said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (thaméni, the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek, tha méni, “will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of thaméni, inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (khalassa, “wasted”/thalassa, “sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.
In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:
Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá
That year he found himself without a job;
ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá
and so he made a living from cards,
apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.
from backgammon, and what he borrowed.
The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of the boy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in the second:
His clothes were in a dreadful state.
There was one suit that he would always wear,
a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.
Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,
your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared
that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.
But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.
As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.
A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.
Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack of any spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.
Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium.
The first instance of enjambment—“came out in droves / to have a look”—underscores the ardent curiosity of the local populace, and hence emphasizes the dazzling nature of the occasion (while hinting at the locals’ cynicism about political displays, which is, in fact, emphasized later on in the poem). The second instance—“who for the first / time were being taken”—places extraordinary emphasis on the noun time by separating it from its adjective, first, which is also thereby emphasized: an emphasis that reminds us of the youth and inexperience of the children who are being so cynically exploited by their parents.
To turn to a work from the poet’s
