Complete Poems (49 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
The translation of the first word of the poem, the plural adjective
idanikés,
is a notoriously vexed issue. Strictly speaking, the word means “ideal”; but elsewhere in Cavafy’s poetry, for instance in the Unpublished Poem “King Claudius,” the poet clearly intends it to mean “unreal” or “imaginary.” Hence my rendering of the word as “imagined,” which imparts to the rather abstract dictionary definition the flavor of cerebral activity implied by Cavafy’s usage elsewhere.
Writing in the mid-1890s to his friend Pericles Anastassiades, Cavafy referred to this poem as “one of the best things I ever wrote.” A decade later, in December 1906, he made the following note apropos of this poem and two others that follow closely, “An Old Man” and “Old Men’s Souls”:
What a deceitful thing Art can be, when you want to apply sincerity. You sit down and write—often speculatively—about emotions, and then, over time, you doubt yourself. I wrote “Candles,” “The Souls of Old Men” and “An Old Man” about old age. Advancing towards old (or middle) age, I discovered that this last poem of mine does not contain a correct evaluation. “The Souls of Old Men” I still think correct; but when I reach seventy years I might find it wanting too. “Candles” I hope is safe.
Descriptive poetry—historical events, the photographing (what an ugly word!) of nature—is perhaps safe. But it is a small and rather short-lived thing.
First written in 1894 and listed under the heading of “Fleeting Years,” this poem was first published in the anthology
Ethnikon Imerologion … tou etous
1898 (1897) along with two other poems, “The Horses of Achilles” and “Horace in Athens.” Apropos of Horace, it is noteworthy that “An Old Man” originally bore, as a subtitle, the Latin
words
Eheu fugaces,
which is a quotation from an ode by that poet (
Odes
2.14):
eheu fugaces … labuntur anni,
“alas, the fleeting years slip away.”
One of Cavafy’s
Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics,
written in English, refers to “An Old Man,” as follows:
I distinctly felt 1 evening in January 1904 that I should have felt more at ease, with a fuller life, had I to remember a satisfactory morning or day to my craving for a f[uck?]; which is proof to the verity of “
” [= the Greek title of “An Old Man”].
In another of these notes (see above on “Candles”), written in Greek and dated 1906, the poet found this poem wanting in comparison to “Candles” and “The Souls of Old Men.”
For the motif of mortals praying to impassive or unresponsive deities, see also “Safe Haven” and “Cleitus’s Illness.”
In his youth, Cavafy wrote with great emotion about the icon of the Mother of God: in an 1893 review of the poetry of Georgios Stratigis, commenting on a poem called “Before the Iconostasis,” he observed that
[i]n it I find as it were an echo of the dream-like and mystical devotion that the Greek people nurture toward the Mother of Christ—a feeling that causes it to regard her blessed icon as a great symbol of consolation; a feeling that … exalts and vivifies and honors [the Greek people].
The poem was originally classified under the heading “Prisons.” For Cavafy’s note on this poem, see above notes on “Candles” and “An Old Man.”
One of the most famous poets of the Alexandrian school, T
HEOCRITUS
(c. 300–260 B.C.) was born in Syracuse, on Sicily, but spent most of his life in Alexandria. What little we know about him is gleaned from details in his poems—for instance, that he’d appealed to Hieron, the ruler of Sicily, before finding a patron in Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt, at whose brilliant court Theocritus seems to have remained thereafter. Although he composed poems of every kind, Theocritus remains a favorite above all for his pastoral “Idylls,” with their elegant feeling and witty descriptions of loves among rural and mythic characters.
The references here are to two mythic interruptions by humans that had disastrous results for divine plans. In the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter
—which we know Cavafy had read around 1900, and which was clearly the inspiration for this poem—D
EMETER
, goddess of the harvest, runs amok on earth in her grief for her ravished daughter Persephone; eventually she comes to the town of E
LEUSIS
, where, disguised as an old woman, she ends up working in the house of the king as a nurse to his infant son. There she begins the arcane process of transforming the baby into an immortal (as compensation for her own lost daughter, an immortal who has become “mortal” by reason of her close proximity to Hades) by placing him each night among the glowing embers of the hearth-fire. One night, his mother the queen, M
ETANEIRA
, enters the room and interrupts Demeter, who in a rage hurls the boy to the ground and stalks out of the royal palace.
T
HETIS
and P
ELEUS
were the parents of the Greek hero Achilles. An immortal sea nymph unwillingly wed to a mortal man, Thetis attempted to render her child virtually immortal by dipping him in the terrible waters of the river Styx, contact with which would leave him invulnerable. Cavafy here imagines that Peleus, in his palace at P
HTHIA
(in the central Greek region of Thessaly), interrupts this process much as Metaneira does in the Homeric
Hymn,
with the result that Thetis neglects to dip the place on her child’s ankle where she’s been holding
him. This, of course, turned out to be the one vulnerable part of Achilles’ body, and the location of the fatal wound he received as the Trojan War was nearing its end.
The battle of T
HERMOPYLAE
was one of the most important battles of the Persian Wars (490–479 B.C.), in which the Persian empire, first under Darius the Great and then under his son Xerxes, attempted to subjugate the cities of mainland Greece. Despite being overwhelmingly outnumbered, a coalition of Greek states, led by Athens and Sparta, resisted the Persians with great bravery, and won the war in 479 after the decisive victories at Salamis and Plataea.
No act of bravery, however, was greater than that shown by the Spartans at Thermopylae, a pass between the mountains and the sea in north-central Greece through which the Persian army hoped to pass en route to Athens. As Herodotus relates in his
History
(7.201–233), a Greek force of between six and seven thousand troops bravely held the narrow mountain pass for two days, until a local man called Ephialtes betrayed them, showing the Persians an alternative route round the pass. After this, nearly all the Greeks withdrew or panicked, leaving about three hundred men behind, mostly Spartans, who heroically fought a rear-guard action until the last man had been killed; this action gave the departing force time enough to leave the vicinity safely. (According to one source, four thousand Persians were killed, to the Spartans’ three hundred.)
Thermopylae has thereafter stood as a symbol of extraordinary bravery against unbeatable odds—and, too, of a supreme, rather stylish disdain for danger, such as truly brave men show. According to Herodotus, Xerxes sent a spy to see how many Greeks were ready to resist him in the pass, and the man he sent was astonished to see that, in the face of daunting odds, the Spartan soldiers were exercising and combing their long hair, “for it is the custom of these men to dress their hair,” as the Spartan turncoat Demaratus (see “Demaratus”) told Xerxes, “whenever they are about to put their lives in jeopardy.”
The title—which means “who made … the great refusal”—is a partial quotation of a line from Canto III of Dante’s
Inferno,
which describes Dante and Vergil as they pass through the Gates of Hell (“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here”). The sight that greets their eyes, once through the gates, is an astoundingly long line of those souls “displeasing both to God and to his enemy” because they committed themselves neither to good nor to evil and therefore “had never been alive”—a failure that clearly fascinated the poet for his own reasons. Among these damned, according to Dante, was Pope Celestine V, a saintly and ascetic hermit who, having been elected to the papacy at the age of eighty, in 1294, resigned the office only a few months later. This extraordinary rejection of the Holy See—the “great refusal”—earned Dante’s contempt primarily because it paved the way for the election of Boniface VIII, a pope for whom Dante had a special loathing.
The title of this poem quotes Dante’s line about Celestine with one significant deletion. The lines in question are:
Vidi e conobbi l’ombra di colei
che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto.
I saw and recognized the shade of him
Who out of cowardice made the great refusal.
Cavafy, who is likely to have known Celestine’s story and understood that the saintly man resigned less out of cowardice than out of humility and recognition of his own unsuitability for worldly office, shows more humanity here than Dante does, in deleting the phrase
per viltate,
“out of cowardice,” in the second line.
The entire passage, cited in the Longfellow translation, which Cavafy owned, reads as follows:
And he to me: “This miserable mode
Maintain the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.
Commingled are they with that caitiff choir
Of Angels, who have not rebellious been,
Nor faithful were to God, but were for self.
The heavens expelled them, not to be less fair;
Nor them the nethermore abyss received,
For glory none the damned would have from them.”
And I: “O Master, what so grievous is
To these, that maketh them lament so sore?”
He answered: “I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death;
And this blind life of theirs is so debased,
They envious are of every other fate.
No fame of them the world permits to be;
Misericord and Justice both disdain them.
Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass.”
And I, who looked again, beheld a banner,
Which, whirling round, ran on so rapidly,
That of all pause it seemed to me indignant;
And after it there came so long a train
Of people, that I ne’er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.
When some among them I had recognised,
I looked, and I beheld the shade of him
Who made through cowardice the great refusal.
Forthwith I comprehended, and was certain,
That this the sect was of the caitiff wretches
Hateful to God and to his enemies.
These miscreants, who never were alive,
Were naked, and were stung exceedingly
By gadflies and by hornets that were there.
These did their faces irrigate with blood,
Which, with their tears commingled, at their feet
By the disgusting worms was gathered up.
The first printed version of this poem bore an epigraph from Aeschylus’s
Prometheus Bound:
“How do I suffer unjust things.” Although published and republished over the years in various periodicals, the poem, which was translated into English by Cavafy’s older brother John a few months after it was written, was included neither in the grouping of Repudiated Poems, nor however in the privately printed collections
Poems
1904 and
Poems
1910; it makes its first appearance as part of a collection in the “Sengopoulos Notebook” version of
Poems
1910.
For a detailed discussion of the formal complexities of this poem, see the Introduction,
this page
.
Apropos of “Walls” Cavafy left a note in English:
Besides, one lives, one hears and one understands and the poems one writes, though not true to one’s actual life, are true to other lives … not generally, of course, but specially—and the reader to whose life the poem fits admits and feels the poem: which is proved by [playwright and author Gregory] Xenopoulos’ liking
Walls, Candles.…