Complete Poems (8 page)

Given the importance of this technique in Cavafy’s prosody, the meticulous care with which he constructed each line, I’ve tried to structure the English of these translations so that it achieves the same effect.

…

One final note, concerning a choice on my part that might strike some readers as controversial. In rendering Greek names from the Classical, Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Byzantine past, I have consistently chosen to eschew a phonetic rendering of the way those names sound in Greek, opting instead to adopt the traditional, Latinate forms—which is to say, the forms that will be familiar to English speakers. To my mind, mimicking the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the names of the historical or pseudohistorical characters is, at best, inappropriate and indeed unhelpful in an English translation. When the Greek eye sees the name
, the person brought to mind is the person brought to mind when the eye of an English-speaking person comes across the name “Justinian”; transliterating it as “Ioustinianos” is to obscure, rather than translate, Cavafy’s text.

Worse, a misguided allegiance to the sound of Modern Greek can lead to a serious misrepresentation of a poem’s deeper meanings. To take “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” once more: certain translators have chosen to render the title of this poem as “The Displeasure of Selefkidis”—that last word being an accurate phonetic reproduction of what the Greek word
, which indeed appears in the poem’s title, sounds like. But this choice conveys the entirely false impression that “Selefkidis” is someone’s name, whereas, as we know, the word refers here to a member of the Seleucid
dynasty
—someone whose name was, in fact, Demetrius. The word “Seleucid” in this poem is therefore a crucial part of its meaning, one that rests on our ability to grasp the great, if rather pathetic, pride that Demetrius took in the fact that he was a Hellenistic monarch—a Seleucid. A fluent speaker and tireless reader of English, Cavafy himself was familiar with the Latinate forms of these names from his extensive reading in English works of history and philology—Gibbon, J. B. Bury, many others—and used these forms himself when writing in English. Not least for that reason, I have done the same.

T
HE PRESENT VOLUME
collects all of the known poetic work of Cavafy. Because of the complexities of their publication history, the organization of the poems in the pages that follow merits brief comment.

Although he published a small number of verses, most of them when he was young, in literary journals and annuals, Cavafy had for most of his career a highly idiosyncratic method of presenting his poems, and never published a definitive collection of them in book form. He preferred, instead, to have poems printed at his own expense as broadsheets or in pamphlets, which he would distribute to a select group of friends and admirers. Among other things, this method allowed the poet to treat every poem as a work in progress; friends recalled that he often went on emending poems after they had been printed. In an essay called
Independence,
the poet articulated what was clearly a kind of anxiety about the finality associated with publication:

Still, after a time he would periodically order modest printings of booklets that contained small selections of the poems, arranged thematically. The first of these,
Poems 1904
, contained just fourteen poems; a second,
Poems 1910
, added seven more, and a later manuscript of that booklet (known, because the poet copied it out by hand as a gift to his friend and
heir, as the “Sengopoulos Notebook”) added one more early poem—“Walls”—which had been written in 1897 and much anthologized, bringing the total to twenty-two. These and subsequent booklets (and sometimes the poems in them) were constantly being revised, added to, and subtracted from: hence
Poems 1910
became
Poems (1909–1911),
and then
Poems (1908–1914),
and so on, according to which works the poet had decided to add or remove.

By the time Cavafy died, there were three such collections in circulation. Two were bound, and arranged thematically:
Poems 1905–1915,
containing forty poems (the dates refer to the year of first publication), and
Poems 1916–1918,
containing twenty-eight poems. The third,
Poems 1919–1932,
a collection of sixty-nine poems arranged chronologically by date of first publication, was merely a pinned-together sheaf of individual sheets. These 137 poems, together with one poem that Cavafy had corrected for the printer in the weeks before his death, “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” and sixteen early poems from the Sengopoulos Notebook, all first published between 1897 and 1904, that had not already been collected in
Poems 1905–1915,
are the 154 poems that appeared in the first commercial collection of his work, lavishly published (in a chic Art Deco style) in Alexandria two years after Cavafy’s death, edited by Rika Sengopoulou, the first wife of his heir.

Although this group of poems is now often referred to as “the Canon”—a word, one suspects, that would have caused Cavafy to raise an eyebrow, given his sardonic appreciation for the difference between the judgments we pass and those that history passes—I refer to them here as the Published Poems, since these are the works that this most fastidious of poets published, or approved for publication, during his own lifetime, precisely as he wanted them to be read. They appear here in the following order: (1)
Poems 1905–1915;
(2)
Poems 1916–1918;
(3)
Poems 1919–1933
(including “On the Outskirts of Antioch”); a fourth section, which I have entitled “Poems Published 1897–1908,” offers the contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook, minus of course the six poems that already appear in
Poems 1905–1915.
(It is worth remembering that Cavafy was eager to take
Poems 1910,
the basis for the Sengopoulos Notebook, out of circulation in the years after its publication.) It is true that this presentation of the latter group wrests them from the poet’s careful thematic arrangement, in which each poem is meant to comment
on and, as it were, converse with its neighbor; but it would be awkward, to say nothing of pedantic, to repeat six poems in two successive sections. For the sake of readers who want to experience the Sengopoulos Notebook as Cavafy arranged it, I have included, before this final section of the Published Poems, a list of the poems giving the order in which they appeared in the Notebook.

Because they were works about which the poet had mixed feelings, I have decided to place the remaining poems, some of which are very early, after those that the poet approved for publication. These appear in roughly chronological order. First come the twenty-seven Repudiated Poems, originally published between 1886 and 1898 and subsequently renounced by the poet. These are followed by the Unpublished Poems. The latter is a group of seventy-seven texts (including three written in English) that Cavafy completed but never approved for publication, and which he kept among his papers, many of them bearing the notation “Not for publication, but may remain here.” The first of these was written when the poet was around fourteen; the last was written in 1923, when he was sixty. Thirteen found their way into print after World War II, and a complete scholarly edition of the entire group, edited by George Savidis, was published in Athens, in 1968. A subsequent edition, published by Mr. Savidis in 1993, gives to them a new name, “Hidden Poems,” but I have retained the old designation, “Unpublished,” both in my text and in my notes, since I believe that “unpublished” adequately suggests the poet’s attitude toward those works without introducing speculative psychological overtones. In the present volume I have included translations of all seventy-four of the Unpublished Poems that were written in Greek, as well as the texts of the three poems Cavafy wrote in English, since they are original works; I have omitted from the present translation the poet’s five translations into Greek of works in other languages, of which three are from English. Readers will also find translations of the three remarkable Prose Poems among the Unpublished Poems.

The fourth and final section of this volume contains the Unfinished Poems, drafts that Cavafy had begun between 1918 and 1932 (see the discussion below).

A final word, about the appearance of the poems on the page. As we know, the dates of composition and subsequent publication of Cavafy’s poems is often suggestive: it surely meant something that he spent fifteen years returning to and polishing “The City” before he chose to publish it. According to Sarayannis,

Given the importance of those dates, I have chosen to note them at the bottom of the page(s) on which the poems appear in the main portion of this text, rather than cluttering the notes at the back with one-line items (“Written in 1917, published in 1918”). To do so, I have adopted the following system of notation. When known, the year of original composition (and of subsequent rewriting, if there was one and if we know when it occurred) appears in
italics;
the year (or years) of publication appear in roman type. Hence, for example, in the case of the Published Poem “Song of Ionia,” of which an early version was written at some point before 1891 and then published in 1896, only to be subsequently revised in 1905 and published in its final form in 1911, the notation reads as follows: [
1891; 1896; 1905;
1911].

In the case of the Unpublished Poems—the date of whose first publication, long after the poet’s death, does not, by contrast, shed any light on his feelings or intentions—I have merely added the year of composition, in parentheses, after the title of each poem. In the case of the Unfinished Poems, the year that appears in parentheses refers to what George Savidis, who discovered the drafts, called “the date of first conception,” which Cavafy noted on the dossier for each draft. In both cases, the addition of the date to the title has, I think, the virtue of making those poems visually distinct from the ones that Cavafy himself chose to publish—however he may have subsequently felt about them. Readers today are, indeed, likely to find more to admire, or at the very
least to learn from, in the poems that Cavafy suppressed than the poet himself would have suspected.

I
N THE AUTUMN OF 1932
, at the end of a four-month sojourn in Athens that also marked the beginning of the end of his life, Cavafy revealed with some agitation that he had important unfinished business to attend to. “I still have twenty-five poems to write,” he declared to some friends, in the distorted whisper to which his famously mellifluous and enchanting voice had been reduced following the tracheotomy that was meant to save him from throat cancer, and which was the reason he’d come to Athens from Alexandria. “Twenty-five poems!”

The conversation, recalled by one of the friends to whom he’d spoken that day and reported after Cavafy’s death in April of the following year, was merely the first of what turned out to be several tantalizing references to a body of unfinished work that the poet was desperately trying to complete as death closed in. Ten years later, in 1943, someone who’d been engaged in compiling Cavafy’s bibliography during the very year in which the poet had traveled to Athens seeking medical help revealed that Cavafy had made it plain to him that the bibliography was far from complete. In 1963, on the thirtieth anniversary of Cavafy’s death, someone else wrote in to a newspaper claiming that, during those last months, the dying poet had written him to say that he still had fifteen poems to finish.