Читать книгу The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn - Страница 89

“Where has he gone off to, where did the Sage disappear?

Following his many miracles,

and the great renown of his instruction

which was diffused among so many peoples,

he suddenly went missing and no one has learned

with any certainty what has happened

(nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).

Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.

But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never

wrote about the death of Apollonius.

Others said that he went missing on Lindos.

Or perhaps that other story is

true, that his assumption took place on Crete,

in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—

But nonetheless we have the miraculous,

the supernatural apparition of him

to a young student in Tyana.—

Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,

for him to appear before the world again;

or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us

unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again

as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then

he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,

and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”

So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—

after a reading of Philostratus’s

“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—

one of the few pagans, the very few

who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant

and timid man—he, too, outwardly

played the Christian and would go to church.

It was the period during which there reigned,

with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,

and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,

showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.

[1897; 1910; 1920; 1920]