Authors: C.P. Cavafy
Complete Poems (41 page)
Etienne Combe, the last European director of the library in Alexandria from which Cavafy would borrow books, recalled that the poet would borrow collections of inscriptions such as those mentioned in this poem.
As the cruelties and egomaniacal excesses of the emperor N
ERO
(on whom see the note on “The Eumenides’ Footfalls.”
here
) worsened, a plot to overthrow him was instigated by C. Julius Vindex. (Among those excesses was Nero’s ludicrous concert tour of Greece—known to the Romans as the province of A
CHAEA
—in the year 67, when he “liberated” the province.) Vindex invited the popular governor of Spain, Servius Sulpicius G
ALBA
(3 B.C.–69 A.D.), a member of an extremely distinguished aristocratic family, to join the conspiracy. Galba eventually marched on Rome, and after Nero’s suicide in 68 became emperor in his seventy-third year.
But this poem does much more than gently mock Nero’s wholly unearned sense of security, which depends (as does the smugness of other Cavafian subjects) on a partial or imperfect knowledge or vision; a further irony is that Galba himself proved to be no great success. Indeed, his own avarice and tactlessness made him as unpopular among the legions as he would eventually be among certain of his political allies, and on January 15, 69, he was murdered by the praetorian guard at the instigation of M. Salvius Otho, a former co-conspirator against Nero who was disappointed when Galba failed to appoint him his heir. Further historical ironies ripple outward from this poem: Otho himself was emperor for only a few short months, fatally clashing with yet another of his former co-conspirators, Aulus Vitellius, who had also declared himself emperor. By the end of the year 69, four men had been emperor; the last was Titus Flavius Vespasianus (Vespasian: 9–79 A.D.), a practical man of relatively humble origins who successfully established himself as emperor and founded the Flavian dynasty.
The oracle given to Nero is recounted in Suetonius’s
Life of Nero,
chapter 40:
Astrologers had once predicted to Nero that he would one day be put away; whence that well-known saying of his: “Our humble art sustains us,” by which he no doubt thought he might be indulged in his pursuit of the art of lyre-playing—an amusement for an emperor, but a necessity for a private
person. Some of the astrologers had promised him rule over the East, once he had been cast off, several referring by name to the rule of Jerusalem; rather more promised the restitution of all his former fortunes. Being inclined to this latter hope (having lost both Armenia and Britain and having recovered both), he reckoned that he had been acquitted of the bad luck for which he had been fated. And, after he had consulted the Delphic oracle and heard the response that he must beware the seventy-third year, taking this to mean that he would die only at that age, and taking no account of Galba’s age, he felt such great confidence not only in his old age, but also in a constant and singular good fortune, that when he lost some extremely valuable articles in a shipwreck, he did not hesitate to say to his intimates that the fish would bring them back to him.
This poem revisits, in a pagan context, a motif Cavafy had first treated twenty years earlier in a Christian one, in “Prayer” (1896; 1898): the drama of a young man’s untimely death is poignantly contrasted with his family’s earnest but futile hopes and prayers for his well-being. He would take up the theme again ten years later, in “Cleitus’s Illness,” in which both Christian and pagan prayers fail to save a gravely ill young man.
An early version of this poem, called “One of Them,” was composed in 1899; this rewritten version was first printed in 1917.
Diana Haas has noted that this is the first extant poem by Cavafy in which the word “ephebe” appears, and in which, indeed, the drama of the poem, externally as well as emotionally, pivots on a studied confusion between a beautiful mortal and a beautiful god—one that recurs, for instance, in “Song of Ionia.” In this context—and particularly given the date of composition of the earliest version of this poem, at the end
of the decade in which Cavafy, heavily influenced by Baudelaire and the Parnassians, first started to write about elite beings gifted with a special sight—it is interesting to note that in the
Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
the great sage observes that the teachings of Pythagoras promised initiates that they would be able to know how to discern the presence of a god. For Cavafy’s interest in supernatural apparitions and visitations more generally, see the note on “Since Nine—,”
here
.
S
ELEUCIA
was the name of a number of cities in the vast Seleucid empire; the name derives from that of the founder of the dynasty, Seleucus I. One of these was Seleucia-on-Tigris, founded on the river’s left bank, below Baghdad, around 305 B.C., as the capital of the kingdom, but a likelier candidate for the setting of this poem is Seleucia Pieria, founded on the mouth of the Orontes River around 300 B.C. by Seleucus, who was buried there by his son, Antiochus. This Seleucia, which the historian Polybius describes as having boasted fine temples and civic architecture, suburbs, and a business quarter, was also an important naval base, and it could well have provided the decadent pleasures to which Cavafy’s subject is devoted.
Haas has also drawn attention to the way in which this poem reflects the extent of the poet’s absorption of Gibbon, whose
Decline and Fall
contains the following passage (3.29) about the fourth-century general Stilicho:
If Stilicho had not possessed the external advantages of strength and stature, the most flattering bard, in the presence of so many thousand spectators, would have hesitated to affirm that he surpassed the measure of the demi-gods of antiquity; and that, whenever he moved with lofty steps, through the streets of the capital, the astonished crowd made room for the stranger, who displayed, in a private condition, the awful majesty of a hero.
Stilicho, one might add, was half Roman and half Vandal; the mixed heritage of this impressive figure is an element recalled, perhaps, in the way that the citizens of Seleucia in the poem wonder whether the beautiful ephebe is a Syrian of Greek origin, or some kind of foreigner.
The implied milieu of the poem is a pointedly cosmopolitan one, and therefore consonant with the poet’s interest in the multicultural richness of life in the cities of Greater Greece: L
ANES
is a name of uncertain provenance, M
ARCUS
Roman, and R
AMETICHOS
Egyptian. H
YACINTH
, in Greek mythology, was a beautiful mortal youth, and the name became a byword for youthful male beauty. The myth is most famously retold by Ovid: beloved of Apollo, Hyacinth was killed by a jealous Zephyr; from his blood, as it spilled on the earth, sprang the flower that bears his name.
Another poem in which Cavafy introduces, with unusual explicitness and a characteristically delicate irony, the tension between the Classical Greek cultural inheritance and the vast sprawl of the later Greek-speaking world, through which that inheritance was disseminated.
For the setting of this poem, O
SRHOENE
, a Syriac kingdom, see the note on “That Is He,”
here
. C
HARMIDES
, an Athenian youth famed for his beauty (and also Plato’s uncle) was immortalized in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name: in it, Socrates, inspired by the perfection of his companion Charmides’ beauty, seeks to define wisdom. The historical Charmides, as it happens, was killed in a political dispute, and there is, perhaps, a subtle invitation in this poem to compare the noble Athenian, martyred for his convictions and immortalized in high literature, with the young Rhemon, hurt in a barroom brawl and dragged to an inn by his ragtag band of ethnically mixed friends.
The body of a beautiful wounded youth, immobilized and lovingly tended, is a motif that can be traced to “The Funeral of Sarpedon,” a poem that shares that motif with Oscar Wilde’s “Charmides” (1881), which may well have influenced it: the original title of this poem was, in fact, “Charmides.” For a possible connection between Wilde’s and Cavafy’s poems, see the note on “The Funeral of Sarpedon,”
here
.
First written in April 1916 with the title “Tomb of Hieronymus.”
In the early church, a lector (Greek
anagnostês
) was a lay person responsible for reading selections from the Old Testament and Epistles during the liturgy; later on, the position was held by clerics in minor orders. Since Cavafy, in a commentary on this poem, characterizes the position as being “semi-ecclesiastical,” we can infer that the poem is set during the earlier rather than the later days of Christianity. The office might have held special interest for the poet, since a well-known item in the biography of Julian the Apostate was that he held the position of lector before abandoning his Christian faith.
In this perhaps most remarkable of the “tomb” poems, Cavafy has re-created the appearance of a scholarly transcription of a funerary inscription. In such transcriptions, letters that are missing or illegible in the original (which can, however, be inferred from context) are rendered in brackets, so as to distinguish them from what is actually legible. This tension, between the traces that remain and what must be inferred, irradiates the entire poem.
H
ATHOR
was the name of the cow-headed Egyptian goddess whose eponymous month came late in the autumn. In Greek, the letters KAPPA and ZETA (KZ), taken together, also represent the number 27, i.e., the age of the deceased.
For Ammon, Who Died at 29 Years of Age, in 610
The milieu of this poem is clearly Egyptian: A
MMON
is an Egyptian name, and the name R
APHAEL
suggests that the boy is Coptic.
Aemilian Son of Monaës, an Alexandrian, 628–655 A.D.
Savidis suggests that this poem was first written in 1898 with the title “On Guard,” in a version comprising only the first two stanzas of this final version.
The dates that Cavafy invents for his fictional subject, together with the telling detail that he died in Sicily, point to a subtle historical irony. Mohammed’s general, the Arab leader ’Amr, conquered Byzantine Alexandria in the year 642; although the Byzantines twice tried to recapture it soon afterward, it was to remain in Arab hands. Hence whatever his armor, whatever his boasts, we may take it that Aemilian was forced to flee his native city for his life.
The original title of this poem, in the first draft of 1911, was “For Beauty.”
The Window of the Tobacco Shop
The original title of this poem, in the first draft of 1907, was “In the Closed Carriage.”
The poem’s setting is Alexandria, as indicated by its original title, “Alexandrian.”
Cavafy takes conspicuous pains to conceal the sex of the beloved in this poem: in the Greek, no pronoun is given as the subject of either of the two active verbs—“departs” in line 5, and “lives” in line 7. I have rendered these lines so as to preserve this important ambiguity.
This taut and beautiful poem from the mid-1910s rather strikingly contains elements that would recur in poems of the late ’20s and early ’30s. The way in which the mundane neighborhood (
sinikía
) in the first line becomes the setting for a miraculous transformation of everything (
ipóstasis … óli
) into intense emotion (
idonikí sinkínisi
) in the last sentence
is something we encounter again in “In the Same Place” (1929), where the everyday inventory of the poet’s neighborhood (
sinikía
) again leads to a climactic and total transformation of everything into emotion (
esthimatopiíthikes olókliro
). Similarly, the collocation here of the imperfect verbs “standing” (
stekomoun
) and “gazing” (
ekíttaza
) that together lead to an erotic/pleasurable epiphany will reappear in “The Mirror in the Entrance” (1930), where the reflection of an athletic young tailor’s assistant who was standing (
stékontan
) and gazing at himself (
kittázontan
) in a mirror causes the mirror to rejoice in the vision of “perfect beauty” that it has received on its surface.
Stratis Tsirkas (in
O Politikos Kavafis,
“The Political Cavafy”) identified the germ of this poem in one of the irritated reading notes that Cavafy made between 1893 and 1896 on the text of Ruskin. The latter had argued that
energetic admiration may be excited in certain minds by a display of fireworks, or a street of handsome shops; but the feeling is not poetical, because the grounds of it are false, and therefore ignoble. There is in reality nothing to deserve admiration either in the firing of packets of gunpowder, or in the display of the stocks of warehouses. But admiration excited by the budding of a flower is a poetical feeling, because it is impossible that this manifestation of spiritual power and vital beauty can ever be enough admired.
Cavafy retorted as follows:
This confinement of Poetry in the prison of “noble grounds” is mistaken …
Great and superior works can be created within the framework “of the street with handsome shops,” by reason not of the nobility or the lack thereof—foolish words—of the “street etc.,” but rather of the feeling, or the sensation, that will be connected with the “street” and that will surround it as if with a halo.
As in “Gray,” Cavafy’s Greek makes it impossible to determine the gender of the object of the speaker’s desire.