Complete Poems (39 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
The allusion here is to chapter 11 of Lucian’s
The Dream,
in which the author relates how he came to his literary career. In a dream, he writes, the figure of Culture, richly dressed, approached the then-impoverished and unknown Lucian and promised him such great fame as a writer that people would immediately recognize him wherever he went:
And even if you go abroad, not even on foreign territory will you be unknown or without fame. For such are the marks of recognition that I will put on you, that each of those who look upon you will nudge the man next to him and say, pointing you out, “That is he.”
The Unfinished Poem “And Above All Cynegirus” also owes its title, and much of its point, to a citation from Lucian.
An E
DESSENE
was a citizen of Edessa, the capital city of the little Syriac kingdom of Osrhoene, which was founded in 132 B.C. after the breakup of the Seleucid empire, and which remained independent until it was made a Roman province in the early third century A.D. Ruled originally by a dynasty of Arab sheikhs, it was Christianized fairly early, and (as Cavafy was surely aware) was the first state to have a Christian king. It is tempting to imagine that the young Edessene of this poem is, then, a Christian—one who has left his quaint hometown for the first time to try his luck at a literary career, and who is dazzled to encounter, in the much older and more splendid Antioch, one of the greatest metropolises of its time.
For remarks on the significance of this poem in Cavafy’s work, see the Introduction,
this page
. Appropriately for a poem that has as its subject the tensions between pagan and Christian values, the dramatic date of this verse is the joint reign of the two sons of Constantine the Great (d. 337 A.D.), the emperor who officially made Christianity the supreme religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine had three sons, C
ONSTANS
, Constantine II, and C
ONSTANTIUS
II; unsurprisingly, the period after their father’s death was marked by strained alliances and grim tensions among the three, who were meant to divide their father’s empire among them. Constans, who reigned in the West, killed Constantine II in 340, and was himself killed in a coup ten years later; Constantius died in January 361 while marching to do battle with his cousin, Julian the Apostate, who after becoming emperor attempted to restore pagan worship in Rome.
In the late third century A.D., the emperor Diocletian had introduced
an administrative arrangement whereby the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western regions, each ruled by an emperor bearing the title of
AUGUSTUS
; each
augustus
had serving under him a deputy bearing the title of
caesar,
who was expected in due time to succeed as
augustus.
The Byzantine emperor M
ANUEL
I C
OMNENUS
(born ca. 1120), son of John II, whom he succeeded in 1143, transformed the austere and pious court of his father into a center of glittering festivity, with tournaments borrowed from Western Europe. Always more oriented to the West than most Byzantine rulers, he never gave up his dream of restoring the former Roman Empire in its entirety, and to this end he neglected his Turkish neighbors while pursuing an aggressive policy of expansion into Italy, meddling in European politics to no little extent, and going so far as to ally himself with the pope against the Holy Roman Emperor. During his reign, he successfully incorporated Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia into the empire; at home, substantial merchant colonies from various Italian cities established themselves at Constantinople.
Manuel’s neglect of affairs closer to home cost him dearly: in 1176 his army was shattered by the Turks at the Battle of Myriocephalum, and he was said never to have laughed or smiled again. He died on September 24, 1180, and was succeeded by his son, Alexius II.
L
ABARA
(singular
labarum
) refers to the standards carried in processions of the Greek Orthodox Church; the finials often take the form of seraphs’ heads.
A fragmentary letter preserved in the Cavafy Archive and reconstructed by Diana Haas sheds light on the strong emotions that churches evoked in the poet:
The ancient Byzantine churches are also most interesting. They are low & very small buildings whose outside has no imposing appearance but a charming old world look … the curious [?] painted pictured walls, the old carved wood seats
& pulpits … mellowed by the centuries, the quaintly gilt Icones you feel transported into the dim & mystical enchanting realm of [the] Middle Ages of Greece.
Another sentence refers to the “high silver candle sticks where the lights of so many hopes & many fears have shone.”
In his 1976 study,
Cavafy’s Alexandria,
Edmund Keeley has drawn attention to the striking resemblance between this poem and a passage from Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
that similarly shows great interest in the aesthetic element of church ritual—a similarity that is to be expected, given Cavafy’s early attraction to the Decadents of the 1890s:
[C]ertainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him.… He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jeweled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the “
panis caelestis
”, the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him.
The phrase “
OUR
B
YZANTINISM
” merits some comment. Diana Haas has made the important observation that Cavafy’s strong feeling for Byzantine culture as the conduit for true Greek identity from the ancient to the modern era is often signaled by the use of the first-person-plural pronoun. “Byzantinism” importantly suggests not so much the empire itself as a historical entity, as rather the culture in the abstract, one whose institutions, particularly the Greek language and the Greek Orthodox Church, were the vehicle for the simultaneous continuation and transformation of the pagan Greek identity. Cavafy came across this concept of Byzantinism in the writings of the German scholar Ferdinand Gregorovius (in an 1882 Greek translation), where the author attaches special importance to the role of the church in the
transformation of the culture of the late Roman Empire into the Greek empire that would become Byzantium. “In Constantinople,” he wrote, “as if in some great cauldron, the culture of the Greek and Roman pagan world, the Christian religion, the cosmopolitan mechanism of Roman imperial government, and the habits and mores of Asia, achieved a bond that became renowned throughout the world as Byzantinism.” (In this context it is worth noting that a figure upon whom Gregorovius seizes as a symbol of this richly hybridized culture—the empress Eudocia, who began life as a pagan named Athenaïs and became the wife of Theodosius II—was the subject, almost certainly, of one of Cavafy’s poems on “Byzantine Days.”)
My translation of line 4 will seem strange to some. The Greek here is
mes s’ekklêsía tôn Graikôn,
literally “into a church of the Greeks.” But Cavafy himself noted that such a translation would falsely connote a distance, perhaps even an estrangement, between the speaker and the church he enters. He was, after all, a Greek Orthodox himself; the meaning here is, rather, a Greek Orthodox church as opposed to a church of any number of other denominations, of which there was a surfeit in Alexandria. The English translation of George Valassopoulos (“When I enter the Church of the Greeks”) was corrected by the poet himself thus: “When I enter the Greek Church.”
This poem and the three that follow constitute a mini cycle concerning the relationship between the artist and his work, and between Art and Nature.
In a self-commentary, Cavafy explained the title as “constituting a commentary on the poem.” The phrase “very rarely,” he went on to say, applied to those exceptional cases in which a work of art of special quality had the ability to touch future generations.
The original is in rhymed couplets; with the exception of the final couplet, all of the rhymes are homophonous.
As a subset of Cavafy’s general interest in artists and their relationship
to their creations we can detect a narrower theme: that of a competition between Art and Nature, with a strong suggestion that the powers of the former are superior. This favorite theme of the Parnassian poets whom the young Cavafy read so avidly notably recurs here and in the poem “Artificial Flowers.”
The date of composition is unknown; the poem was first printed in 1915.
In one of his “Notes on Poetics and Ethics,” written on July 5, 1902, Cavafy pondered the lack of feeling for Nature that marks his poetry:
I have never lived in the country. I haven’t even visited the country for short whiles, as others have done. Nevertheless, I wrote a poem in which I praise the countryside, where I write that my verses are a tribute to the countryside. The poem is insignificant. It is indeed the most insincere construction; a true fallacy.
But, it crosses my mind—is that true insincerity? Does not art always lie? Or, rather, is it not that when art lies the most, it is then that it creates the most? When I wrote these verses, was it not an artistic achievement? (The fact that the verses were imperfect is not perhaps due to the lack of sincerity; for how very often one fails, even armed with the sincerest of impressions.) At the time when I wrote the verses, did I not possess an artificial sincerity? Did I not fantasize in such a way as if I had lived in the country indeed?
In an essay called “Cavafy: The Man of the Crowd,” Cavafy’s friend J. A. Sareyannis recalled that after his 1932 throat operation, in Athens, the poet went to a convalescent home in the village of Kifissia:
He pulled me towards the window and showed me the marvelous view: in the foreground some huge cypresses, beyond the plain stretching out as far as Tatoï, and rising up in the
background the breathtakingly beautiful mountains of Parnes and Pendeli. With irritating gestures the poet indicated how oppressed he was by it all. “It bores me,” he told me. (tr. Sasa Wheeler)
First written probably before 1891, an early version of this poem, called “Remembrance,” was published in October 1896 and subsequently revised in July 1905 (with the title “Thessaly”); it was then revised once again and published, in its present form and with its present title, in July 1911.
One of the poet’s reading notes on Gibbon, concerning the late Roman emperor Attalus (d. after 416 A.D.), is worth considering in connection with this poem in its final form. Of Attalus, Gibbon writes that he was a “degraded emperor [who] might aspire to the praise of a skillful musician,” to which Cavafy responds:
The subject for a beautiful sonnet, a sonnet full of sadness such as Verlaine would write—
“Je suis l’empire à la fin de la decadence.”
Lost in the Gothic tumult and utterly bewildered, a melancholy emperor playing on the flute. An absurd emperor bustled in the crowd. Much applauded and much laughed at. And perhaps at times singing a touching song—some reminiscence of Ionia and of the days when the gods were not yet dead.
The reference to Ionia here is not gratuitous: Attalus, as Gibbon notes elsewhere, was born in Ionia and “had been educated in the pagan superstition” there. Hence although the original version of this poem predates Cavafy’s reading note to Gibbon, it is tempting to think that the subsequent change in the setting of the poem from Thessaly to Ionia may have been influenced by the passage in Gibbon, to which Cavafy may well have returned at some point.
Diana Haas has noted that some time around 1900—which is to say, during the period when Cavafy was revising this poem—the poet read
the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter,
which provided the subject matter for “Interruption,” and suggests that at the same time he likely read the
Hymn to Hermes,
whose description of the buoyant young god, silently skimming the peaks of Cyllene at morning, is recalled in “Song of Ionia.” Particularly worthy of note are the similarities between Cavafy’s poem and the translation of the
Hymn to Hermes
by Shelley, a poet whom Cavafy knew and, indeed, translated:
All night he worked in the serene moonshine—
But when the light of day was spread abroad
He sought his natal mountain peaks divine.
On his long wandering, neither man nor god
Had met him, since he killed Apollo’s kine,
Nor house-dog had barked at him upon his road;
Now he obliquely through the key-hole past
Like a thin mist, or an autumnal blast.
An early version of this poem, now lost, entitled “By the Hands of Eros,” was written in 1904; the final version was published in 1915. The title of the lost early version draws attention to a favorite motif here: the use of the language of sculpture to describe beautiful young men. See note on “Sculptor from Tyana,”
here
.
The original title of this poem was “Memory of Pleasure.”
According to Timos Malanos, this poem has its origins in the period of Cavafy’s existence as a young man when he was living what we would call a “double life,” perhaps soon after his 1885 return to Alexandria from Constantinople, where he had his first homosexual experiences with his cousin George. Malanos, in his 1957 book about Cavafy, recalls the poet telling him that as a young man he would pass his nights in “certain
isolated quarters” of Alexandria as a “slave to his temptations.” After such nights, apparently, the poet would repent and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” An acquaintance of Cavafy’s recalled years later that the young poet would bribe a servant to muss his bed back at home, in order to fool his family into thinking he had slept there. He kept, indeed, a room in a brothel on the corner of the Rue Mosquée Attarine, and he later recalled that one morning he took a piece of chalk and wrote on the window, “You’re not to come here again, you’re not to do it again.”