Complete Poems by C.P. Cavafy Read Free Book Online Page B

effectively (to the American eye) signal a different, often elite cultural milieu, which is part of katharevousa’s flavor.
    There are other stylistic matters, resulting in other choices I have made, with which the reader should be acquainted. However much Cavafy’s language may eschew the devices—metaphor, simile, figurative and “lyrical”language—that we normally associate with poetry, his verse, in Greek, is unmistakably musical. This music results principally from two stylistic features, which I have taken pains, whenever possible, to reproduce.
    The first is meter. Very often Cavafy’s lines have a strong iambic rhythm; very often, too, he favors a five-beat line that English speakers are familiar with—as Cavafy himself was, from his deep reading of British poets. (There is, indeed, a distinctly English cast to many of his poems, as commentators have observed.) Although he will often preserve a strict iambic pentameter, he just as often loosens the line when it suits his purposes. In “Nero’s Deadline,” for instance, we first learn about the Delphic oracle’s warning (that the emperor should “beware the age of seventy-three”), as the direct object of the verb “heard,” in a line with a strictly iambic beat with precisely ten syllables (I have marked the stresses with acute accents):
                   
tou Dhélfikoú mantíou tón khrismó
                   the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle
    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