style="font-size:15px;"> Here, the preciseness of the meter vividly suggests the ineluctable character of the oracle itself. By contrast, the first line of the second stanza, in which the poet describes how Nero returns to Rome from a pleasure trip to Athens exhausted by his sensual indulgences, Cavafy maintains a five-beat line while padding it with five extra syllables:
Tóra stin Rhómi tha epitrépsei kourasménos lígo
Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little bit wearied
The subtle loosening of the line nicely conveys the relaxation of the self-involved Nero, who is blithely unaware that his days of aesthetic and erotic pleasure are numbered.
These strong and suggestive rhythms structure much of the verse, from the early sonnets of the 1890s to the poems of his last decade; without them, the poetry, already devoid of the usual devices, might well seem flat-footed in a way that indeed reminds us that both the Ancient and the Modern Greek word for prose, pezos, literally means “pedestrian”—that is, language that lumbers along arhythmically instead of dancing. Fortunately for the English translator, English itself falls quite naturally into the rhythms that Cavafy favored.
Cavafy is, indeed, endlessly inventive with his meters. In certain early lyrics, for example “La Jeunesse Blanche” (1895) and “Chaldean Image” (1896), the very elaborate metrical schemes betray the young poet’s infatuation with the Continental poetry of the day; while in others, like the Repudiated Poem “A Love” (1896), we hear the thrumming fifteen-syllable beat characteristic of the Greek popular songs so beloved of this poet. (In a famous 1904 poem, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” Cavafy rather suggestively casts the anxious questions of the speakers in this “Greek” rhythm, while the answers that come back are in “English” iambics.) One particularly noteworthy metrical innovation can be observed in a number of lyrics composed in what George Seferis, in commenting on these poems, referred to as a “tango” rhythm. Each line of these poems is composed of two half lines of three beats each; the lines are separated by white space. Hence, for instance, the opening of “In Despair” looks like this:
| Ton ékhas’ éndhelós. | Ke tóra piá zití |
| sta khíli káthenós | kenoúriou érastí |
| ta khíli tá diká tou … |
| He’s lost him utterly. | And from now on he seeks |
| in the lips of every new | lover that he takes |
| the lips of that one: his. |
These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watches Roman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.
The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.
“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:
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.
The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word
Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a. Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme
