Complete Poems (68 page)
Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Cavafy’s fascination with the lives of beautiful youths living at the
fringes of society, possibly criminal, is reflected in many poems throughout his career. Curiously, a number of these seem to have been written in the mid- to late 1910s, the moment to which the poet, in the present poem, assigns the poetic framing device. “That’s How” (1913) expresses no little fascination—prurient, for all its aghast protestations—with the life of a street youth who’s posed for a pornographic photograph. A few years later the poet turns to a rough but touchingly passionate group of youths, strongly reminiscent of the one described in “Felony,” in “In a City of Osrhoene” (1916; 1917). Here the narrator similarly describes a touching solidarity among violent gang members:
From the tavern brawl they brought him back to us, wounded—
our friend Rhemon, around midnight yesterday.
Through the windows we’d left open all the way
the moon illumined his beautiful body on the bed.
We’re a hodgepodge here: Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Rhemon too is such a one.
The Unpublished Poem “The Bandaged Shoulder” (1919) also hints that a desirable young man has been involved in illicit, and in this case violent, activities:
He said that he’d hit a wall, or that he’d fallen.
But probably there was another reason
for the wounded, bandaged shoulder.
Already in a note of 1906, Cavafy had acknowledged the fascination that lower-class youths held for him, in language that is highly suggestive, given the criminal milieu that also exerted no little appeal for him. (See the note on “The Mirror in the Entrance,”
here
) The appeal that such figures had for him is evident in the last year of his poetic creation. In “Days of 1908” (1932; 1932), the narrator lingeringly describes the beauty of a youth whose rather grand rejection of a low-level clerk’s job has forced him to find other, more marginal ways of making a living. This poem is perhaps also worth thinking about in the context of a discussion of “Crime” because in it we find again the structure of an erotic
reverie about low-class youth considered from the poetic vantage point of a much later date. Indeed, an earlier version of it, entitled “The Summer of 1895,” was probably written around 1921, which suggests that not only that special social and erotic milieu, but more specifically that particular structure, were much on the poet’s mind from the late 1910s through the 1920s.
Other significant variant readings are as follows:
Of the Sixth or Seventh Century
The first of the four sheets in this dossier bears the title and the date; the third contains the last form of the poem with only two small corrections; and the second and third contain the variants to the opening, along with some other variant line readings.
In the autumn of 641, having already conquered the Byzantine strongholds of Jerusalem, Antioch, Aleppo, Damascus, and a number of other cities in a series of stunning victories, Arab forces led by Amr Ibn-el-’Aas, the great general of the caliph Omar I, advanced on Alexandria. After harassing the great port city for nearly a year, Amr finally negotiated a treaty with the Byzantine viceroy, the patriarch Cyrus; in September 642, Arab soldiers entered the city of “four thousand palaces,
four thousand baths, and four hundred theaters,” barely able to contain their admiration for the lavish capital. (“The moonlight reflected from the white marble made the city so bright,” one is reported to have marveled, “that a tailor could see to thread his needle without a lamp. No one entered the city without having a covering on his eyes to veil him from the glare of the plaster and marble.”) On the caliph’s orders, the entire collection of the Library of Alexandria—except for the works of Aristotle—was burned as fuel to heat water for the public baths.
Already in a position to look back at that climactic moment in the long twilight of Hellenic culture, the narrator of this poem articulates, with an unusually naked emotionality made poignant by his consciousness of the ultimate decline of Classical civilization, his allegiance to Greek civilization—its culture and, particularly, its language. For that reason, this Poem has perhaps even more in common with works such as the Unpublished Poem “Poseidonians” (1906) and the Unfinished “Epitaph of a Samian,” in which devotees of Greek culture hang on to whatever shreds of Greek they can retain, than it does with those poems that are specifically concerned with the sixth or seventh centuries A.D. in Alexandria: “If Indeed He Died,” the early, 1897 draft of which was reworked in 1910 and 1920; “For Ammon, Who Died at 29 in 610,” written and revised between 1915 and 1917; and “Aemilian son of Monaës, Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D.,” an early draft of which dates back to 1898, and which found its final form in 1918. The combination of resignation and yearning also colors “Fugitives” (1914), in which the two exiles from Constantinople skulk around the Egyptian capital; as Lavagnini notes, what makes the present poem unique is that the city itself occupies the foreground here, as a character in and of itself.
The variants for the opening lines are as follows:
On sheet 2:
My imagination takes me now
to the Alexandria not of the Ptolemies,
but of the fifth or sixth century.
I love her every form and epoch
and on sheet 4:
How moving is the Alexandria
of its final era. Of the sixth
century, or the beginning of the seventh
before the Arab power came.
Sheet 4 also offers a striking variant reading of the second stanza, which indicates that Cavafy had thought at one point of making the narrator a poet:
It’s not unnatural if I so feelingly
gaze at this period of hers
I who am a Greek poet, —a Greek, who on my own
have made my Greek opus on her soil
The first of the three sheets that make up this dossier bears the title and the date; the second contains the text of the poem, which was written with apparent speed and very few corrections (all of which belong to the first five lines); the third bears seven lines of fragmentary variant readings.
The poem refers to events of the first century B.C., and owes its ironic bite to an episode recounted by Plutarch in his life of the Roman general Lucullus. T
IGRANOCERTA
was the southern capital of Armenia, founded by T
IGRANES
I “
THE
G
REAT
,” the so-called King of Kings of a short-lived Armenian empire. Established on the Armenian throne in 100 B.C., Tigranes soon demonstrated a passion for power, pomp, and expansionism. Allying himself with Mithridates, the king of Pontus, he ravaged the territories of Media in central Asia and seized northern Mesopotamia from the Parthians; in 83 B.C. he took over Syria, Phoenicia, and Cilicia. Those Greek cities that sided with him were treated indulgently, but those that resisted were reduced and their inhabitants transferred to the opulent new capital of Tigranocerta. Plutarch, who as we know was a favorite of Cavafy’s (his friend I. A. Sarayannis, in his 1964
Notes on Cavafy,
recalled how the poet would often sprinkle his conversation with citations from the biographer) is clearly the source
for this poem, and goes out of his way to emphasize the hubristic arrogance of the self-made King of Kings:
Above all, the spirit of the king himself had become pompous and haughty in the midst of his great prosperity. Not only did he possess all that men covet and admire most, but he actually thought that they existed for his sake. For although he had begun his career with small and insignificant expectations, he had conquered many nations.… Many were the kings who waited upon him; four, whom he always kept about him like attendants or bodyguards, would run on foot, wearing short tunics, by their master’s side when he rode out, and when he sat transacting business, they would stand by with their arms crossed.
In view of the present poem’s somewhat skeptical view of Hellenic culture as it survived throughout the world long after Alexander’s conquests—a theme found in “Philhellene” (1906; 1912) and many other poems—it is noteworthy that Plutarch attributed to the inhabitants of Tigranocerta the same overweening arrogance shown by its king: “It was a rich and beautiful city,” he writes, “every common man, and every man of rank, in imitation of the king, studied to enlarge and adorn it.” One senses, from “Tigranocerta,” that this enthusiasm among the people of Tigranocerta to adorn the capital with Greek culture has not made them the more discriminating.
Tigranes’ grandiosity, particularly as reflected in his aggressive expansionism, was always an irritant to Rome, and eventually led to all-out war. In 69 B.C. Lucullus utterly crushed the Armenians and reduced Tigranocerta, an overwhelming victory all the more noteworthy for its contrast with the pretensions of the Armenian leader: Plutarch put the Armenian dead at over a hundred thousand, with only a hundred Romans wounded and five killed, and cited other sources, among them Strabo and Livy, on the remarkable nature of the victory (“The Romans never fought an enemy with such unequal resources, for the conquerors were not so much as one-twentieth part of the number of the conquered”).
The ironic contrast between the king’s pretension and the cruel reality that awaits him will, in fact, be mirrored by the experience
of Cavafy’s cocky speaker—although he cannot yet know it. Renata Lavagnini identifies a passing reference in chapter 29 of Plutarch’s account as the source of Cavafy’s inspiration; it is easy to see how this short passage provided not only the idea for the narrator, but also the larger framework (with its hint at this amateur actor’s possible fate) within which the poem must be understood:
In the city Tigranocerta, meanwhile, the Greeks, having separated themselves from the barbarians, attempted to hand the city over to Lucullus, who attacked and took it. He himself seized the treasure; the city he gave to his soldiers to be sacked, and in it were found eight thousand talents in coin money, along with other possessions. In addition to this, he distributed eight hundred drachmas to each man out of the spoils. When he learned that among the prisoners of the city were many actors whom Tigranes had invited from all over for the opening of the theatre he had built, Lucullus used them to celebrate his triumphal games and spectacles.
Our awareness of the looming disaster—with which the speaker, so typically in Cavafy, is blithely unconcerned, preoccupied as he is with his grandiose personal fantasies—clearly connects this poem to others in the corpus. George Savidis pointed out that it bears a certain resemblance to “Young Men of Sidon,” which like this poem is set just before the demise of the world so intensely celebrated by its characters. Similarly, in “In 200 B.C.,” the Greek speaker’s vainglorious championing of Greek achievements is framed, ironically, by our knowledge that within a few years Rome would decisively crush Greek forces both in Greece and in Asia, thereby establishing its supremacy once and for all. See also the note on “Epitaph of a Samian,”
here
.
Variants:
The dossier consists of three sheets, the first of which bears the title and the date. Sheet 2 contains drafts of the first two stanzas, with variants and corrections, and sheet 3 contains the text of the entire poem, with some corrections as well; the back of sheet 3 contains verses that Lavagnini believes were deleted from the Published Poem “Come, O King of the Lacedaemonians” (1929).
Two deletions are worthy of attention. To the word “abandonment” in line 4 the poet had originally added the phrase “complete and utter”; and an earlier version of the second line of the second stanza read, “Perhaps it shouldn’t last any longer.”