concentration on Greek phraseology.

  every single bit is now a bore.

  But out of his dismay, a thought

  lifts him right away, the wonderful “That’s he,”

  that Lucian in his sleep heard at another time.

  The City

  You said: I will go to another land. I will go to another sea.

  There will be another city, better than this one.

  Everything I try is found guilty as charged.r />
  My heart—like a corpse—is buried.

  How long am I to wither ?

  Wherever I look, wherever I glance,

  I am looking at black ruins of my life here,

  Where I spent, wrecked, lost so many years.

  You will not find new places. You will not find other seas.

  The city will follow you. You will turn the same

  streets, in the same neighborhoods grow old,

  In the same houses your hair will turn white.

  You will always arrive in this city. As for elsewhere, do not hope .

  There is no boat for you. There is no road.

  The way you wrecked your life here

  In this little corner, you lost it in all the world.

  The Satrapy

  What a disaster when you are made

  for fine important work

  and unfair chances always say No:

  no encouragement, no success:

  shoddy habits block your way

  incidents of meanness and indifference.

  What a dreadful day when you give in

  (the day you have given up and give in)

  and depart as traveler for Susa.

  You go to King Artaxerxes

  who welcomes you at his court

  offers you satrapies and such

  and you accept in despair

  these things you do not want.

  Your soul seeks other things,

  cries for other things:

  praise from the People, from the Sophists:

  their hard-to-get and priceless “Well Done”

  the Market, the Theater, the Wreaths

  How will Artaxerxes give you these?

  Where in the satrapy do you find these?

  What life will you lead without them?

  The Ides of March

  Be afraid, my soul, of grandeurs

  and if your love of glory

  you cannot overcome

  pursue it with doubt and caution:

  the more you go on,

  test, pay attention the more.

  When you, Caesar, are at your peak,

  when you take the stance of a famous man

  pay attenton especially then

  when you go out into the street,

  a potentate, proceeding with escort, cynosure,

  and there happens to reach you from out of the crowd