evoked a particularly strong emotion in Cavafy, who deeply admired Cantacuzenus’s steadfast loyalty, devotion to principle, and—once he had been forced to abdicate, after his enemies’ ultimate triumph—great dignity in defeat, along with an impressive piety. The existence of the two Unfinished Poems now makes it clear that during the mid-1920s the poet was hard at work on what amounts to an entire cycle of poems on this poignant and noble figure, a small but significant lyric corpus whose celebration of “the worthiest man whom our race then possessed, / wise, forbearing, patriotic, brave, adroit” sheds greater light on our understanding of the qualities that the mature Cavafy associated with the unique Greek identity for which Byzantium was the conduit. This Cantacuzenus cycle may now take its place alongside the previously known cycles of poems about certain historical figures who similarly evoked a particularly strong response in the poet, not least because of the way their lives shed light on something about what it was to be Greek, or a poet, or both: Marc Antony, Apollonius of Tyana, the apostate emperor Julian.
The other group of historical poems worthy of special note consists, in fact, of no less than four new texts about Julian, now revealed as the figure from the ancient past to whom the poet returned with greatest frequency and intensity: a total of eleven poems in all. (An embryonic twelfth is one of the four fragments in the Cavafy Archive; see here in this volume.) Cavafy’s poetic engagement with this complex and enigmatic emperor, who wanted to return the empire to pagan worship not long after it had been converted by his uncle Constantine to Christianity, began early in his creative life, with the Unpublished Poem “Julian at the Mysteries” (1896), and continued virtually to his last days: he had just finished correcting the proofs to “On the Outskirts of Antioch,” about Julian’s contemptuous treatment of the Antiochene Christians, when he died. The four Unfinished drafts give expression to a wide range of favorite themes and motifs, all clustered around the figure of the emperor, who, in his scheme to impose a dour, humorless, and rigid paganism on the newly Christianized empire, embodied an intolerance, a rigidity of thought, and, worst of all, a profound hypocrisy that to Cavafy represented everything the true Hellenic spirit was not.
And so we have “The Rescue of Julian,” with its terse closing reminder, bare of any editorial comment whatever, that the emperor owed his life to the Christian priests he later tormented—a poem that savors of the tart ironies that give works like “Nero’s Deadline” their jaundiced effectiveness. “Athanasius,” which dramatizes the moment in which two Christian monks in Egypt have a vision of the death of Julian half a world away, in Persia, returns us to the milieu of telepathic perception that had so fascinated the young poet thirty years before. “The Bishop Pegasius,” about the still secretly pagan young Julian’s encounter with a secretly pagan bishop at an ancient Trojan shrine to Athena, is memorably irradiated by the aura of illicit homosexual attraction that haunts a masterpiece like the Published Poem “He Asked About the Quality.” And the perplexed narrator of “Hunc Deorum Templis” must grope in helpless ignorance like the unlucky masses in the early poem “Correspondences According to Baudelaire,” which owes so much to the Parnassians’ vision of the poet as someone granted a special vision. Contemplating the scene in which, during Julian’s triumphant entry into Vienne, an old woman cries out that “here is the man who will restore the [pagan] temples” (the exclamation to which the title refers), this narrator is forced to wonder, rather querulously, whether she is speaking in elation or despair—whether, that is to say, she is a secret pagan sympathizer or a loyal Christian. More secret identities.
The foregoing overview of these rich and quite beautiful works is, of necessity, brief. But in sketching the ways in which the present poems partake so richly of the themes and qualities of the poems already well known to us, I hope to have made clear what will, on a close reading of the poems themselves, be evident: that the Ateli not only complement our knowledge of the great poet’s output, but complete it. The addition of these poems to the canon of Cavafy’s published poetry allows us to say, three-quarters of a century after he died on his seventieth birthday—a perfect concentricity, a polished completion—that his work has, at last, been truly finished.
Although much of Professor Lavagnini’s edition is, necessarily, devoted to discussions of intricate issues related to textual criticism—material that I have not reproduced in this translation—I suspect that even the casual reader is likely to want to know something about the physical state in which these Unfinished Poems were found. As George Savidis observed in the comment that I cited above, it is clear that the poet carefully organized his work in progress. Each of the poems had its own “dossier.” Out of some thick paper—quite often the covers of his own printed collections, which he would appropriate for their new role—Cavafy would fashion a kind of rudimentary envelope (only once did he use an actual envelope), in which he would keep the various bits of paper pertinent to a given poem in progress: drafts, notes, passages from source texts that he had copied out, and so forth. On the outside of the envelope he would write the title (sometimes marked as “provisional”) and a date, consisting of the month and year: the moment, as Savidis argues, when Cavafy conceived the poem.
The meticulousness with which the poet conserved his drafts and materials stands, as Professor Lavagnini has noted, in stark and rather amusing contrast to the often quite random nature of his writing materials. These consisted all too obviously of whatever he had to hand at the moment of inspiration—letters that had been addressed to him, invitations to conferences, and, in one memorable case, a scrap of a cigarette box. One thing that this haphazard physical evidence does suggest bears importantly on our understanding of the poet’s creative process: clearly, when the moment of inspiration struck, he seized on whatever was immediately available and started writing. Each of my Notes begins with a brief summary, based on the Lavagnini commentary, of the contents of the relevant dossier; I have provided fuller discussion of those contents and the state of the manuscript when I thought such material would be of interest to the general reader.
Many readers are also likely to be curious about the physical appearance of the pages themselves, which Professor Lavagnini has rendered accessible through her labors. As is already well known due to the reproduction of some of his manuscripts, Cavafy’s handwriting was, generally speaking, forceful and clear (a godsend to the textual critic); he generally wrote in pencil. Divisions between strophes are often clearly marked, as are deletions, which the poet indicated by means of a line through the rejected verses—or, in cases of major deletions, a large wavy line over the entirety of the material to be deleted. Substitutions and additions are written in the space above the original text, and are, in general, made only after the material to be deleted was clearly marked. For this reason, there are relatively few instances in which variant readings appear without any clear indication of what the poet’s preference was. (It should, however, be said that in a number of cases, the manuscript pages are somewhat illegible, or show signs of vacillation, with confusingly repeated crossings-out and reinsertions; it is in these cases that Professor Lavagnini’s skills as a textual critic have done us the greatest service.)
When there are cases of variant readings in which Professor Lavagnini has been unable to establish priority, I have reproduced these variants (when they are significant, and not merely cases in which the drafts give us one or more synonyms for a given word, as is often the case) in the Notes, with commentary where appropriate. In no case have I chosen to present as part of the translation a variant that has been rejected by Professor Lavagnini. Only in the case of “Epitaph of a Samian” have I deviated from her printed text, for reasons I explain in the note to that poem.
In the interests of making these poems accessible to the general reader, I am not reproducing what textual scholars refer to as the “diplomatic text”—a text that indicates, by means of a series of conventional notations, all of the additions, deletions, insertions, and emendations that were made at each stage of composition. The texts of the poems themselves, therefore, simply reproduce what Professor Lavagnini, with admirable scrupulousness, refers to as “the last” (rather than “the final”) of the “forms” that can be construed from Cavafy’s manuscript pages. In this I feel licensed by, and am indeed following the example of, none
