Cavafy on "the great new Hellenic world"

Cavafy’s “beautiful young men” theme frequently crosses with his other great concern, Greek history.  “In an Old Book” is about the discovery of a watercolor of a nude young man, “those ideal limbs shaped for bed,” in “an old book - / almost a hundred years old,” the kind of book Cavafy would pillage for his poems, which are often Browning-like monologues.

from In the Year 200 B.C.

And from this marvelous pan-Hellenic expedition,
triumphant, brilliant in every way,
celebrated on all sides, glorified,
incomparable, we emerged:
the great new Hellenic world. (1931)

The expedition in the first line is that of Alexander the Great, the creator of Hellenistic Greece; the reason, in some distant way, that a Greek like Constantine Cavafy lived in Egypt.  The speaker is an antiquarian commenting on an inscription over a century after Alexander’s conquest, during the end of a long, slow decline from a cultural peak – from several peaks.  A few years later, the Romans will conquer and absorb Greece.  This history, the date in the title, and the speaker’s failure to understand his own history, is the point of the poem.  Ironist.

“To understand the reasons for this long-drawn-out decline [of the Hellenic world] is one of the major problems of world history,” the classicist E. R. Dodds wrote in 1949 (The Greeks and the Irrational, Ch. VIII, p. 244).  Cavafy wrote many poems on this theme, with settings and characters ranging from Homer’s heroes to the end of Byzantine Greece outside the walls of Constantinople.  His poems frequently have dates in the title.  Cavafy expected his audience, which was just a few close friends, to know what he was writing about.

from A Byzantine Nobleman in Exile Composing Verses

…  incredibly bored,
it’s not altogether unfitting to amuse myself
writing six- and eight-line verses,
to amuse myself politicizing myths
of Hermes and Apollo and Dionysos,
or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese…  (1921)

This poem is about the decline of learning, the decline of poetry.  Only this poet has any standards anymore, or so he thinks.

His most startling poem of decadence is an earlier one, written in 1898, “Waiting for the Barbarians.”  The poem begins:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

      The barbarians are due here today.

One speaker asks, the other answers, always with the same answer – why bother to do anything, the barbarians are coming.

The poem ends:

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the street and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thoughts?

      Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
      And some of our men just in from the border say
      there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

This must be among the boldest conceits in 19th century poetry, as much about psychology as history, as much individual as cultural.

I’ve looked on beauty so much that my vision overflows with it - one side of C. P. Cavafy

Still in or near the 1890s but away from England, to the poems of Konstantinos Petrou Kavaphes, or as I know him C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), secret poet of Alexandria, printing up copies of poems for a few friends while working “as special clerk in the Irrigation Service (Third Circle) of the Ministry of Public Works” for decades (p. 439).  Poetry not only without money – we can take that for granted – but without prestige, without status.  Bold.

I have never read Cavafy, yet I have, because he has been one of the most reviewed poets due to the baffling number of Cavafy translations over the last twenty years.  I briefly knew an expert in modern Greek poetry, and she was baffled, too – there are so many other great Greek poets, she said.  But every couple of years there is a new Cavafy.

I’ve Looked So Much…

I’ve looked on beauty so much
that my vision overflows with it.

The body’s lines.  Red lips.  Sensual limbs.
Hair as though stolen from Greek statues,
always lovely, even uncombed,
and falling slightly over pale foreheads.
Figures of love, as my poetry desired them
. . . . in the nights when I was young,
encountered secretly in my nights.  (written 1911, “published” 1917)

Cavafy has two modes, almost exclusively two, one being poems drawn from his deep knowledge of Greek history and culture, Classical, Hellenistic, and Byzantine, the other mildly erotic poems about his homosexual love affairs.  Sometimes, as here, the two modes meet.  Cavafy makes sure that a poem that could be merely a metaphor, a poem about poetry, is pulled back to the actual object of desire.  The phrase that does the work, that is not generic, is “even uncombed.”  The poet has someone in mind. 

There, now that he’s sitting down at the next table,
I recognize every motion he makes – and under his clothes
I see again the limbs that I loved, naked.  (from “The Next Table,” 1919)

To my surprise, the editor says that “[i]n the original, the sex of the person sitting at the next table remains ambiguous” (412), an effect unavailable to the English translators.  Cavafy seems to give up this ambiguity in later poems.  “A good-looking boy, a tailor’s assistant / (on Sundays an amateur athlete)” adjusts his tie in a mirror, which

was full of joy now,
proud to have embraces
total beauty for a few moments.  (“The Mirror in the Front Hall, 1930)

Or the friend’s lover who dies “doesn’t want suits any longer”:

Sunday they buried him, at ten in the morning.
Sunday they buried him, almost a week ago.

He laid flowers on his cheap coffin,
lovely white flowers, very much in keeping
with his beauty, his twenty-two years.  (“Lovely White Flowers,” 1929)

The Greek, I am told, generally rhymes and is more metrical if not completely strict, so it must be less plain-spoken than this, which is fresh enough to have been published as prose in the Village Voice in the 1980s.  The puzzle might be that there have not been more versions, that the Cavafy boom did not really start until this century.

I went against fashion and read an old one, the Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Collected Poems from 1975, source of all of the above.  I now see that there are so many Cavafy translations that this is not even the right Keeley and Sherrard, since a revised version of their book was published in 1992.  It’ll do for now.

Any suggestions for my next Cavafy will be warmly appreciated.