Complete Poems (50 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
And:
If even for one day, or one hour I felt like the man within “Walls”, or like the man of “Windows” the poem is based on a truth, a short-lived truth, but which, for the very reason of its having once existed, may repeat itself in another life, with perhaps as short duration, perhaps with longer.
The poem at first seems to be among the strongest expressions, on the part of the younger Cavafy, of the pessimistic lassitude and resistance to the idea of progress typical of the Decadents. And yet the poet left a strong note, dating to the period of his “Philosophical Scrutiny” of 1903–1904, suggesting that we must read this work in a more complex way:
The poem assumes this kind of social situation.
Possible situation; not likely; not my own prediction. My own notion concerning the future is more optimistic. Anyway, the poem is not at odds with my own optimistic notion; it can be taken as an episode in the progress towards Good.
The note suggests a certain impatience with the facile attitude of ennui that was characteristic of the Decadents whom he liked to mimic as a young poet, one which, as he evolved into his mature phase, seemed to him to be too unsubtle and lacking in intellectual nuance.
The epigraph of this poem comes from the conclusion of the second book of Plato’s
Republic.
The context is a discussion about whether the gods can be evil, a proposition that Socrates vehemently rejects: it is only in the imperfect representations of the gods, he says (e.g., in theater and poetry), that the gods appear to be imperfect. In order to demonstrate his point, Socrates cites a passage from a play by Aeschylus (it is not known from which lost play the quotation comes) in which T
HETIS
, the wife of P
ELEUS
and mother of A
CHILLES
, claims to have been misled by A
POLLO
about the fate of her son.
Cavafy’s citation of Plato (who is in turn reporting a citation by Socrates of Aeschylus) creates a particularly dense framework for interpreting his own poem. On the one hand, the Classical quotation he has marshaled as the epigraph for his poem is Plato’s critique, in the
Republic,
of the veracity of poetry. This part of the
Republic
is, indeed, the first systematic attempt in the Western tradition at a reasoned critique of
myth and its allied art (as the Greeks saw it), poetry, and in this context the tone of Cavafy’s poem, which is rather detached, in the rather Thucydidean manner of a historian coolly reevaluating a myth, suggests an alliance with Plato.
On the other hand, whereas the title, “Betrayal,” suggests that Apollo—and, therefore, “Poetry”—can and does indeed lie, the vehicle for our appreciation of this insight is, of course, the poem that Cavafy is writing, and which we are reading.
The myth to which the poem and its epigraph allude concerns Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes who went to Troy. Thetis—a sea-nymph and daughter of the Old Man of the Sea, Proteus—and Peleus, the son of Aeacus, were the parents of Achilles. Thetis had been pursued by Zeus, but when he learned of a prophecy predicting that any son she bore would be greater than his father, he quickly married her off to Peleus; their marriage was said to have been the last great occasion at which both mortals and immortals feasted together. The tradition is that soon after the birth of Achilles, Thetis dipped the child in the river Styx in order to grant him immortality, but the place where she had held him, at his heel, remained vulnerable—his one weak spot. (See “Interruption.”) Achilles was taken away from his mother as a boy and given to the centaur Chiron to be brought up in the woodlands of T
HESSALY
, in central Greece. A story goes that when the Achaean kings came to fetch him to the Trojan War, his mother spirited him away to the island of Skyros, dressed as a maiden; there he married Deidamia, who bore him a son, Neoptolemus. Eventually his ruse was discovered and he went to Troy. Although Achilles’ death at the hands of Paris, the seducer of Helen, is not depicted in the
Iliad
itself, the poem does allude to it: for instance, when his divine horses admonish him (19.494) to remember that he will be cut down by both a god and a man—i.e., by Apollo and Paris, who, guided by the god, aims his arrow at Achilles’ heel, thereby killing him.
This poem exists in two versions, both of them published: one in December 1898, and the other (extensively revised and rewritten) in
August 1908. Like Cavafy’s other poems dealing with High Classical subjects (as opposed to Hellenistic or Byzantine), it belongs to the earliest period of his work.
“The Funeral of Sarpedon” is closely linked, in terms of its Iliadic themes and content, to “The Horses of Achilles.” Book 16 of the
Iliad
represents a kind of dramatic peak in the overall action of the poem: in it, Achilles’ companion Patroclus, the son of M
ENOETIUS
, goes into battle with the Trojans disguised in Achilles’ armor, a ruse that has the effect of temporarily routing the Trojans. Until his death at the hands of the Trojan prince Hector, Patroclus slaughters many Trojans and Trojan allies in an escalating fury. As Homer narrates (
Iliad
16.419 ff.), among those killed by Patroclus was S
ARPEDON
, the king of L
YCIA
and the son of Zeus and Laodameia. Immediately prior to Sarpedon’s death, Zeus, watching the proceedings from Olympus, ponders whether to go against the decrees of Fate and snatch Sarpedon off the battlefield (16.433–37), but his wife, Hera—an implacable foe of the Trojans—argues with him, claiming that such favoritism on Zeus’s part would disgruntle the other gods. Hera’s response is worth quoting in full, as it clearly provided Cavafy not only with the theme of his poem, one he returns to, in different incarnations, again and again—the way in which even the mighty must cope with defeat—but the details of the action, from the mission of Sleep and Death to the “tomb and the grave-stele” (
tymboi te stêlêi te,
16.457; the modern Greek is
to mnima kai tin stili
):
In reply to him the wide-eyed lady Hera spoke:
“Dread son of Kronos, what kind of speech you have made!
Do you really wish to free a mortal man, whose fate
has long been sealed, from dreadful-sounding death?
Fine: but know you that we gods will never praise you.
And I’ll tell you something more, and ponder it well:
if you send Sarpedon home still living,
consider whether some other god might then want
to send his own son out of the heavy fray;
for around Priam’s high city are fighting many
sons of immortals, in whom you’ll arouse great anger.
But even if he is so dear to you, and your own heart grieves,
still let him fall in the heavy fray
under the hands of Patroclus, Menoetius’s son.
But then, when his soul and life have left him,
send Death and painless Sleep to carry him home
until they reach the people of broad Lycia,
and there his brothers and clansmen will give him burial
with grave-mound and pillar. For that is the honor due to the dead.”
Later on in Book 16, after Patroclus has slain Sarpedon and the Greeks and Trojans are battling for possession of his body and armor, Homer relates how Zeus arranged for the burial rites of his son (16.666–75):
And then cloud-gathering Zeus spoke unto Apollo:
“On, now, dear Phoebus: clean from Sarpedon the dark gore,
taking him out of the battle, and then use the running waters
of the river to wash him and then anoint him with ambrosia
and clothe him with immortal garments;
then send him off to be born by swift escort,
by the twins Sleep and Death, who will swiftly
set him down among the rich folk of broad Lycia,
where his brothers and clansmen will bury him
with grave-mound and pillar. For that is the honor due to the dead.”
So he spoke, nor did Apollo fail to heed his father.
The sensuous description of a beautiful corpse, carefully tended, shows a debt to the Decadents. Cavafy’s verses recall, indeed, Oscar Wilde’s long 1881 poem “Charmides,” about a beautiful youth who makes love to a statue of Athena. After the youth dies, his body is the object of languid attentions very similar to those lavished on Cavafy’s Sarpedon:
But some good Triton-god had ruth, and bare
The boy’s drowned body back to Grecian land,
And mermaids combed his dank and dripping hair
And smoothed his brow, and loosed his clinching hand,
Some brought sweet spices from far Araby,
And others made the halcyon sing her softest lullaby.
… … … … … … … … … … …
Hither the billow brought him, and was glad
Of such dear servitude, and where the land
Was virgin of all waters laid the lad
Upon the golden margent of the strand,
And like a lingering lover oft returned
To kiss those pallid limbs which once with intense fire burned …
Whether Cavafy knew Wilde’s poem (which Wilde considered his best), we cannot know; but it is interesting that he invokes the name Charmides in a later poem, “In a City of Osrhoene,” in which a youth, after being beaten up in a street brawl, is brought to a room in a tavern, where the moonlight streams through a window, illuminating his immobile, beautiful form.
By the sixteenth book of the
Iliad
’s narration of the final year of the Trojan War, the Greek forces are suffering badly because Achilles, the greatest of the Greek soldiers, has withdrawn both himself and his countrymen from the fighting after being insulted by the commander-in-chief, Agamemnon. Out of pity for the allies, Achilles’ soft-hearted friend and companion, P
ATROCLUS
, persuades Achilles to let him wear Achilles’ famous armor into battle; by so doing, he hopes to fool the Trojans into thinking that Achilles himself has returned to the fighting, and thereby to frighten them away for a while. Driving a chariot pulled by Achilles’ immortal horses, Balios and Xanthe (“Charger” and “Roan”)—they are the offspring of the Zephyr, the West Wind, and the harpy Podarge (“Swift-foot”)—Patroclus roars into the fray and, for a while, wreaks terrible damage on the Trojans. He becomes so caught up in bloodlust, however, that he forgets all caution and fails to turn back, as Achilles had instructed, and is eventually killed by Hector, the leader of the Trojans, after Apollo helps to reveal the ruse of the borrowed armor. (In Book 19, these same horses are given voice by the goddess Hera, and they remind Achilles that he, too, is fated to die young, at the hands both of Apollo, the god ultimately responsible for Patroclus’s death, and of a man, Paris.)
Cavafy’s poem is, at points, a fairly close adaptation of about twenty lines from Book 17, which tell of how the grief-stricken horses stood apart from the mêlée as Greeks and Trojans battled furiously over the body of Patroclus (
Iliad
17.426–47):
But the horses of Peleus’s son stood apart from the fray and
wept, ever since they first had learned that their driver
had fallen in the dust at the hands of mankilling Hector.
Now Automedon, the rugged son of Alkimos,
kept lashing them, laying on with the darting whip,
now coaxing them with gentle words, now swearing:
But the two did not want to go either to the ships, on the broad Hellespont,
or back into the battle with the Achaeans,
but as a pillar stands firm, that upon some tomb-mound
of a man who had died, or a woman,
so they remained, firmly, holding back the beauteous chariot,
trailing their heads in the dust. Their warm tears
flowed down from their eyes to the ground in mourning
desire for their charioteer. Their luxuriant manes were dirtied
streaming down from the yoke-pads, along either side of the yoke.
And seeing the two of them mourning, the son of Kronos took pity
and shaking his head spoke to his own deep heart:
“O, you two wretches, why did I give you to lord Peleus,
a mortal, when you two are ageless and immortal?
So you could suffer pain alongside wretched men?
For there is nothing more lamentable as man
of all that breathe and crawl upon the earth.”
REPUDIATED POEMS
(1886–1898)
The epigraph to this poem is a Greek transliteration—not a translation—by Cavafy of an Egyptian Arabic maxim into Greek characters; the first line of the poem is an approximate translation of the maxim. Given the poem’s preoccupation with language, silences, and meaning, it seems wrong to translate the epigraph itself: Cavafy clearly meant the reader to confront the (likely unintelligible) sound of the proverb in the original Arabic before reaching the translation itself.
I am indebted to Glen Bowersock for the correct English transliteration of the Arabic.