limbs a little colored by the sun
What is of interest to Cavafy is not so much individual beauty, but the idea of beauty itself—what happens to it when it is filtered through the passage of many years. Significantly, one of the few poems to include some particulars of what a beautiful young man might actually look like is a poem about beauty in the abstract: the short lyric “I’ve Gazed So Much” (whose original title, it’s worth noting, was “For Beauty”):
At beauty I have gazed so much
that my vision is filled with it.
The body’s lines. Red lips. Limbs made for pleasure.
Hair as if it were taken from Greek statues:
always lovely, even when it’s uncombed,
and falls, a bit, upon the gleaming brow.
The poet’s descriptive vocabulary, then, while narrow, has the supreme advantage of imparting to his imaginations of the beautiful an abstract, philosophical dimension—and, perhaps more important, of forcing his reader to do what the historian must do, which is to apply his own imaginative powers to subjects of which, so often, few details are extant.
Indeed, if the desire that flares in so many of these poems has, more often than not, been extinguished, the compensation for all those vanished or disappointed or broken-off love affairs is an artistic one: for we are always reminded that the poem itself is the vehicle for the preservation of desire, and of beauty, that otherwise would have disappeared. This important theme has its roots in the young poet’s debt to the Parnasse and to Baudelaire, with their elevation of the poet as a craftsman and seer whose gifts are denied to the common masses. A crucial aspect of this theme, developed as the poet evolved, was that the artistic creation ultimately has a life more substantial than the object that inspired it. Two decades after the early poems of the 1890s, with their heavy debt to those French poets, the theme recurs with greater subtlety, in suggestive ways. In the 1913 poem “In Stock,” for instance, a jeweler—a stand-in for the poet, of course—fashions fabulous pieces that may mimic nature, but are symbols of the superiority of his creative fantasy to any vulgar needs of the public:
Roses from rubies, pearls into lilies,
amethyst violets. Lovely the way that he sees,
and judges, and wanted them; not in the way
he saw them in nature, or studied them. He’ll put them away
in the safe: a sample of his daring, skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the store,
he takes other jewels out of the cases to sell—
. . . .
And in another poem of virtually the same period, “Painted,” written in 1914 and published in 1916, the theme of the superior powers of Art is again stressed. Here, however, it is not natural life but a beautiful boy who becomes the object of Art’s transformative, and in this case healing, power:
In this painting, now, I’m looking at
a lovely boy who’s lain down near a spring;
it could be he’s worn out from running.
What a lovely boy; what a divine afternoon
has caught him and put him to sleep.—
Like this, for some time, I sit and look.
And once again, in art, I recover from creating it.
Another twenty years later, the theme of the artist’s observing gaze and creative powers as the indispensable vehicles for both an emotionally charged reverie and a creative commemoration has its most sublime expression in the magnificent late poem “Days of 1908,” published the year before the poet’s death. Here, the beautiful but down-at-the-heels young Alexandrian, full of his schemes to make, win, or borrow money (a character we have met before, to be sure), never dreams, as he strips for his seaside swim, that the beauty by which he may well end up making his living will be immortalized in unimagined ways by the poem’s anonymous speaker. Or, rather, by Time itself, since the “you” to whom this speaker addresses himself is, in fact, the days of the long-past summer of 1908:
Your vision preserved him
as he was when he undressed, when he flung off
the unworthy clothes, and the mended underwear.
And he’d be left completely nude; flawlessly beautiful;
a thing of wonder.
His hair uncombed, springing back;
his limbs a little colored by the sun
from his nakedness in the morning at the baths,
and at the seashore.
The hotly yearning heart, with its ambitions, its strivings; the coolly assessing mind, to which those yearnings can appear so puny, even absurd, when measured against the epic forces of history and time and chance. Beauty, yes—the red lips, the jasmine skin, the sapphire eyes: but we can only know that beauty, know about the red and jasmine and sapphire, because of the assessing, measured gaze of the observing artist who beheld and touched and looked; and remembered. The rich, perfervid, sensuous present of most lives is lost forever to recollection: only the living memory of that past, memory that is itself alchemized into something permanent, and permanently beautiful, by poetry, “preserves” them forever. The past and the present; the past in the present. Small wonder that Cavafy, toward the end of his life, insisted that “plenty of poets are poets only, but I am a historical poet.” Those last two words are one way of rendering what he said in Greek, which was piïtís istorikós; but the adjective istorikós can also be a substantive, “historian.” There is no way to prove it, but I suspect that what he meant was precisely what his work makes clear: that he was a “poet-historian.”
3
THE READER WHO takes the time to immerse himself in Cavafy’s rich and idiosyncratic poetic world should be aware of certain technical features, not least because they raise questions about the aims and strategies of any given translation.
One of the techniques of which Cavafy made use to convey the suggestive interplay of past and present so important to his work is one that poses particularly thorny difficulties for the English translator. As a Greek author writing at the turn of the last century, Cavafy had available to him two quite different registers of the language: demotic Greek, the vernacular spoken by the people, and the far more formal Katharevousa, or “pure” Greek, the high language of literature, intellectual life, and officialdom. (The accent falls on the third syllable.) This artificial form of the language, invented at the turn of the nineteenth century by an eminent literary and political figure who had studied Classics, grafted much of the vocabulary and many of the more complicated grammatical forms of Classical Greek onto the everyday language as a means of “purifying” it of non-Greek elements that had accreted during centuries of foreign influence and occupation; its adoption was, therefore, a political gesture as much as anything else. Katharevousa became the official language of the state, and was used in newspapers, official publications, and government edicts. It was, moreover,
