Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 69

From my speech, and looks, and from my mien

I shall make an excellent panoply;

and so I’ll stand before those wicked men

without fear, without debility.

They will want to harm me. But none of those

who come close to me will ever see

where my vulnerable places are, my wounds,

beneath the falsehoods that will cover me.—

Boastful words of Aemilian son of Monaës.

I wonder if he ever made that suit of armor?

In any event, he ­didn’t wear it much:

At twenty-seven, in Sicily, he died.

[1898?; 1918]