this technique. The poem describes an occasion on which a beautiful youth employed by a tailor makes a delivery to a wealthy home; while he waits for a receipt, alone in the vestibule, he approaches an old mirror and fixes his tie, unaware that the mirror itself—here a double for the poet—is, as it were, “watching” him. The poem ends with a description of the mirror’s feelings:
But the ancient mirror, which had seen and seen again,
throughout its lifetime of so many years,
thousands of objects and faces—
but the ancient mirror now became elated,
inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself
perfect beauty, for a few minutes.
Except for the final two lines, each line is a grammatically independent unit ending with some kind of punctuation—a comma or a dash. Coming at the end of this series of discrete phrases, the penultimate line, which can only be logically and grammatically completed by the line that follows, takes on a tremendous drama and excitement: by withholding the object of the verb “received” until the next line, the poet gives the all-important word “beauty” an enormous climactic force.
Given the importance of this technique in Cavafy’s prosody, the meticulous care with which he constructed each line, I’ve tried to structure the English of these translations so that it achieves the same effect.
One final note, concerning a choice on my part that might strike some readers as controversial. In rendering Greek names from the Classical, Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Byzantine past, I have consistently chosen to eschew a phonetic rendering of the way those names sound in Greek, opting instead to adopt the traditional, Latinate forms—which is to say, the forms that will be familiar to English speakers. To my mind, mimicking the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the names of the historical or pseudohistorical characters is, at best, inappropriate and indeed unhelpful in an English translation. When the Greek eye sees the name
Worse, a misguided allegiance to the sound of Modern Greek can lead to a serious misrepresentation of a poem’s deeper meanings. To take “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” once more: certain translators have chosen to render the title of this poem as “The Displeasure of Selefkidis”—that last word being an accurate phonetic reproduction of what the Greek word
4
THE PRESENT VOLUME collects all of the known poetic work of Cavafy. Because of the complexities of their publication history, the organization of the poems in the pages that follow merits brief comment.
Although he published a small number of verses, most of them when he was young, in literary journals and annuals, Cavafy had for most of his career a highly idiosyncratic method of presenting his poems, and never published a definitive collection of them in book form. He preferred, instead, to have poems printed at his own expense as broadsheets or in pamphlets, which he would distribute to a select group of friends and admirers. Among other things, this method allowed the poet to treat every poem as a work in progress; friends recalled that he often went on emending poems after they had been printed. In an essay called Independence, the poet articulated what was clearly a kind of anxiety about the finality associated with publication:
When the writer knows pretty well that only very few volumes of his edition will be bought … he obtains a great freedom in his creative work. The writer who has in view the certainty, or at least the probability of selling all his edition, and perhaps subsequent editions, is sometimes influenced by their future sale … almost without meaning to, almost without realizing—there will be moments when, knowing how the public thinks and what it likes and what it will buy, he will make some little sacrifices—he will phrase this bit differently, and leave out that. And there is nothing more destructive for Art (I tremble at the mere thought of it) than that this bit should be differently phrased or that bit omitted.
Still, after a time he would periodically order modest printings of booklets that contained small selections of the poems, arranged thematically. The first of these, Poems 1904, contained just fourteen poems; a second, Poems 1910, added seven more, and a later manuscript of that booklet (known, because the poet copied it out by hand as a gift to his friend and heir, as the “Sengopoulos Notebook”) added one more early poem—“Walls”—which had been written in 1897 and much anthologized, bringing the total to twenty-two. These and subsequent booklets (and sometimes the poems in them) were constantly being revised, added to, and subtracted from: hence Poems 1910 became Poems (1909–1911), and then Poems (1908–1914), and so on, according to which works the poet had decided to add or remove.
By the time Cavafy died, there were three such collections in circulation. Two were bound, and arranged thematically: Poems 1905–1915, containing forty poems (the dates refer to the year of first publication), and Poems 1916–1918, containing twenty-eight poems. The third, Poems 1919–1932, a collection of sixty-nine poems arranged chronologically by date of first publication, was merely a pinned-together sheaf of individual sheets. These 137 poems, together with one poem that Cavafy had corrected for the printer in the weeks before his death, “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” and sixteen early poems from the Sengopoulos Notebook, all first published between 1897 and 1904, that had not already been collected in Poems 1905–1915, are the 154 poems that appeared in the first commercial collection of his work, lavishly published (in a chic Art Deco style) in Alexandria two years after Cavafy’s death, edited by Rika Sengopoulou, the first wife of his heir.
Although this group of poems is now often referred to as “the Canon”—a word, one suspects, that would have caused Cavafy to raise an eyebrow, given his sardonic appreciation for the difference between the judgments we pass and those that history passes—I refer to them here as the Published Poems, since these are the works that this most fastidious of poets published, or approved for publication, during his own lifetime, precisely as he wanted them to be read. They appear here in the following order: (1) Poems 1905–1915; (2) Poems 1916–1918; (3) Poems 1919–1933 (including “On the Outskirts of Antioch”); a fourth section, which I have entitled “Poems Published 1897–1908,” offers the contents of the Sengopoulos Notebook, minus of course the six poems that already appear in Poems 1905–1915. (It is worth remembering that Cavafy was eager to take Poems 1910, the basis for the Sengopoulos Notebook, out of circulation in the years after its publication.) It is true that this presentation of the latter group wrests them from the poet’s careful thematic arrangement, in which each poem is meant to comment on and, as it were, converse with its neighbor; but it would be awkward, to say nothing of pedantic, to repeat six poems in two successive sections.
