Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 7

THE READER WHO takes the time to immerse himself in Cavafy’s rich and idiosyncratic poetic world should be aware of certain technical features, not least because they raise questions about the aims and strategies of any given translation.

One of the techniques of which Cavafy made use to convey the suggestive interplay of past and present so important to his work is one that poses particularly thorny difficulties for the English translator. As a Greek author writing at the turn of the last century, Cavafy had available to him two quite different registers of the language: demotic Greek, the vernacular spoken by the people, and the far more formal Katharevousa, or “pure” Greek, the high language of literature, intellectual life, and officialdom. (The accent falls on the third syllable.) This artificial form of the language, invented at the turn of the nineteenth century by an eminent literary and political figure who had studied Classics, grafted much of the vocabulary and many of the more complicated grammatical forms of Classical Greek onto the everyday language as a means of “purifying” it of non-Greek elements that had accreted during centuries of foreign influence and occupation; its adoption was, therefore, a political gesture as much as anything else. Katharevousa became the official language of the state, and was used in newspapers, official publications, and government edicts. It was, moreover, de rigueur in institutions of higher learning.

Katharevousa savored, then, of official culture, the classical past, and high art. (To Forster, it “has tried to revive the classical tradition, and only succeeds in being dull.”) Just as Cavafy began writing, however, katharevousa—after having achieved preeminence over the years as the primary vehicle for literary expression, one increasingly characterized by an elaborate diction and style—was being rejected by the so-called Generation of 1880, a literary movement led by the prolific poet, dramatist, and critic Kostas Palamas, who advocated the use of demotic in literature. Cavafy’s earliest works were written in katharevousa, but in the early 1890s he had begun using demotic; the unpublished poem “Good and Bad Weather” (1893) was the first poem written entirely in demotic.

And yet he often chose not to write entirely in demotic. A distinctive feature of Cavafy’s style—perhaps the distinctive feature—is that he continued to mingle katharevousa diction and grammar (as well as pure Classical Greek words from time to time, to say nothing of citations from ancient texts) with demotic. The result is a poetry that has a unique and inimitable texture, very often plain and admirably direct but starched, too, with a loftier, more archaic and ceremonious language—like the talk of a fluent and charming raconteur (like Cavafy himself) that is sprinkled with locutions from the King James Bible. For this reason, it is a mistake to overemphasize, as many critics and admirers (and translators) have done, the laconic plainness of Cavafy’s diction; such an emphasis fails to convey the frequent strangeness of the diction, the “unique and cunning alloy,” as the great English travel writer and Hellenophile Patrick Leigh Fermor so marvelously put it in his essay “Landmarks in Decline,”

in which the fragments of legal diction and ancient Greek and inscriptions on tombs and old chronicles—one can almost hear the parchment creak and the flutter of papyrus—are closely haunted by the Anthology and the Septuagint; it is contained in a medium demotic perversely stiffened with mandarin and beaten at last into an instrument of expression which is austere and frugal in the extreme.

Those strange irruptions of mandarin stiffness deserve to be heard. When, in “Philhellene,” Cavafy ends a monologue by a vulgar eastern potentate—eager to indulge in superficial shows of Hellenic style despite that fact (which his monologue inadvertently betrays) that he is crassly disdainful of its substance—with an awkward shift into Classical Greek (on the word “unhellenized,” no less), he tells us more about the speaker’s pretensions than a laborious exposition could.

The deployment of this hybrid language—a verbal expression, you could say, of that larger and abiding fascination with margins, amalgams, cultural “alloys”—is, indeed, crucial for the interpretation of many poems. Two examples, one from a poem that treats a contemporary erotic theme, the other from a poem with an ancient setting, will help illuminate Cavafy’s subtle technique, while showing my own strategies for rendering them in English.

The 1928 poem “Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11” treats a favorite theme: the squalid life of an impoverished young man whose spectacular beauty stands in stark contrast to his humble circumstances—and, in this case, to his convenient morals. (We’re told that the lovely blacksmith’s assistant is willing to sell his favors, if necessary, in order to buy a coveted tie or expensive shirt.) In the poem’s final stanza, the narrator wonders whether even ancient Alexandria, famed for its louche and comely youths, could claim a young man as lovely as this down-at-the-heels boy. Here, the contrast between the allure of the youths in the glittering ancient city and that of a common blacksmith’s boy is suggestively conveyed by the shift in tone between the adjective used of the former, perikallis, and the noun used of the latter, agori: for the former is a high-flown katharevousa word taken directly from the Ancient Greek (which I translate by means of the rather stiff “beauteous”), while the latter is a noun as worn and plain as a pebble: “lad.”

Even more strikingly, in “The Seleucid’s Displeasure,” first written in 1910 and published in 1916, a large part of the meaning of the entire poem rests on the difference between a katharevousa and a demotic word, both of which mean the same thing. Set in the second century B.C., as the Hellenistic monarchies founded after the death of Alexander were crumbling before an emergent Rome, the poem treats the painful disappointment felt by one Greek monarch, Demetrius I Soter of the Seleucid house in Asia, on hearing that his Egyptian counterpart, Ptolemy VI, had cast aside his royal dignity and traveled to Rome as a supplicant in order to appeal for help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. The first two stanzas evoke Demetrius’s grandiose regard for the dignity “befitting … an Alexandrian Greek monarch”: to the impoverished Ptolemy he offers lavish clothing, jewels, and a retinue for his presentation to the Senate.

The Seleucid monarch’s attitude is pointedly contrasted with Ptolemy’s canny appreciation for political realities; he knows that he’s likelier to obtain Roman aid if he appears humble when he makes his appeal. His abject willingness to come down off his royal pedestal is brilliantly evoked in the Greek. In the first line of the stanza he is described as having come for the purposes of epaiteia, a noun with roots in Classical and Byzantine Greek that means everything from “a request” to “begging”; but in the last line, the verb used for the reason for his visit is the demotic zondanevo, “to beg.” Hence the shift from the high to the demotic forms, both words meaning the same thing, itself beautifully reflects the demotion in his status from an ostensibly independent ruler to a supplicant reliant on the power of others. In my rendering of these lines, I have attempted to suggest this tonal shift by using an abstruse term in the first instance, and a familiar, monosyllabic word in the second:

But the Lagid, who had come a mendicant,

knew his business and refused it all:

He didn’t need these luxuries at all.

Dressed in worn old clothes, he humbly entered Rome,

and found lodgings with a minor craftsman.

And then he presented himself to the Senate

as an ill-fortuned and impoverished man,

that with greater success he might beg.

As these two examples indicate, I have tried to convey distinctions between katharevousa and demotic, when possible, by using high Latinate forms in the case of the former, and ordinary, plain Anglo-Saxon derivations in the case of the latter—an imperfect, but I hope suggestive, means of conveying this vital aspect of Cavafy’s technique. In certain cases, moreover (“Philhellene,” for one), I have used British spellings when rendering katharevousa, since these—as indeed with the archaic spellings of certain words that Cavafy often favored—instantly and quite 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 one: his.

These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watches Roman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.

The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.

“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:

Without pity, without shame, without consideration

they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.

And I sit here now in growing desperation.

This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:

because I had so many things to do out there.

O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?

But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.

Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.

The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word , “shame,” which is pronounced ehdhó, while line 3 (literally, “And I sit and lose all hope now here”) ends with the demotic word , “here,” which has the identical pronunciation. In the first two couplets, moreover, the katharevousa usages are associated with the oppressive “them” (without shame, walls), while the demotic usages are associated with the imprisoned “I” (here, this fate). The only pairing in which the rhymed words are both in the demotic is that of lines 6 and 8.The former (literally, “O while they built the walls, how could I not pay attention?”) ends with the verb proséxo, “pay attention”—but to the Greek ear, the word is indistinguishable from the prepositional phrase pros éxo, “towards the outside”: which is to say, the very direction in which the speaker failed to look. (To the Greek ear, it sounds as if the line is going to be something like, “O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look towards the outside?”) In my translation I have tried to convey this provocative confusion by translating the first word by means of the casual English expression “look out,” which has the further advantage of enabling the loaded repetition, which we find in the Greek, of the word “out.”

Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a. Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme to hammer home a crucial point. The first stanza provides a useful example:

You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.

There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.

My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;

my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;

How long will my mind endure this slow decay?

Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,

I see all round me the black rubble of my life

where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”

In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (thaméni, the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek, tha méni, “will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of thaméni, inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (khalassa, “wasted”/thalassa, “sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.

In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:

Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá

That year he found himself without a job;

ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá

and so he made a living from cards,

apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.

from backgammon, and what he borrowed.

The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of the boy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in the second:

His clothes were in a dreadful state.

There was one suit that he would always wear,

a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.

Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,

your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared

that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.

But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.

As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.

A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.

Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack of any spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:

I love the church—its labara,

the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,

the lights, its icons, its lectern.

When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:

with the aromas of its incenses,

the liturgical chanting and harmonies,

the magnificent appearance of the priests,

and the rhythm of their every movement—

resplendent in their ornate vestments—

my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,

to our Byzantium, illustrious.

With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.

Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:

The Alexandrians came out in droves

to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:

Caesarion, and also his little brothers,

Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first

time were being taken to the Gymnasium.

The first instance of enjambment—“came out in droves / to have a look”—underscores the ardent curiosity of the local populace, and hence emphasizes the dazzling nature of the occasion (while hinting at the locals’ cynicism about political displays, which is, in fact, emphasized later on in the poem). The second instance—“who for the first / time were being taken”—places extraordinary emphasis on the noun time by separating it from its adjective, first, which is also thereby emphasized: an emphasis that reminds us of the youth and inexperience of the children who are being so cynically exploited by their parents.

To turn to a work from the poet’s latest phase, the final stanza of the great 1930 poem “The Mirror in the Entrance” suggests how Cavafy continued to hone his handling of 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 , the person brought to mind is the person brought to mind when the eye of an English-speaking person comes across the name “Justinian”; transliterating it as “Ioustinianos” is to obscure, rather than translate, Cavafy’s text.

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 , which indeed appears in the poem’s title, sounds like. But this choice conveys the entirely false impression that “Selefkidis” is someone’s name, whereas, as we know, the word refers here to a member of the Seleucid dynasty—someone whose name was, in fact, Demetrius. The word “Seleucid” in this poem is therefore a crucial part of its meaning, one that rests on our ability to grasp the great, if rather pathetic, pride that Demetrius took in the fact that he was a Hellenistic monarch—a Seleucid. A fluent speaker and tireless reader of English, Cavafy himself was familiar with the Latinate forms of these names from his extensive reading in English works of history and philology—Gibbon, J. B. Bury, many others—and used these forms himself when writing in English. Not least for that reason, I have done the same.