Complete Poems (67 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Cavafy’s inspiration for this poem may well have been a passage from the
Life of Apollonius of Tyana
(1.23) that describes the sage’s tearful reaction,
while traveling near Babylon, on coming across the tombs of Greeks from Eretria who had been captured and deported to Asia by Darius I during the first Persian War. The author of the
Life
goes so far as to quote one of the grave inscriptions, of which Cavafy’s sonnet is strongly reminiscent:
Here now we lie on Ecbatana’s plain,
But once we sailed the deep Aegean’s swell.
Farewell, Eretrian homeland, old in fame,
And nearby Athens, and the sea, farewell.
(tr. C. P. Jones)
The inclusion of the frame in my translation is the only instance in which I have diverged from Professor Lavagnini’s presentation of the “last” version of the draft. (Because she considers the frame a variant, she places it in a footnote.) I have done so in part for practical reasons—to have simply reproduced the sonnet itself, as Professor Lavagnini does in her scholarly text, would have been to present readers with a poem that is already known, the Unpublished “Epitaph” of 1893 (p. 272)—and partly because I believe that readers of the present edition will want to see, all at once, what the poet’s larger, if never adequately executed, conception for this revamped poem was, a conception that makes the new Unfinished work different from the old poem it sought to transform.
The dossier consists of two sheets, the first bearing the title—which the poet notes is “provisional” only—and the date, and the second containing the text of the poem, written swiftly and with few corrections.
In its frankness and the deep yet by no means glib sympathy with which it surveys a complicated and compromised emotional landscape, this poem recalls other, earlier works while surpassing them in its self-assured humaneness—a quality that seems to grow in strength in Cavafy’s work as the years pass.
We might compare, for instance, the rather severe ethical vision in poems written at the turn of the century, the years, as we know, when
Cavafy was going through his poetic crisis. In “Che fece … Il Gran Rifiuto” (1899; 1901), the poet passes a harsh judgment on those who, in moments of moral crisis, choose the path of personal comfort or safety over that of large moral responsibility:
For certain people there comes a day
when they are called upon to say the great Yes
or the great No. It’s clear at once who has
the Yes within him at the ready, which he will say
as he advances in honor, in greater self-belief.
He who refuses has no second thoughts. Were he asked
again, he would repeat the No. And nonetheless
that no—so right—defeats him all his life.
The poet’s severity here is all the more striking for being directed at the saintly pope Celestine V, who resigned the papacy at the age of eighty, in 1294—a decision understandable in itself but condemned by Dante (whence the title) because it paved the way, as Celestine knew it must, for the advent of the corrupt and immoral Boniface VIII.
Such unyielding rigor may be seen as the inevitably self-punishing product of a secretive and shamed existence. A yearning for understanding and forgiveness is implied by another poem of the same period, one that focuses less on condemnation than on the speaker’s admiration for those who uphold standards of right behavior and decency even in the face of apparently inevitable moral weakness and betrayals such as the ones he disdains in “Che Fece … Il Gran Rifiuto.” In “Thermopylae” (1901; 1903), Cavafy suggests that another component of the just man’s personality is a forgiveness of weaker men. Here the speaker praises those who are
generous whenever they’re rich, and again
when they’re poor, generous in small things,
and helping out, again, as much as they are able;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hatred for those who lie.
Ten years later there is evidence of a still more forgiving vision. In the Unpublished Poem “Hidden”
(
1908
),
a poem marked by the same plainness of language and remarkable self-exposure that we find in this Unfinished Poem, Cavafy acknowledges quite openly the failure to be open, the necessary concealments and lies which, we know, characterized his early years:
An obstacle was there and it distorted
my actions and the way I lived my life.
An obstacle was there and it stopped me
on many occasions when I was going to speak.
And yet that poem ends on a note of hope that contains within it the large vision advocated in the opening lines of “Remorse”—the acknowledgment that the individual’s problems and failures must be put in a proper perspective:
But perhaps it’s not worth squandering
so much care and trouble on puzzling me out.
Afterwards—in some more perfect society—
someone else who’s fashioned like me
will surely appear and be free to do as he pleases.
In the context of this evolving moral vision, of which the increasing emphasis on forgiveness reflects, perhaps, a growing sense of self-acceptance, “Remorse” might be seen as a culminating ethical and poetic moment.
The dossier contains three sheets: the first noting the title and the date, the second containing the text of the poem, and a third simply noting the title again.
The poem refers to the conflict between the Byzantine emperor L
EO
III (ca. 680–741), who instigated the religious policy known as iconoclasm—the destruction or removal of religious icons, on the grounds that icon worship violated the Second Commandment—and
Germanus I, P
ATRIARCH
of Constantinople, who, like many of Leo’s subjects, violently opposed the new policy. Leo, born in the Syrian province of Commagene and given the leadership of the eastern armies by Anastasius II, became emperor in 717 after deposing the usurper Theodosius III; immediately after assuming the throne he successfully resisted a yearlong Arab siege of the capital, and would repel two subsequent Arab invasions decisively, in 726 and 739. A brisk leader, he is credited with far-reaching legal reforms, including the elevation of the serfs into a free class, the abolition of certain onerous taxes, and the reform of family and maritime law.
But the policy of iconoclasm, enforced by a 730 edict against the worship of religious images and symbolized by the removal of a prominent image of Christ from the palace gates, proved disastrously unpopular throughout the empire. At home the opposition was led, at first, by Patriarch Germanus, who was subsequently deposed by Leo, although the latter took no further punitive measures against the patriarch. The policy was enforced, after Leo’s death, by his son, Constantine V (reigned 741–775), and it was only after the brief rule of Constantine’s son, Leo IV (reigned 775–780), and the rise to power of Leo IV’s wife, Irene, who was secretly iconodule—i.e., a supporter of the veneration of icons—that the First Iconoclastic Period came to an end.
Cavafy’s treatment of Leo III as a villain and his recalcitrant patriarch, Germanus, as a noble hero owes rather more to the heavily biased chronicles of the Constantinopolitan and iconodule monk and historian Theophanes (c. 760 to 817–18) than it does to Paparrigopoulos, who is more sympathetic to Leo’s legislative reforms than his Byzantine predecessor is, and views Germanus’s opposition less favorably.
It is from Theophanes’
Chronographia
(a chronicle of world events from 284 to 813) that the donnée of the present poem derives. In the chapter of his chronicle devoted to the year “6221” (that is, September 729–August 730), Theophanes relates the following curious exchange between the emperor and his patriarch—an exchange that Paparrigopoulos cites, in his own history, as evidence of how difficult it was to pin down the character of the emperor:
In the same year the lawbreaking Emperor Leo raged against the true faith. He brought in the blessed Germanus and
began to entice him with wheedling words. The blessed chief prelate told him, “We have heard there will be a condemnation of the holy and revered icons, but not during your reign.” When the emperor forced him to say during whose reign it would be, he replied, “Conon’s.” At which the Emperor said, “In fact, my baptismal name is Conon.” The patriarch said, “My Lord, do not let this evil come to pass during your reign. For he who does so is the precursor of the Antichrist and the overthrower of the incarnate and divine dispensation.” The tyrant became enraged at this; he put heavy pressure on the blessed man, just as Herod had once put on John the Baptist. But the patriarch reminded him of the covenants he had made before he became Emperor: he had given Germanus a pledge secured by God that he would in no way disturb God’s church from its apostolic laws, which God had handed down. But the wretched man felt no shame at this. He observed Germanus and argued with him, and put forth statements to the effect that if he found Germanus opposing his rule, he would condemn the holder of the [patriarchal] throne as if he were a conspirator and not a confessor. (tr. Harry Turtledove, with some modifications)
The title and date appear on the first of the two sheets comprising this dossier; sheet two, containing the text of the draft, which was written swiftly and all at once, indicates that the final lines gave the poet some trouble. The variant readings stand side by side with no indication of which he preferred.
This tart little poem is based on an incident in the life of Julian the Apostate for which Cavafy, as so often, made use of two sources, one ancient and the other modern. The latter was Allard’s three-volume life of Julian (see
here
); the former was Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330–after 391), a contemporary of Julian’s whose immense thirty-one-volume history covered the span from the death of the emperor Nerva in 98 to the death of Valens in 378. A pagan, Ammianus was, unsurprisingly, a great partisan of Julian’s, in whose campaigns in
both the east and the west he took part; Gibbon approvingly judged him “an accurate and faithful guide, who composed the history of his own times without indulging the prejudices and passions which usually affect the mind of a contemporary.” Ammianus reports an incident that allegedly took place early in 356, when Julian, recently elevated to the rank of
caesar
by the emperor, his cousin Constantius, was sent north to put down incursions by German tribes along the Rhine frontier. According to Ammianus, the young Julian was rapturously received by the citizens of Vienne, who, impressed by the royal splendor of his entrance, were relieved to see that this was no usurper but a legitimate prince. As the crowds acclaimed Julian, Ammianus goes on, “a blind old woman, on enquiring who it was who was entering the town and being told that it was Caesar Julian, exclaimed that this was the man who would restore the temples of the gods [
hunc templa deorum reparaturum
].”
The exquisite ambivalence that hovers over the present poem—was the blind old woman a secret pagan cheering the secretly pagan Julian on, or a perceptive Christian denouncing him (rumors of his anti-Christian inclinations having spread from the east)?—derives from Cavafy’s reading of Allard. Citing evidence from inscriptions, the French historian (1.393ff) reminds his readers that despite the presence of a vigorous Christian cell there, the pagan gods remained popular in Vienne at that time; and he recalls, too, that communication between the Greek east and the city would not have been as difficult as it might first appear (1.397): hence the possibility that locals might have heard about Julian’s pagan tendencies. Given this, Allard takes the old woman in Ammianus’s story—providing the story is true, which he acknowledges may well not be the case—to be one of Vienne’s loyal pagans.
The motif of secret identities revealed through a kind of telepathy connects this poem to others in the Cavafian corpus, among which not only another of the Unfinished Poems about Julian (“The Bishop Pegasius,” in which secret paganism is concentric, one strongly feels, with secret homosexuality), but also, for instance, the Published poem “He Asked About the Quality,” a poem, set in the poet’s own time, in which the secret is clearly homosexual yearning. For Cavafy’s interest in telepathic knowledge more generally, see “Among the Groves of the Promenades” and “Athanasius,” with notes.
The title of this poem preserves Cavafy’s incorrect rendering of the blind woman’s exclamation in Ammianus’s tale (
templis
instead of the text’s
templa
).
The back of the page on which the text of this poem appears offers the following variant for the final two lines:
did you say it—as was fitting—in sorrow
or in joy, abominable old woman?
The reading Lavagnini has adopted is less overtly editorial.
The dossier for this poem contains, apart from the covering sheet, four heavily worked sheets of text. Sheet 2 contains the text of an early form of the poem (see below); both sides of sheet 3 contain the text of what appears to be the last form, with very few corrections; a fourth sheet contains very few variant line readings, noted below; and the fifth sheet contains drafts of the final stanza.
There is some question as to whether the final stanza actually belongs to this poem. However, its presence in the dossier, along with the fact that the device of a “frame” chronologically later than the event described in the body of the poem is so well attested in Cavafy’s work (see the commentary on “Ptolemy the Benefactor [or Malefactor],” and also on “Epitaph of a Samian”), argue strongly for its being a part of this very strong work. The date mentioned in this frame is, indeed, a matter to which the poet gave no little thought: Lavagnini’s reconstruction of the text indicates that he first considered 1896, then a suggestively unspecified date in the 1890s (“The one is barely visible; then eight, then nine / The fourth numeral is faded away”), then 1916, then 1919. As the poet clearly understood, the much later date achieves a far stronger emotional effect, further isolating the character of the mature, indeed even elderly poet from the scene of his dangerous youthful milieu and passionate erotic affair.