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Literary Review
Cavafy's angst
RAVI VYAS
What does all this sudden uneasiness mean?
And this confusion? (How grave the faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares rapidly emptying,
And why is everyone going back home so lost in thought?
Because it is night and the barbarians have not come.
And some men have arrived from the frontiers
And they say that barbarians don't exist any longer.
And now what will become of us without barbarians?
They were a kind of solution.
C.P. Cavafy: Waiting for the Barbarians
CAVAFY (1863-1933) belonged to the ancient port city of Alexandria and to a cosmopolitan society — polyglot and multiracial that was wilfully dismembered time and again in history. In their arrogant insecurity, the Alexandrians created a culture and a legend, an impacted palimpsest of languages and memories, of passions and conceits from which Cavafy's provincial genius fashioned something universal. His main thrust was political, the tragic glory of Hellenistic Greece and its decadence in which historical memories and personal experiences were inextricably mixed. Towards the end of his life, Cavafy said, "many poets are exclusively poets. I am a poet-historian. I could never write a novel or a play, but I feel in me a hundred and twenty five voices that tell me I could write history. But now there is no more time."
Unlike the Nobel laureate, George Seferis (1963) who records the fate of modern man in fruity phrases, Cavafy's poems are sly, but not slight, dry but not desiccated. With pride and resignation at their heart, they express the tragedy of life — in the typically Greek tradition where the unfolding tragedy can be seen by all excepting the dramatis personae — more sensually, and the sensuality more tragically, than any of his predecessors. E.M. Forster got it right when he described Cavafy as "a Greek gentleman with a straw hat standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe."
Cavafy spoke with bitter prescience in 1904 of the barbarians who were said to be coming and whose failure to materialise disappointed the citizens whom they had come to despoil. The citizens had only to wait a few decades longer: the citizens with nothing to struggle against, themselves turned barbarians and moved imperceptibly into the cities. Who else would have wrecked the classical departments of the universities or destroyed the libraries and centres of learning just as they had once destroyed the one in Alexandria? Extend the metaphor a bit and you see parallels with citizens turning barbarians and destroying whatever is sacred in our societies.
Should we then seek another city to replace the one they have destroyed? Cavafy has a rueful answer in "The City":
You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, a better one than this.
Every effort of mine is a condemnation of fate.
And my heart is — like a corpse — buried.
How long will my mind remain in this wasteland?
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years destroying and wasting."
You will find no new lands, you will find no other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighbourhoods;
and you will grow grey in these same houses.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other —
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.
Yet the same poet said that we should honour the men who held the pass at Thermopylae (the passage in southern Greece where 300 Spartans fought a rearguard action to death to delay the Persian army of Xerxes) though some foresaw that Ephialtes, the traitor would render their bravery futile and "the Medes would break through after all." Cavafy's basic philosophy in all his musings of ancient Greece, is simply to do As Much as You Can:
And if you cannot make your life as you want it,
at least try this
as much as you can: do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the world,
in the many movements and all the talk.
Do not disgrace it by taking it,
Dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
till it becomes like an alien burdensome life.
But the dailiness of daily life bugs Cavafy. In "Monotony":
One monotonous day follows another
identical monotony. The same things
will happen, they will happen again —
the same moments find us and leave us.
A month passes and ushers in another month.
One can easily guess the coming events;
they are those tedious ones of yesterday.
And the morrow ends by not resembling morrow.
More and more life becomes a series of traps where you are hemmed in from all sides. So, in "Walls", Cavafy moans:
Without consideration, without pity, without shame
They have built big and high walls around me.
And now I sit here despairing.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;
For I had many things to do outside.
Ah why didn't I observe them when they were building the walls?
But I never heard the noise or the sound of the builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me out of the world.
It is in "Ithaca" (Odysseus' birthplace which can be taken as a metaphor for home) that Cavafy advises how to tackle life's fitful fevers.
When you start on your journey to Ithaca,
then pray that the road is long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge.
Do not fear the Lestrygonians (cannibals)
and the Cyclopes (one-eyed giants) and the angry Poseidon (god of the sea).
You will never meet such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your body and your spirit.
You will never meet the Lestrygonians,
The Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,
If you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not raise them up before you.
Then pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many,
that you will enter ports seen for the first time
with such pleasure, with such joy!
Stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
...buy as many pleasurable perfumes as you can;
visit hosts of Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from those who have knowledge.
Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years;
and even to anchor at the isle when you are old,
rich with what you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have taken the road.
But she has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not defrauded you.
With the great wisdom you have gained, with so much experience,
you must surely have understood by then what Ithacas mean.
And yet even when you "arrive" home, how can you not have regrets as
An Old Man: In the inner room of the noisy café
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.
And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.
He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
And yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.
And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and how he always trusted her — what folly! —
the liar who would say, "Tomorrow. You have ample time."
He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.
...But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the café.
One could go on endlessly! But a word about poetry in translation. It is said often that it is the poetry that is lost in translation because the verbal resources of the new language cannot make meaning clear without turning the metaphor into a simile. When this happens, the muse in the poem is lost because the poem is, in the final analysis, language in its purest form. In Cavafy's case this does not happen because metaphor and simile he never really uses: speaking of a scene, an event or an emotion, every line of his is a plain factual description without any ornamentation whatsoever. So the translation comes through as an original and it looks as if his verses have been written in our kitchen, in our living room, in our bedroom. But whatever the problems of translation, there is plenty of fine poetry in Cavafy's Collected Poems in English that mean much more than, say, Wordsworth or Shelley or Pound or Eliot or Larkin.
The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, with an Introduction by W.H. Auden, The Hogarth Press Ltd., current price, approximately $10.
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