Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 60

Nero wasn’t worried when he heard

the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.

“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”

He still had time to enjoy himself.

He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,

this deadline that the god is giving him,

for him to think about dangers yet to come.

Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,

but exquisitely wearied by this trip

which had been endless days of diversion—

in the theatres, in the gardens, the gymnasia. …

Evenings of the cities of Achaea …

Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all …

So Nero. And in Spain, Galba

was secretly assembling his army and preparing it:

the old man, seventy-three years old.

[1915; 1918]