[ilds] A Distant Pleasure

[Charles Sligh]

See review copied and pasted below.

***

Keith Taylor
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/taylor.php
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009
A Distant Pleasure

C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems
translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn, 
Knopf, $35.00 (cloth)

C.P. Cavafy: The Unfinished Poems
translated, with introduction and commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn, 
Knopf, $35.00 (cloth)

My obsession with C.P. Cavafy, the definitive poet of modern Greek, 
started almost 40 years ago. Neither classicist nor philologist, 
certainly not a systematic scholar of anything, I was captivated by the 
poems that allowed immediate access, such as the famous “Waiting for the 
Barbarians,” where the irony of the ending—“And now what’s to become of 
us without barbarians. / Those people were a solution of a sort”—loses 
none of its power for its lack of subtlety.

I puzzled over other poems, too: what could I make of the music in “The 
God Abandons Anthony?” What was it, and where was it going? I looked for 
answers. As histories of the classical world, of the Hellenized Levant, 
of the transition from paganism to Christianity, and of Byzantium 
presented themselves to me in haphazard ways, I felt compelled to read 
them simply because they might help me understand a Cavafy poem. When 
the opportunity came to study modern Greek, I jumped at it. A large part 
of my reading life revolved around Cavafy. Many have been equally 
fascinated.

I know bookstore clerks, the assistant manager of a grocery store, and a 
professor of mathematics who can quote part of the almost canonical 
Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard translation of “Ithaka”: “As you set 
out for Ithaka / hope the voyage is a long one, / full of adventure, / 
full of discovery.” After Maurice Tempelsman read this translation at 
the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the poem assumed a special 
place in the American national story. It might be impossible and 
unnecessary for a new translation to supplant that. Still, Daniel 
Mendelsohn’s new C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems has provided context and 
versions of the poems that deepen and sometimes fundamentally alter our 
sense of many of them, and of the poet himself.

Cavafy was born in 1863 and lived most of his life in the diaspora 
community in Alexandria. He spent his early years in England, where he 
received a formative education. Indeed, Cavafy has done well in English. 
We English-speaking philhellenes enjoy the report, perhaps apocryphal, 
that Cavafy spoke Greek with an English accent until the day he died. As 
a teenager in the late 1870s, he wrote poems in English, a few of which 
have survived, and which Mendelsohn includes at the end of this new 
Collected Poems. Although these English poems are sometimes amusing in 
the way poems by precocious children can be (“Good-bye to Therápia & 
joys of the hotel— / Good dinners that make you exultingly swell, / Good 
beds that refresh you from the toil of the day / Fine sights near which 
you’d wish ever to stay”), they give little indication of the brilliance 
that would follow in a couple of decades. Some of his first serious 
poems in Greek were translated by his older brother shortly after their 
composition, and as Mendelsohn shows us in his essential notes, Cavafy 
cared deeply about their appropriate representation in English.

During World War I, E.M. Forster, already a successful novelist, was 
stationed with the Red Cross in Egypt, where he befriended Cavafy and 
became an admirer of his poetry. He wrote travel essays about 
Alexandria, one of which includes the first significant critical 
assessment of Cavafy’s work in English, as well as quick translations of 
three poems. In that essay Forster wrote the following characterization 
of the Greek poet, which is appropriate and catchy but has been a bit 
overused during the last eight decades: “a Greek gentleman in a straw 
hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. 
His arms are extended, possibly.” Some 25 years after Cavafy’s died on 
his 70th birthday, Lawrence Durrell began publishing the novels of his 
Alexandria Quartet, in which eroticism is explicitly connected to the 
quieter but even more pervasive sensuality of Cavafy’s poetry, which 
attracted a larger English-language audience in part due to Durrell’s 
success in the early 1960s. The translation by Rae Dalven was the one 
most available at the time, and had the good fortune of including an 
extraordinary introduction by W. H. Auden.

Auden admits to being influenced by Cavafy (“I can think of poems which, 
if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or 
perhaps not written at all”), yet he also admits, “I do not know a word 
of Modern Greek.” His access had only been through translation. So the 
influence had not happened because of the way Cavafy used the sounds of 
his language. And it did not happen because of Cavafy’s use of simile or 
metaphor or other figures of speech, because he famously did not use 
them often. Auden seems reluctant to acknowledge the nature of that 
influence:

Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a 
personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many 
different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a 
poem by Cavafy; nobody else could have written it.

It is almost as if (contradicting one of the conventional bromides poets 
use to comfort themselves) Auden admits that with this poet, at least, 
the poetry is exactly what survives the translation.

Daniel Mendelsohn insists that Cavafy’s unique perspective ‘allowed him 
to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye.’

Perhaps the most significant addition to our understanding of Cavafy 
offered in Mendelsohn’s translations is a definition of that “tone of 
voice,” that “personal speech” that Auden puzzled over. Cavafy has often 
been understood as a poet with two themes. First, he wrote historical 
poems about the wilder corners of the Greek world, the kingdoms that 
fractured across the Near East after the death of Alexander or the 
outlying regions of the Byzantine Empire a millennium later. Second, he 
wrote deeply erotic poems about homosexual love, often set in the darker 
streets of his beloved Alexandria. These poems seem to be very quiet, 
yet are filled with a painful longing. They have the ambience, the 
atmosphere, of desire. Though occasionally one poem would include both 
elements, Cavafy was often read in two different ways. Mendelsohn calls 
this “an invidious distinction . . . that obscures our sense of his 
large project.” All the way through these two volumes—from the brilliant 
introductions to the notes, and clearly in the translations 
themselves—Mendelsohn insists that even the erotic element in this 
poetry is contained in memory, that for Cavafy the “one great subject, 
the element that unites virtually all of his work, is Time.” The “unique 
perspective” of this poetry “allowed him to see history with a lover’s 
eye, and desire with a historian’s eye.” That is what Auden saw in these 
poems: the obsession of desire directed toward everything that moved 
this poet, including those who lived through distant historical moments.

Mendelsohn’s description of and insistence on the formal aspects of 
Cavafy’s poetry are also welcome. Next to Cavafy in the original, I have 
one French and seven English translations. Although a couple of them 
make reference to the formal elements in some of the poems, only 
Mendelsohn’s edition tries consistently to capture something of the 
rhythm and rhyme that characterize many, perhaps most, of the originals. 
I remember hearing this the first time a Cavafy poem was read to me in 
Greek, long before I knew much more of the language than 
efharisto—“thank you.” A young chemist in Athens read at my request one 
of my favorite poems, “Myris: Alexandria, A.D. 340.” This is the longest 
poem that Cavafy published, and concerns the end of the classical, pagan 
world, just before the final conquest of Christianity. The speaker is a 
pagan, and his friend, Myris, is a Christian, although for much of their 
youth they had enjoyed the same wild pleasures of Alexandria. I knew the 
poem in the direct and unadorned 1975 translation of Keeley and 
Sherrard, and loved it in that version (as I still do), and was moved 
and frightened by the last three lines:

I rushed out of their horrible house,

rushed away before my memory of Myris

could be captured, could be perverted by their Christianity.

When my Athenian friend read it to me, I heard more play in the words, 
repeated end sounds that seemed close to rhyme, and a sense in sound 
that accented the great bitterness of this ending. It was a revelation.

In this particular case, I do not think Mendelsohn’s version (“I flew 
out of their horrible house, / and quickly left before their 
Christianity / could get hold of, could alter, the memory of Myres”) 
adds much to Keeley and Sherrard’s, nor do I think it absolutely must. 
In other instances, Mendelsohn’s prosodic concerns do add considerably 
to our understanding of Cavafy. In the relatively early poem “Walls,” 
which Mendelsohn discusses at length in his introduction, he not only 
captures the rhyming across the couplets, but also finds an unobtrusive 
irregular English iambic to reflect the Greek. Here it is in its entirety:

Without pity, without shame, without consideration

they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.

And I sit here now in growing desperation.

This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:

because I had so many things to do out there.

O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?

But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.

Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.

In his discussion of this poem, Mendelsohn introduces us to the 
complications of Cavafy’s diction. After Greece was liberated from four 
centuries of Ottoman rule, the creation of the nation-state made 
important political demands on the language. A highly artificial 
language called katharevousa attempted to marry the spoken language with 
informed guesses of what might have been the sound of the classical 
language: this was imposed as the official language of the new 
government. It functioned almost as a second tongue forced onto public 
life, while the demotic, modern Greek was spoken by everyone in their 
daily lives. This split came to mirror political differences as well as 
aesthetic choices and was a fundamental political issue as Greece 
entered the twentieth century. Cavafy, perhaps because in Alexandria he 
was removed from the nation-state, was able to use these two levels of 
language for his own ironies and his own music.

Although a few poems feel too fragmentary, for those of us who love 
Cavafy, even they come as unexpected gifts.

Mendelsohn tries to make the case that we can find some equivalent of 
this in English by using words of Latinate origin in opposition to words 
that came to us from Anglo-Saxon. Although I am not convinced by his 
comparison—the Greek differences carry the weight and implications of 
political imposition, while the English differences sometimes simply 
indicate pretension—and I do think some of his translations get 
needlessly complicated because of it, the translation of “Walls” is a 
very successful example. Here all the prosodic choices and the levels of 
diction combine to make the most interesting version of this poem on my 
shelf.

• • •

In The Unfinished Poems, meanwhile, Mendelsohn provides English-speaking 
readers with something entirely new. Shortly before his death, Cavafy 
complained that he had 25 poems yet to finish, and for a long time his 
protestation was thought to be nothing more than the cry of a dying man. 
But, just as he has been fortunate in his English translators, Cavafy 
was fortunate in the preservation of his manuscripts. The late George 
Savidis, who edited several Cavafy editions, assumed the task of 
preserving and collating the Cavafy archive, a task that has been 
continued by his son Manolis. In 1963 Savidis announced that versions of 
these poems, now numbering 30, really did exist, and Italian scholar 
Renata Lavagnini began the search for usable texts. She published the 
Greek version in 1994, which includes extensive notes and photocopies of 
the original manuscripts. It is clear from those that Lavagnini 
performed a heroic deed, combining the techniques of a textual scholar 
with the intuition of a papyrologist.

Mendelsohn’s translations of the unfinished poems are the first in 
English. Although a few poems feel too fragmentary, for those of us who 
love Cavafy, even they come as unexpected gifts. There are poems that 
resume the engagement with historical characters—the Ptolemies, Julian 
the Apostate, Apollonius of Tyana—that the poet had initiated when still 
young. And there are smaller poems that capture those exquisite erotic 
moments and connect them to history or even, as in “Birth of a Poem,” to 
the actual making of the work of art:

One night when the beautiful light of the moon

poured into my room . . . imagination, taking

something from life: some very scanty thing—

a distant scene, a distant pleasure—

brought a vision all its own of flesh,

a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .

Once again, imagination becomes both memory and Eros in a small moment 
that could be a touchstone for our new understanding of Cavafy. And the 
poem is formed from that mix. The memory here seems to be clearly 
personal, yet for those who remember the more famous “finished” poem, 
“Caesarion,” in which Cavafy imagines the son of Caesar and Cleopatra 
appearing in his study (“And so fully did I imagine you / that 
yesterday, late at night, when the lamp / went out—I deliberately let it 
go out— / I dared to think you came into my room”), the distinctions 
between the personal and the historical disappear.

There are other poems in this collection, such as the wonderful “And 
Above All Cynegirus,” that are so dependent on their references that all 
but a few classicists would need Mendelsohn’s extensive notes to catch 
anything of the jokes and ironies that motivated Cavafy. But the fact 
that we need these references to fully enter into the poems should not 
cheapen our appreciation of the poems themselves. Just the opposite.

The expansive notes in these volumes will save all future Cavafy readers 
in English from the piles of supplementary reading I undertook. The next 
generation will not have to struggle through the uncertainties of 
reference, because Mendelsohn has provided the sources, given the long 
quotations from Edward Gibbon and from much older authors. The poems 
still make demands on readers, but these demands will not seem crushing. 
And for those who have known the poet for a long time but have not had 
the historical knowledge or references at their fingertips, Mendelsohn’s 
notes will open up old poems in new ways.

With his passionate reading of this poet-historian, his explanations of 
the formal elements of modern Greek verse, his versions of previously 
unknown poems, his notes, and mostly his meticulous translations, 
Mendelsohn has created not only an essential guide to Constantine Cavafy 
for English-speaking readers, but has likely shaped our understanding of 
the greatest writer of modern Greek for a couple of generations to come.



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Charles L. Sligh
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
charles-sligh at utc.edu
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