[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So if you haven't.
Here it is, Kelly Spera. As you set out for Ithaca.
Hope your road is a long one. Full of adventures.
Full of discovery. Latest Argonian.
Cyclops. Angry Poseidon. Don't be afraid of them.
You'll never find things like that on your way. As long as you keep your thoughts raised high.
As long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body likes Oregonians.
Cyclops. Wild. Poseidon. You won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul.
Unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when with what pleasure, what joy you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time.
May you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things.
Mother of pearl and coral.
Amber and ebony. Sensual perfume of every kind.
As many sensual perfumes as you can.
And many. May you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaca always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years.
So you're old by the time you reach the island. Well, see, with all you've gained on the way.
Not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her, you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her, poor Ithaca won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become so full of experience.
You'll have understood by then what these Ithaca's mean.
This is one of the most famous modern poems in the world,
as much a chestnut for U.S. graduation ceremonies as Frost's The Road less travelled than a poem written in modern Greek would achieve,
this kind of popularity seems counterintuitive.
Much of its fame comes from its being read at Jackie Onassis funeral in 1994,
and subsequent subsequently published in this translation in The New York Times.
Um, Mike Keeley, um, Edmund Keeley, the translator, um, says there's a little bit of a feedback, something going on with the microphone.
Um said that, um, after this came out in the New York Times, um, their translation,
the Kelly and Sherrard Cavafy translation sold hundreds and hundreds a week at that point.
Um, because of that popularity, or, as we say in the poetry world, in the big three figures.
It is as much of Cavalli's poetry at once crystal clear and elusive, evasive.
What do these articles mean? What does it mean that a poet writing in Greek in Egypt, who published no commercial volume in his lifetime,
has become one of the most important influences in Anglophone literature?
Constantine Cavafy had, of course, never been to Ithaca. Cavafy was born on the 29th of April by the old Julian calendar in 1863,
in Alexandria, Ottoman Egypt, and died on the 29th of April by the new calendar.
In 1933, in Alexandria, in the Kingdom of Egypt, there is something essentially Cavafy, and in the layers of historical irony,
like sheets of graphite that slip between these dates and places, which are also the same date and the same place.
As Peter MacRitchie has pointed out.
And I'd like to dedicate this talk to Peter Makris and to Mike Keeley, who both left us relatively recently and too soon.
Um, that even coffee's name suggests an unlikely fusion of worlds, times and places.
Constantine, um, being an emperor of Byzantium and Cavafy from the Arabic Turkish Cavafy meaning a maker of cheap shoes.
The poems for which he is known, particularly the 154 canonical poems, were written in his own brand of the Greek vernacular,
a moderate demotic which permitted archaic and purist forms in the mix.
Maybe 154 should be a poetic unit.
A poet's growth. If a baker's dozen is a dozen plus one, a poet's gross would be 144 plus ten.
It is the number of Cavalli's canonical poems and of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Just putting it out there. In addition to the canonical poems, there are the hidden poems, the repudiated poems, and the Unfinished Poems.
But we will mostly be dealing with canonical poems today, with one small exception.
Aside from ten essential years, childhood years spent in England, in Liverpool and in London.
And I kind of wonder if there's a Cavafy plaque in Liverpool that would be good to know.
Um, and visits to Paris and to Athens. He lived principally in Alexandria with a bit of time in Constantinople.
Crossroads cities and cosmopolitan ports of the Ottoman Empire, straddling East and West.
As he never published a commercial volume of poems in his lifetime.
Um. Instead, he collected fascicles of poems on a table in a room that, um, friends called the Book bindery of his apartment,
pamphlets that he would distribute to friends and admirers, and sometimes retrieve later for corrections and revision.
This is indicative of poetic ambition rather than its absence, as he would write in 1906, in English.
By postponing and postponing to publish what a gain I have had, this might be some wise advice for poets.
Um. Oh, those poems written between 19 and 22.
What wretched trash! When he had finished his poem in the month of Isaiah in the spring of 1917,
and uh editor of uh literary journal Stefanos Parga dropped by his house to collect it for publication.
Argus found the poet restless and jittery, pacing up and down in the small living room and the corridor,
with the manuscript projecting from his pocket and his hands locked behind his back.
Take it, dear man, this masterpiece! Cavafy reportedly exclaimed as he handed him the manuscript.
Take it, for it is burning my hands! Cavafy understood his own importance.
But it is hard to think of another figure as eccentric to modern Western literature
who had become so centrally influential and not to Western literature only.
But I think basically all poetry is the only remotely comparable figure I can think of is Emily Dickinson.
Alexandria might not sound. It might sound glamorous and exotic to us.
Partly, I suppose, due to Covid, but it was not so incorrect this time.
Um, as E.M. Forster wrote of Alexandria, Forster essentially discovers Cavafy for the English speaking world.
Modern Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul, founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs.
Ill built, ill planned, ill drained.
Many hard things can be set against it, and most are said by its inhabitants.
Forster's famous description of Cavafy follows immediately after this,
and it's often quoted in a single phrase, but I think it's worth looking at the director's cut.
They, the Alexandrian inhabitants, turn and see a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe.
His arms are extended. Possibly. Oh, Cavafy.
And then it goes into it almost sounds like the narrative voiceover of a 1970s Disney documentary.
Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office or from his office to the flat.
If the former, he vanishes when seen with a slight gesture of despair.
If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence.
An immense, complicated, yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed,
and then reservations that really do reserve a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end,
yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw.
This sentence deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Komnenos in 1996, or with olives,
their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia minor.
It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English or French, and despite its intellectual richness and human outlook,
despite the matured charity of its judgements, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe.
It is the sentence of a poet. If you think of one of Cavalli's essential qualities as flatness, you are not alone and you are not wrong.
I do point out, there's sometimes more wordplay and more sound effects in Cavafy than people tend to have a sense of from some translations.
Um, but even to the Greek ear, there is a flatness took of the Greek Nobel laureate George Spheeris in May of 1941,
arriving in Egypt with the Greek government in exile, Athens having fallen under Nazi occupation the month previous and in April.
Had a sudden revelation about Cavalli's style. He'd had kind of trouble coming to grips with Cavafy.
But seeing Egypt, he suddenly felt he understood the style of Cavafy.
Egypt, he says.
The lowest land which I have ever seen, no mountain on the horizon, the highest things you can see as you approach are boats and houses.
Yellow sea. The sea of Proteus.
I meditate on Cavafy as I observe this low land.
So is his poetry, prosaic, like the boundless plain before us?
It doesn't go up and down it walks.
And in Greek prose also is basically the same word for pedestrian.
It walks. I understand it better now. And I honour what he did.
Um, I think this prosaic ness of Cavafy is one of several paradoxes about his style that make him, um, unique.
So there's an Alexandrian flatness of affect as intensity.
There is prose as the building block of verse.
There is stinginess with metaphor as a symbolic language.
There is honouring failure as being as noble as victory.
Ephemeral pleasure as eternal in the memory.
Racial mixture as cultural purity.
Edges of empire as its focal essence by standards.
Bystanders of history as its central experiencers.
Post classical Hellenism as the essence of bleakness, treating the ancient as contemporary and the contemporary as ancient Faulkner's.
The past is never dead. It isn't even past is very often, um, and maybe even the minority language of Greek as a central world language.
Need to turn the page. Um, we also have covered his own biography of himself, which he did for a Greek paper when he was visiting in Athens,
um, where he says, I am from Constantinople by descent. But I was born in Alexandria.
I left very young and spent much of my childhood in England.
Um, I have also lived in France during my adolescence.
I lived in Constantinople, and it's been many years since I last visited Greece.
My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt.
I know English, French and a little Italian. Probably knows a lot of Italian, but we'll leave it at that.
In fact, when Cavafy wrote notes to his poems or kept a journal on this visit to Athens, it was in English, as was his first efforts at writing verse.
Um, George Safaris, again in discussing Cavalli's humour and humour, might not be something that you associate with Cavafy,
but according to George Safaris, um, Cavalli's humour is very English.
He links it to the nonsense aesthetic of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear.
Um, so Ferriss writes that Cavafy spoke no language but English until the age of nine.
That seems very unlikely to me, and I'm not sure where Severus comes up with that.
I'm just quoting surveyors. Um, Cavafy did have an English nurse in Alexandria, and from the formative ages of nine to 10 to 14, lived in England.
His biographer, Robert Little writes that English was Cavalli's second language and that,
but it was the language most commonly used in his family and with many of his friends.
Um, I will not say that Cavafy is an English poet writing in Greek.
That would be facetious and wrong. I withdraw it, and yet I think it is also not without a kernel of truth.
He is as influenced by Gibbon as by Plutarch, and by Browning as much as by Homer.
We will find that his Odysseus is a Ulysses, fetched up as much from Dante and Tennyson as from the Odyssey.
Um, the Cavafy family. I also like to point out, um, was it barely one removed from the writers and artists of the Pre-Raphaelites in England?
Um, Maria z. Barco. Um, we have here Maria Bartoli, Stillman and Anglia.
You know any of these? Um, these were the three Greek graces of the movement.
Famous beauties, independent minded women, muses, models, and all artists and writers in their own right.
They were cousins and family friends to the Cavafy.
So this is, uh, one removed from Cavafy.
At any rate, I think we find as anglophone, um, readers and speakers of English,
a sense of recognition that seems to accompany the history of Cavafy translations into English,
and plays into the extensive responses and invitations written to his work in our own tongue.
There are even categories of imitation that amount to whole new subgenres of lyric poems.
Almost the very first publication of Cavafy, it's actually his second publication, and again by publication.
I'm referring to this kind of self publication, which was not unusual at the time.
Um, the very second poem that he publishes, he publishes in a bilingual edition.
Um, that is the poem walls. This is an early poem, um, in 1887, the very first translator of Cavafy is his brother, John Cavafy.
Um, so this poem came out in Greek and in English at the same time.
Um, John Cavafy versions of his brother works work are always worth looking at.
Um, they are alive to the sounds and to the formal decisions of the Greek um, such as rhyme and metre, where applicable, and shifts and register.
Um, I guess the problem may be that they reflect English verse conventions of the time, so sometimes they strike us as dated.
Um, but they must have had, at least at the beginning, the poets imprimatur.
Um, John was a poet himself, though he chose to write in English, an option that no doubt had been available to Constantine also.
Um, was is one of the poems I like to show people who think of graffiti as a flat, free verse poet.
Um, and he does have meant most of his poems are unnamed, but about 55 of them.
So a pretty big chunk are rhymed, and some of them are intensely rhymed, like this one.
Um, and in these poems, he also does something kind of interesting with Greek,
where he takes what might be considered a kind of flaw or decadence of modern Greek by, uh, raised me in pronouncing classicists.
Um, but he turns it into a flex. So I will get to this poem and just say, uh, no, I turned it off.
What did I do? That's scary. I just.
This is, um, just very briefly, but modern Greek now has five ways to spell the long e sound.
So iota is e eta is e epsilon is e Omicron.
Iota is yes e epsilon iota is e uh.
So um, but Modern Greek retains the spellings um, as if these changes hadn't happened.
So the result is there's actually a treasure trove of puns available in Greek, and homophones of words that have zero etymological relationship.
Um, and Cavafy kind of uses that to his advantage.
Um, I will try to, you know, forgive me.
I will read this in Greek and struggle through it.
Um, so tiki equals hoodies, petty skip seen hoodies, sleeping hoodies and the mega like Epsilon three zero more active sun T-shirt.
Okay. Casio man. Okay, okay. Apple PS1 matura.
It's all alike then. Skiff domain tournament.
Troy FTT vat pragma Tabula x on the com or econ.
Uh, or turn equities on to t post namin proceso Allah then Aqua Zapotec rotten stone econ on a pest status may listen up on Cosmo and exo.
Well, um, so I've highlighted the words that rhyme, but they don't just rhyme, it's rhyme riche.
It's a punning rhyme. They are exactly the same sounds.
So though, which is shame turns into a though which is here.
But I think the most critical one is teehee, which is walls turns into fate.
That is something we can't do in English, but we can get the rhymes.
So this is um, John Phase translation, which came out as the same time as this Greek version.
Without reflection, without mercy, without shame.
They built strong walls and high and compassed me about.
And now I sit here and consider and despair.
My brain is worn with meditating on my feet.
I had outside so many things to terminate.
That's an unfortunate line. But others are not so bad.
Oh, why, when they were building, did I not beware? But never a sound of building.
Never an echo came out of the world. Insensibly they shut me out.
He doesn't follow the rhyme scheme. Which in the Cavafy in the original is a, b a b c, d c, d.
Instead he makes a kind of nesting box of rhymes.
But I think that also works to give the idea of being claustrophobic, which is what these intense rhymes are doing in this poem.
And I will look briefly at two other versions of this.
Um, Daniel Mandel, Mendelssohn's versions of Cavafy came out, um, maybe like ten years ago, I guess now, um, the two, uh, quite a lot of hoopla.
He does get the rhyme sounds. And without pity, without shame, without consideration.
They've built around me enormous towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation. So he's following the rhyme scheme.
This fate consumes my mind. I think of nothing else because I had so many things to do out there.
While they built the walls, why didn't they look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders. Did I hear there?
There's a little bit of strain trying to get the rhyme at the end of the line.
Um, imperceptibly, they've shut me from the world without, um, that kind of banging shut on the out, I think works quite well.
Um, Tony Barnes stone, um, his sister, Leaky Barnes stone, um, actually did a complete Cavafy translation.
Tony is an American poet. Um, who does some translation as well.
They are half Greek.
Um, and I feel like I'm a little bit of a midwife to this version of Wells, because I think it came out a little bit from having a talk with Tony,
and I was like, if only someone could try to get these rhymes in, that would be so cool.
And, um, uh, Tony did do so, so with no compassion, pity, shame.
They wrought these massive walls around me, walls so high I sit here and despair until the rot consumes my thoughts.
How poor my look, how I had wished many things, had many things I wish to do out there when they were building.
How could I not hear? I never heard the builders racket.
Their clangs as they walls me up in here.
Um. So we have the rhyme race here. Rot and rot.
Hi. How I there, there, here, here.
It can't do the trick where walls turns into fate. Um, English doesn't have a vehicle for that.
Um, but I also like that he's got the builders racket, um, that we had in the Greek,
because the Greek is quite noisy there, where you have conductor sounds throughout your throat on the stone.
It's kind of hard to say. Um, so it's nice to have racket there.
Um. So. We have these, um, translations of walls.
Cavafy divided up his poetry into three areas the philosophical or the area of thought.
So walls will belong, I think, to that category, the historical of which we will see a couple, and the hedonistic or sensual.
Um, often a poem sits somewhere in the overlap of a Venn diagram of two or more of these.
Um. The first complete Englishness of the canonical poems was published in 1951 by John Matagorda Cato, and I think he has an Oxford connection.
I maybe one of you can enlighten me, um, later with an introduction by Rex Warner,
with the Hogarth Press in the UK and in 1952, you in the US with Grove.
It was widely reviewed in all the right places,
probably the most significant American poem to be born under the zodiac sign of Cavafy is this one by Alan Dugan.
Um, Alan Dugan was a poet who was born in 1923.
And Brooklyn. He died in 2003.
Um, he fought in World War two. He served in World War two.
So he's a war poet? Um, he won all the right prizes and was widely anthologised for a while.
I think now he's mostly known for this poem and for his love song, I and thou.
Maybe you'll hear it. Nothing is plumb level or squared.
Um, but this poem recently came up in a Facebook group that I belong to called, um, American Poems of the mid 20th century.
It's, uh, run by the wonderful, um, American poet Sam Gwin.
And, um, as soon as this poem came up for discussion, I said, well, that's got Cavafy all over it.
And it was interesting to me because people said, oh, how so?
Um, and I thought, well, okay, well, let's, let's. So I'm actually going to try to do something techie, which is to play a sound file.
We'll see if I can do that, because it's wonderful to hear Alan Dugan reading this poem in his own voice.
He's got this, um, Brooklyn, um, mid-century kind of accent of a sort of American G.I.
That sounds like it's right out of a World War Two movie.
How they named the river lockdown because, as at many a military victory indicative of war or official acts upstream.
But what about it all goes by? That is the thinking, I think.
Other than us soldiers are issuing drunk and we gas.
And why even this junk comes out of us.
So from the past upstream friends, is a.
The great battle of the Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the lesson nobody arms and by sight.
This is a joke between a man named Alexander um and involves a hero.
That's a god. It's wonderful. See if I can now get back to the poem.
Do I need help? Correct. The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris is indicative of war or official acts upstream.
Um. Let's see. Here we go. But it went by.
It all goes by. That is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by.
He seemed drunk, and we asked him why had he and this junk come down to us?
So from the past upstream friends, he said, the great battle of Granicus has just been won by all the Greeks except the last time, onions and myself.
This is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you babas will hear of as a god.
Um, I think Granicus and Lacedaemonians are some of these terms that immediately bring to mind Cavafy.
Um, and in fact a particular poem, um, in the year 200 BC.
This is in the Maverick audio translation.
Um, it starts with an inscription at a plucked Plutarch um, where after the Battle of Granicus,
which is the first of these three major battles against the Persian Empire,
where Alexander starts to carve off the carve up, uh, carve out prepositions, carve out this, um, huge empire to the East.
Um, but the Lacedaemonians, that is, the Spartans refused to go along with him on this expedition, said he.
He had a kind of, uh, vindictive temper. So whenever he had one of these victories, he would post.
You know, I like this victory is by Alexander. And the Greeks accept the Lacedaemonians.
Um, but that battle is in 334 BC.
So the title is already this kind of Cavafy, an ironic slippage.
It's the year 200 BC, so we're a good hundred years out.
Um, and we also 200 BC.
It's this kind of. Height of Hellenistic, um empire and culture.
So it's looking back into the past where Dickens is kind of looking into the future, and it begins.
We are able to imagine how completely unaffected they must have been at Sparta by that inscription, accepting the Lacedaemonians.
But naturally they were not the Spartans to be led about and to be ordered like valuable servants.
And besides, a Panhellenic expedition without a Spartan king for leader would not have appeared to them of much standing.
Oh, most certainly accepting the Lacedaemonians.
Um. But it ends with, um, there's this new Greek world and great.
And it's spoken in the first person plural, as Alan Dugan's poem is we, the Alexandrians, the Men of Antioch,
the solutions, and the numerous Greeks over above, of Egypt and of Syria, and those in media,
and those in Persia and all the others, with their far reaching dominations, with various influence prudently adapted,
and our Greek common speech into the midst of Bactria, we carried it even to the Indians.
Talk about the lesser dominions. Now, um, so there's this attitude, um, but it may not necessarily be the speak the poets attitude.
It's put into the voice of these people. Um, we have these nice notes which would have been available immediately, um, to, to Alan Dugan.
But there are things about the poem that are essentially Cavafy.
And I think we have that prose beginning, which is almost in the the kind of prose of a historian or a chronicler.
The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris indicative of war or official acts upstream.
That feels very Cavafy and in its tone, and how it sort of steps back.
Um, then we have, I think, something that's very dug in. It all goes by.
That is the thing about the river, um, we have this very, um, eccentric figure that is not central figure.
He's somebody from the battle floating by in a log. Who is the we who are speaking?
Um, are they barbarians in the ad who are just getting news about Granicus?
Ah, is it us here in the future now, because the past is far upstream.
And I thought a bit about even who the speaker is. Um, of the guy in the log.
The great battle of Granicus has just been won by all the Greeks except the last and myself.
At first I thought maybe this is one of the Greek mercenaries who were actually fighting on the Persian side and ended up enslaved.
But I think this is just a regular soldier who doesn't buy into this whole war project, um,
who doesn't think very highly of war and didn't fight very hard and has got out with his life, and he's okay with that.
Um, Dugan writes of World War Two that it was crucial to my own life, or at least to the 3% years of it I spent in the Air Force.
I was a premature anti-fascist, a mature anti-fascist, and now I'm a post mature anti-fascist, as the joke goes.
Um, so there is something very Dugan to ask, I think also about this attitude.
Um, but going through Cavafy and through this historical irony, I think makes it a very powerful anti war war poem.
1961 is actually when, um, the Alan Duggins book came out, um, his first book.
But it was a big year for Cavafy in America. 1961 marked the publication in America of Lawrence Girls Alexandria Quartette,
and the publication of Ray devons translation of The Complete Poems of Cavafy, with an introduction by W.H. Auden.
Ray Delvin is a fascinating figure in her own right.
A native Greek speaker, she was born Oromia youth in Previn's, uh in 1904, and the Ottoman Empire came to the U.S. as a child in 1909,
and has written books and plays about the Romanian Jews, um, whom she went and visited and um learned a lot about.
Um, and one of the reasons this is so important is that population was essentially completely wiped out, um, by the Nazis.
Um, in World War Two, you and the Romani Jews had been, um, in Greece since the time of Nero.
And there are separate, um, cultural strands to the Sephardic Jews that were in Thessaloniki.
Um, but Auden's introduction might be just as important as the translation.
Um, and it is a very important essay on translation in its own right.
It presented an essential conundrum about Cavalli's work that poetry could be found in translation, he writes,
ever since I was first introduced to his poetry over 30 years ago, Cavafy has remained an influence on my own writing.
That is to say, I can think of poems plural, which, if Cavafy were unknown to me,
I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all.
Yet I do not know a word of modern Greek, so that my only access to graphics poetry has been through English and French translations.
This perplexes, and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry.
I have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be translated into another tongue, but poetry cannot.
But if it is possible to be influenced by work which one can read only in translation, this belief must be qualified.
So what is it in Cavafy poem that survives translations and excites something I can only call it most inadequately a tone of voice, a personal speech.
I have read translations made by different hands, but every one of them was recognisable as a poem by Cavafy.
Reading any poem of his. I feel this reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.
Um, a unique tone of voice, he adds, cannot be described.
It can only be imitated, that is to say, either parodied or quoted.
This, I think, is the most obvious poem that Auden must be talking about Atlantis.
Um, it was written, um, in 1940, after he had moved to United States.
Uh, and it is in some ways a meditation on the dream of America.
Uh, and it is very much based on Ithaca.
On the one hand, it has it's in syllabus, although I think there are points where the numbers don't add up.
And maybe he made some adjustments. You know, later on I won't read the whole thing cause it's quite long,
but I'll read a few of these stanzas being set on the idea of getting to Atlantis.
You have discovered, of course, only the Ship of Fools is making the voyage this year, as gales of abnormal force are predicted,
and that you must therefore be ready to behave absurdly enough to pass for one of the boys at least appearing to love hard liquor,
horseplay and noise, should storms as may well happen.
Drive you to anchor a week in some old harbour city of Ionia, then speak with her witty scholars,
men who have proved there cannot be such a place as Atlantis learn their logic, but notice how its subtlety betrays their enormous, simple grief.
Thus, they shall teach you the ways to doubt that you may believe.
If later you run aground among the headlands of Thrace, where, with torches all night long and naked barbaric race leaps,
frenzied lead to the sound of conk and dissonant gong on that stony savage shore.
Strip off your clothes and dance, for unless you are capable of forgetting completely about Atlantis, you will never finish your journey.
Um. Oh. Oh. We'll skip.
I've kind of, uh, moved one of the things around.
Um, again, should you come to gay Carthage or Corinth, take part in their endless gaiety.
And if in some bar a tart as she strokes your hair should say, this is Atlantis, dearie.
Listen with attentiveness to her life story.
Unless you become acquainted now with each refuge that tries to counterfeit Atlantis, how will you recognise the true kind of, um.
Got the stanzas in the wrong order. Um. So some of this is very Cavafy and very Ithaca.
Um, there is that didactic second person singular that might also be self-reflexive.
You know, the poet speaking to himself. Um, there's a little bit of that prosaic language, um, as gales of abnormal force are predicted.
For instance, um, should storms as may well happen, that prose block that becomes part of the verse.
There's also stuff that is totally odd and not Cavafy at all.
Um, especially, I think the campiness of the Carthage or Corinth take part in their endless gaiety.
And if in some bar a tart as she strokes your hair should say, this is Atlantis, dearie.
That could not be in coffee. Um. In the 1960s, Edmund Keeley was writing about Cavafy, an influence on American poets.
So even then, and got this response from Auden back about Atlantis.
Quote, If I'd known Cavafy would become as famous as he's becoming, I wouldn't have published the poem at all.
Um, what other poems might Auden be referring to when he says poems looking over them?
I wonder if the fall of Rome, or even the Shield of Achilles,
which both contain slippage between ancient history or myth on the one hand, and contemporary doom for a moment on the other,
the Unknown Citizen has something of the flatness of tone and mythology making of waiting for Their barbarians, as does epitaph on a tyrant.
Indeed, the opening of the Mosaic Bazaar, with its prose thinness and elevated inverted syntax, feels Cavafy in as well about suffering.
They were never wrong. The Old Masters considered it translated into Greek petty, pithy, mutters Potter.
Then it kind of us in a pie, the rascally.
It sounds very Cavafy. Um, so Atlantis is just one of a whole subgenre of Cavafy imitations that are versions of Ithaca.
Um, here is another one.
This is a quite long poem, and I've only kind of given you a sample of it, um, by the Polish poet, um, Adam Zagar, Jet ski, who died in 2021.
He was a major figure in the generation of 19, um, 68, of 68, rather, um, so he was born in.
And I'm not going to pronounce this correctly. I should have found someone to help me.
Lvov. Um, but they're. His family was expelled after World War two, and now this is living in Ukraine.
Um, so it's a city like Ithaca, but it's a city to which he.
From which he is exiled and to which he cannot return, partly because the name of the city has changed.
So there is no way to go back to this city, to go to Verve.
Which station for verve, if not in a dream at dawn?
When do gleams on a suitcase? When express trains and bullet trains are being born.
To leave in haste for love, night or day in September or in March?
That kind of options are very Cavafy and but only if the above exists, if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just in my new passport.
That also feels like a very Cavafy and move. Um, the ending though, it goes somewhere else.
And um, I think maybe also sheds light a little bit on to give off his poem.
Um. And the cathedral trembled.
People bade goodbye without handkerchiefs. No tears.
Such a dry mouth. I won't see you anymore.
So much death awaits you. Why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew?
And now in a hurry. Just past always each day.
And go breathless. Go to live. After all it exists.
Quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere.
There are lots of languages that there have been Ithaca poems and translations and versions.
Um, Robert Crawford had a version of Cavafy poems, um, in his book Testament um, from Greek after Cavafy,
and they are in Scots and I I'm sorry to inflict this on you in my pronunciations,
but I will do the best that I can just to at least get you the beginning and the end.
And I like this just called home so we don't even have to have a name for the place, you know?
So we don't even need Ithaca. It's now him as you start for him, take tent the long road back.
Uh, Marvel's, uh, Whig Mallory's Margaret Thatcher.
Sorry being butcher Cumberland. Do not fear them.
You'll never bump into trash like yarn as long as you keep a good start.
As long as a really good kerfuffle fires up your body and soul.
Margaret Thatcher Sarnie being butcher Cumberland, you'll never meet them if you do not cart them along in your own soul.
If your soul does not cast them up to you to greet the, um.
So obviously he's taking the Lister goatee.
Ian's the Cyclops and, um, angry Poseidon and turn them into Margaret Thatcher.
Sorry. Been butcher Cumberland. Um, you know, this is not my poem.
I'm not making a statement myself. Um, although there is something kind of interesting in the Lister gonads, of course,
where this gigantic people that Odysseus, um, and his men met who sacrificed visitors to a gigantic cannibal queen.
Um, the end is moving, though, even though there's humour in here.
Um, I keep your name in mind. Hams. What's your for? But dinner.
Hurry, mind and take your time. See, I see that you're chuckled.
By the time you're back. It was your home that gives you the long road.
Without home can you narrow? Started out and now your home has nothing left to give you.
Um. So I think that actually works quite well.
Um, you might think there is no obvious.
Source for Cavafy, Ithaca, but he does have a source in his own poems.
Um, so this is about 15 years before he writes Ithaca.
It's one of the hidden poems. So he didn't repudiate it, but nor did he publish it.
Second Odyssey here he namechecks Dante and Tennyson as sources, um, for a kind of different version of Odysseus's journey, the grand second Odyssey.
Grander than the first. But no homer, no hexameter.
His father's roof was too small. His father's city was too small.
All of Ithaca was too small. The affection of Telemachus, the faith, the Penelope, the age of his father, his old friends.
And you'll see that that repeats also later the affection of Telemachus, the faith of Penelope, the age of his father.
Just as we have the last or gone aeons. Um.
And we have the Cyclops and angry Poseidon. There is this triad that gets repeated exactly in that very plain Cavafy and repetition.
Um, he talks about a nostalgia for travels, mornings when arriving in a new port for the first time.
What is happy? When Cavafy goes to essentially rewrite this poem.
Um, first off, he casts it in the second person and he changes it.
This poem is clearly based on Tennyson's idea of Ulysses on Dante, who did not know, um, the story, um, of Homer's Odysseus,
but instead has Odysseus or Ulysses with all of his crew, so they haven't died, set out to the West on new adventures.
Somehow, though, Cavafy kind of combines these into it again.
I would suggest also, and I'm not the only one to suggest it, um, that he was very familiar with French poetry and this famous double a sonnet,
which is also important to poets like George to Paris, plays a part.
Um, the idea that the journey is the thing.
Happy is the one who's made this marvellous journey, who has received his full of wisdom from travelling the world and comes back to their home,
which is but a poor home, but, you know, home sweet home.
So in a certain way, I feel that we are actually triangulating among Dante, um, uh, Tennyson and Du to come up with Ithaca.
Um, I probably won't go too far into the days of poems.
Um, these are the hidden poems, um, where he is talking about Frank, frankly,
about homosexual experience as odd and says as a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest.
He neither bold realises nor glamorises, nor giggles.
Um, but they are always set in the past, the days of poems, and he has at least a half dozen of them strike me as a new genre of lyric poem.
A lyric poem is often in the present or in the perfect past, but the days of poems are free, quantitative and earnest.
Where can we live? But in days there are days when, you know certain people go to certain places, do certain things.
It is your life. Then one day it is over and those days recede into the irretrievable past.
Unless you are the poet necromancer and can call them back to life.
Um, James Marrow, who died 30 years ago, um, this year, uh, very important American poet, uh, poet,
also of the gay experience, a poet of exquisite technique, um, and who lived in Athens and knew Greek.
He translated 3 or 4 poems of Cavafy. Each of them is a gem.
I have learned things from Merrill's translations about the Greek days of 1908.
That year, he found himself without a job. Accordingly, he lived by playing cards and backgammon and the occasional loan.
A position had been offered in a small stationers at £3 a month, but he turned it down unhesitatingly.
It wouldn't do. That was no wage at all for a sufficiently literate young man of 25.
2 or 3 shillings a day won't hit one hit or miss.
What good cards and backgammon earned the boy at his kind of working class cafe?
However quick his play, however slow his picked opponents.
Worst of all, though, were the loans rarely a whole crowd, usually half.
Sometimes he had to settle for a shilling, but sometimes for a week or more, set free from the gas leanness of staying up all night.
He'd cool off with a swim by morning, light his clothes by then were in a dreadful state.
He had the one same suit to wear, the one of much discoloured cinnamon.
Uh, days of summer days of 1988.
Excluded from your vision tastefully. Was that cinnamon discoloured suit your vision preserved him.
And the very act of casting it off. Throwing it all behind him.
The unfit clothes the men did under clothing.
Naked he stood impeccably fair, a marvel his hair and combed, uplifted,
his limbs tanned lightly from those mornings, naked at the baths and at the seaside.
This poem was actually written in 1932, um, at the very end of Cavalli's life.
So it's looking back quite a long time to 1908 and this summer.
Um, this is a poem I've read in lots of translations and in Greek,
and only really through Merrill's translation did I notice that there was some irregular rhyming in the poem,
which I think you could hear when I was reading it. Um, it starts though, uh, really kind of picking up at the moment where the young man is free,
but sometimes for a week or more, set free from the gasolina of staying up all night.
He'd cool off with a swim by morning, light his clothes by then were in a dreadful state.
He had the one same suit to wear. The one of much discoloured cinnamon, uh, days of summer.
Days of 1908. Um, there's this brief bit where it almost goes into song, um, where you can really hear those chimes.
Um, and also you have this sense of, you know, Cavafy is stingy with figurative language and he's stingy with metaphor,
and therefore a detail comes to serve, um, as a metaphor or simile.
And that detail is this cinnamon discoloured suit.
Um, this really ugly colour. I can kind of see it kind of reddish.
Yellowish. An inappropriate colour for a seat. Um, sag frog ugly translates this as faded light brown suit.
Kelly Sherrod as faded cinnamon brown suit.
Ray Donovan has faded cinnamon coloured suit.
Um, marrow, who is, uh, you know, a excellent poem himself.
Poet himself, I think kind of hits on on something that works very well.
Um, not faded, but discoloured. Discoloured cinnamon in Greek.
It's kind of. Yeah. So, um, Greek is canela is cinnamon, and canela is a colour word made from cinnamon.
Um, so cinnamon as a colour word. The cinnamon discoloured suit of much discoloured cinnamon.
He even gets that very slight variation that Cavafy has.
And I think the cinnamon, you know, not having it be light brown, for instance,
is very important because it also I think we can't help but import a kind of odour or aroma.
Um, perhaps there's a kind of body odour or spiciness to this suit, this one suit that this poor young man wears.
Um, or maybe even, you know, the odours of food, cooking.
Um, but it also then I think, um, contrasts quite sharply with the freshness of the sea air.
The body that's been swimming. Um. And the air of the sea.
Um, so that is one of the days of poems.
Merrill does write his own days of poems. Naturally. Days of 1964 is one of them.
Um, this is a manuscript, and that is an image of his house.
Um, for gay poets. American poets. During the Aids crisis in the 1980s, of course,
Cavafy and his frank and unapologetic homoeroticism would become a touchstone, mostly this time in Kelly and Share.
It's 1975, um, translations, with the excellent notes by survivors Mark Doty, who was born in 1953.
Um, an important poet of gay experience. His third book of poetry was titled My Alexandria.
So it's entirely interacting with Cavafy.
Um, it's a book of grief and nostalgia and loss.
In 1989, um, Dottie's partner, Walter Wally Roberts, tested positive for HIV, and he.
I think he died before this book came out. This is a quite long poem, and I invite you to go look it up.
I think it's too long for us to look at tonight.
It is about Mark Doherty's very first, um, sexual encounter, um, uh, which is an anonymous pick up at a gay bar.
Um, but it becomes very him, for one thing, the the anonymous pick up is a sculpture that is just such a Cavafy and detail.
Of course it would be a sculptor. You see the slippage here days of 1981, but this is coming out in 1993.
So that's a very important, um, essential element to the days of poem.
This poem is much more even Cavafy. And this is from a book earlier, The Death of Continuous.
It's a gorgeous poem. Um, I invite you to check it out.
Um. Marilyn Hacker, American poet. Um, born, I think, in 1945.
Here we have a days of 1994. Alexandrians.
Um, this about the end of the 20th century. And old friends who are perhaps dying.
Um, so, again, it just becomes a whole genre of poems.
Um, I have been thinking a lot about what the ironies of Cavafy offer.
To poets and particularly. American poets are not okay right now.
We are not fine. Um, I have been posting almost daily on social media.
Why isn't anything going on in the Senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Um. And I don't know that American poetry is currently up to the task of confronting the moment that we're having.
I think a lot of American poems that deal with current events or history, um, tend to be preaching to the choir, um, which is the opposite of irony.
And, um, you know, perhaps do that kind of sentimental sentimentality of virtue signalling.
Um, but perhaps Cavafy irony will give us a way forward.
Certainly. I read this poem very differently right now in a large Greek colony, 200 BC.
Again, 200 BC will be this kind of sweet spot of, uh, the Hellenistic empires.
Um, there's the vagueness of in a large Greek colony.
This could be any Greek colony. This could be your Greek colony.
That the affairs in the colony are not going well.
Not the slightest doubt remains. And though somehow or other we are moving along.
Perhaps, as many believe, the time has come to bring in a political reformer.
But the obstacle and the difficulty is that these reformers make a great issue out of everything.
A blessing it would be, if nobody ever needed them. They examine and inquire about the slightest little thing,
and they set their mind immediately on radical reforms, demanding that these be executed without delay.
They also have an inclination towards sacrifices. Give up that possession of yours.
Your control over it is precarious. It is precisely such possessions that are detrimental to the colonies.
Give up this revenue and that other similar one and this third.
As a natural consequence, they are indeed substantial. But what can you do?
They create for you a harmful liability. And as they continue with their investigation, they find more and more redundant things.
And they ask for these for their suspension things, however, that one cannot readily relinquish.
And when in good times they complete their assignment,
and having specified and reduced everything down to the last detail, they depart, taking away their rightful wages.
Then let us see what else is left after such surgical dexterity.
Well, possibly the times may not as yet be ripe.
Let's not be hasty. Rashness is a hazardous thing.
Untimely measures. Foster regrets. To be sure, there is unfortunately, a lot that's out of place in the colony.
But is there anything human devoid of imperfection and.
Well, one way or another, we are moving along.
This is the latest book by Scott Cairns. It came out in 2024.
Um, the Democratic State, I think, is partly this poem that we've just read and a little bit, maybe waiting for the barbarians.
Um, the Democratic this book correspondence with my Greeks is all poems responding either to Cavafy or to other Greek poets living and dead.
The the democratic state after Konstantinos gadhafi's.
That things in the Democratic state are not as they should be, is without question.
And while despite the plethora of numbskulls and dipshits, the roads continue to be paved, the bridges in turn replaced or refurbished,
and certain of the numbskulls and dipshits have made their way to court and thereafter to jail.
One cannot help but think that things will not get better any time soon.
The catch remains an expansion of ill will that threatens to replace our long
evolving system of laws with the sudden whims of numbskulls and dipshits.
The senators continue to attempt redress of things that are not as they should be.
This much is mildly reassuring, but the outcome remains uncertain.
Have I mentioned the legion of Numbskulls and dipshits?
Have I also made note of their intransigence and wilful ignorance?
Well, I offer that note for now. For your consideration, certainly, and with chagrin felt by all safe.
Perhaps the numbskulls and the dipshits, much in the democratic state, has succumbed to manifest absurdity, regardless if without much hope or cheer.
We do proceed. Um, anyway, I'm not sure if we have arrived at the end of our journey knowing what these articles mean.
I hope we have enjoyed the journey itself. I think one of the things that I hope we realise is that Ithaca and Ithaca are everywhere.
Ithaca so ingrained that it is entered the ear of the popular subconscious.
I was recently watching television when a Cunard ad came up for cruises on Cunard.
Um, in a dramatic reading by Alan Watts.
I wonder. I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream.
It says as the cruise ship is going to fabulous places.
Um, Egypt and Phoenician trading places and all.
You would, I suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes love affairs, banquets, wonderful journeys.
And after that, for some, after you've done that for some time, you'd forget that you were dreaming.
Um, but the one thing I will say is Cunard does not sail to Ithaca.
I you.