1 00:00:01,110 --> 00:00:05,300 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So if you haven't. 2 00:00:14,230 --> 00:00:21,760 Here it is, Kelly Spera. As you set out for Ithaca. 3 00:00:23,080 --> 00:00:27,399 Hope your road is a long one. Full of adventures. 4 00:00:27,400 --> 00:00:30,820 Full of discovery. Latest Argonian. 5 00:00:30,820 --> 00:00:35,380 Cyclops. Angry Poseidon. Don't be afraid of them. 6 00:00:36,010 --> 00:00:41,740 You'll never find things like that on your way. As long as you keep your thoughts raised high. 7 00:00:42,250 --> 00:00:48,729 As long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body likes Oregonians. 8 00:00:48,730 --> 00:00:57,220 Cyclops. Wild. Poseidon. You won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul. 9 00:00:57,730 --> 00:01:01,300 Unless your soul sets them up in front of you. 10 00:01:03,140 --> 00:01:15,590 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. 11 00:01:16,550 --> 00:01:21,410 May you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things. 12 00:01:21,920 --> 00:01:24,980 Mother of pearl and coral. 13 00:01:25,460 --> 00:01:30,980 Amber and ebony. Sensual perfume of every kind. 14 00:01:31,340 --> 00:01:34,820 As many sensual perfumes as you can. 15 00:01:35,670 --> 00:01:42,720 And many. May you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. 16 00:01:43,910 --> 00:01:50,420 Keep Ithaca always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. 17 00:01:51,080 --> 00:01:55,790 But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years. 18 00:01:55,790 --> 00:02:01,640 So you're old by the time you reach the island. Well, see, with all you've gained on the way. 19 00:02:02,090 --> 00:02:09,150 Not expecting Ithaca to make you rich. Ithaca gave you the marvellous journey. 20 00:02:09,900 --> 00:02:15,960 Without her, you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. 21 00:02:16,770 --> 00:02:21,390 And if you find her, poor Ithaca won't have fooled you. 22 00:02:21,780 --> 00:02:26,700 Wise as you will have become so full of experience. 23 00:02:27,030 --> 00:02:32,280 You'll have understood by then what these Ithaca's mean. 24 00:02:35,760 --> 00:02:39,870 This is one of the most famous modern poems in the world, 25 00:02:40,380 --> 00:02:52,320 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, 26 00:02:52,320 --> 00:02:55,470 this kind of popularity seems counterintuitive. 27 00:02:56,250 --> 00:03:01,980 Much of its fame comes from its being read at Jackie Onassis funeral in 1994, 28 00:03:02,400 --> 00:03:08,550 and subsequent subsequently published in this translation in The New York Times. 29 00:03:09,180 --> 00:03:17,280 Um, Mike Keeley, um, Edmund Keeley, the translator, um, says there's a little bit of a feedback, something going on with the microphone. 30 00:03:17,550 --> 00:03:23,320 Um said that, um, after this came out in the New York Times, um, their translation, 31 00:03:23,340 --> 00:03:28,710 the Kelly and Sherrard Cavafy translation sold hundreds and hundreds a week at that point. 32 00:03:28,980 --> 00:03:34,140 Um, because of that popularity, or, as we say in the poetry world, in the big three figures. 33 00:03:37,540 --> 00:03:44,260 It is as much of Cavalli's poetry at once crystal clear and elusive, evasive. 34 00:03:44,620 --> 00:03:54,970 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, 35 00:03:55,420 --> 00:04:00,310 has become one of the most important influences in Anglophone literature? 36 00:04:02,050 --> 00:04:12,550 Constantine Cavafy had, of course, never been to Ithaca. Cavafy was born on the 29th of April by the old Julian calendar in 1863, 37 00:04:12,550 --> 00:04:19,270 in Alexandria, Ottoman Egypt, and died on the 29th of April by the new calendar. 38 00:04:19,480 --> 00:04:30,309 In 1933, in Alexandria, in the Kingdom of Egypt, there is something essentially Cavafy, and in the layers of historical irony, 39 00:04:30,310 --> 00:04:39,280 like sheets of graphite that slip between these dates and places, which are also the same date and the same place. 40 00:04:40,770 --> 00:04:42,989 As Peter MacRitchie has pointed out. 41 00:04:42,990 --> 00:04:50,910 And I'd like to dedicate this talk to Peter Makris and to Mike Keeley, who both left us relatively recently and too soon. 42 00:04:51,780 --> 00:04:58,200 Um, that even coffee's name suggests an unlikely fusion of worlds, times and places. 43 00:04:58,860 --> 00:05:09,540 Constantine, um, being an emperor of Byzantium and Cavafy from the Arabic Turkish Cavafy meaning a maker of cheap shoes. 44 00:05:11,380 --> 00:05:20,140 The poems for which he is known, particularly the 154 canonical poems, were written in his own brand of the Greek vernacular, 45 00:05:20,140 --> 00:05:25,060 a moderate demotic which permitted archaic and purist forms in the mix. 46 00:05:25,540 --> 00:05:30,220 Maybe 154 should be a poetic unit. 47 00:05:30,790 --> 00:05:40,240 A poet's growth. If a baker's dozen is a dozen plus one, a poet's gross would be 144 plus ten. 48 00:05:40,990 --> 00:05:45,370 It is the number of Cavalli's canonical poems and of Shakespeare's sonnets. 49 00:05:45,550 --> 00:05:54,070 Just putting it out there. In addition to the canonical poems, there are the hidden poems, the repudiated poems, and the Unfinished Poems. 50 00:05:54,070 --> 00:05:58,390 But we will mostly be dealing with canonical poems today, with one small exception. 51 00:06:00,220 --> 00:06:07,000 Aside from ten essential years, childhood years spent in England, in Liverpool and in London. 52 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:11,380 And I kind of wonder if there's a Cavafy plaque in Liverpool that would be good to know. 53 00:06:11,890 --> 00:06:18,460 Um, and visits to Paris and to Athens. He lived principally in Alexandria with a bit of time in Constantinople. 54 00:06:18,760 --> 00:06:24,160 Crossroads cities and cosmopolitan ports of the Ottoman Empire, straddling East and West. 55 00:06:24,850 --> 00:06:28,120 As he never published a commercial volume of poems in his lifetime. 56 00:06:28,660 --> 00:06:37,570 Um. Instead, he collected fascicles of poems on a table in a room that, um, friends called the Book bindery of his apartment, 57 00:06:37,990 --> 00:06:45,280 pamphlets that he would distribute to friends and admirers, and sometimes retrieve later for corrections and revision. 58 00:06:46,330 --> 00:06:53,320 This is indicative of poetic ambition rather than its absence, as he would write in 1906, in English. 59 00:06:54,100 --> 00:07:01,150 By postponing and postponing to publish what a gain I have had, this might be some wise advice for poets. 60 00:07:01,870 --> 00:07:05,130 Um. Oh, those poems written between 19 and 22. 61 00:07:05,140 --> 00:07:12,520 What wretched trash! When he had finished his poem in the month of Isaiah in the spring of 1917, 62 00:07:12,820 --> 00:07:18,760 and uh editor of uh literary journal Stefanos Parga dropped by his house to collect it for publication. 63 00:07:19,390 --> 00:07:25,240 Argus found the poet restless and jittery, pacing up and down in the small living room and the corridor, 64 00:07:25,300 --> 00:07:30,160 with the manuscript projecting from his pocket and his hands locked behind his back. 65 00:07:30,460 --> 00:07:36,820 Take it, dear man, this masterpiece! Cavafy reportedly exclaimed as he handed him the manuscript. 66 00:07:37,030 --> 00:07:42,730 Take it, for it is burning my hands! Cavafy understood his own importance. 67 00:07:44,110 --> 00:07:49,929 But it is hard to think of another figure as eccentric to modern Western literature 68 00:07:49,930 --> 00:07:54,700 who had become so centrally influential and not to Western literature only. 69 00:07:54,700 --> 00:08:02,680 But I think basically all poetry is the only remotely comparable figure I can think of is Emily Dickinson. 70 00:08:06,530 --> 00:08:11,569 Alexandria might not sound. It might sound glamorous and exotic to us. 71 00:08:11,570 --> 00:08:15,140 Partly, I suppose, due to Covid, but it was not so incorrect this time. 72 00:08:15,770 --> 00:08:22,610 Um, as E.M. Forster wrote of Alexandria, Forster essentially discovers Cavafy for the English speaking world. 73 00:08:23,900 --> 00:08:31,760 Modern Alexandria is scarcely a city of the soul, founded upon cotton with the concurrence of onions and eggs. 74 00:08:32,360 --> 00:08:35,360 Ill built, ill planned, ill drained. 75 00:08:35,720 --> 00:08:40,340 Many hard things can be set against it, and most are said by its inhabitants. 76 00:08:41,420 --> 00:08:46,219 Forster's famous description of Cavafy follows immediately after this, 77 00:08:46,220 --> 00:08:51,410 and it's often quoted in a single phrase, but I think it's worth looking at the director's cut. 78 00:08:52,310 --> 00:09:03,020 They, the Alexandrian inhabitants, turn and see a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe. 79 00:09:03,500 --> 00:09:07,640 His arms are extended. Possibly. Oh, Cavafy. 80 00:09:07,970 --> 00:09:15,080 And then it goes into it almost sounds like the narrative voiceover of a 1970s Disney documentary. 81 00:09:15,500 --> 00:09:21,980 Yes, it is Mr. Cavafy, and he is going either from his flat to the office or from his office to the flat. 82 00:09:22,640 --> 00:09:26,960 If the former, he vanishes when seen with a slight gesture of despair. 83 00:09:27,470 --> 00:09:31,070 If the latter, he may be prevailed upon to begin a sentence. 84 00:09:31,400 --> 00:09:37,340 An immense, complicated, yet shapely sentence, full of parentheses that never get mixed, 85 00:09:37,580 --> 00:09:43,820 and then reservations that really do reserve a sentence that moves with logic to its foreseen end, 86 00:09:44,150 --> 00:09:49,280 yet to an end that is always more vivid and thrilling than one foresaw. 87 00:09:50,420 --> 00:09:58,550 This sentence deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Komnenos in 1996, or with olives, 88 00:09:58,790 --> 00:10:07,030 their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends or George Eliot, or the dialects of the interior of Asia minor. 89 00:10:07,040 --> 00:10:14,990 It is delivered with equal ease in Greek, English or French, and despite its intellectual richness and human outlook, 90 00:10:15,350 --> 00:10:23,750 despite the matured charity of its judgements, one feels that it too stands at a slight angle to the universe. 91 00:10:24,200 --> 00:10:35,760 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. 92 00:10:36,920 --> 00:10:44,510 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. 93 00:10:45,020 --> 00:10:54,890 Um, but even to the Greek ear, there is a flatness took of the Greek Nobel laureate George Spheeris in May of 1941, 94 00:10:55,520 --> 00:11:04,760 arriving in Egypt with the Greek government in exile, Athens having fallen under Nazi occupation the month previous and in April. 95 00:11:05,970 --> 00:11:11,670 Had a sudden revelation about Cavalli's style. He'd had kind of trouble coming to grips with Cavafy. 96 00:11:11,940 --> 00:11:16,649 But seeing Egypt, he suddenly felt he understood the style of Cavafy. 97 00:11:16,650 --> 00:11:17,640 Egypt, he says. 98 00:11:18,060 --> 00:11:29,130 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. 99 00:11:29,580 --> 00:11:32,610 Yellow sea. The sea of Proteus. 100 00:11:33,240 --> 00:11:38,160 I meditate on Cavafy as I observe this low land. 101 00:11:38,760 --> 00:11:44,280 So is his poetry, prosaic, like the boundless plain before us? 102 00:11:44,610 --> 00:11:48,320 It doesn't go up and down it walks. 103 00:11:48,330 --> 00:11:52,740 And in Greek prose also is basically the same word for pedestrian. 104 00:11:53,130 --> 00:11:57,750 It walks. I understand it better now. And I honour what he did. 105 00:11:58,840 --> 00:12:08,110 Um, I think this prosaic ness of Cavafy is one of several paradoxes about his style that make him, um, unique. 106 00:12:08,680 --> 00:12:14,050 So there's an Alexandrian flatness of affect as intensity. 107 00:12:14,800 --> 00:12:18,280 There is prose as the building block of verse. 108 00:12:19,120 --> 00:12:23,530 There is stinginess with metaphor as a symbolic language. 109 00:12:24,040 --> 00:12:28,150 There is honouring failure as being as noble as victory. 110 00:12:28,540 --> 00:12:31,900 Ephemeral pleasure as eternal in the memory. 111 00:12:32,260 --> 00:12:35,260 Racial mixture as cultural purity. 112 00:12:35,680 --> 00:12:40,840 Edges of empire as its focal essence by standards. 113 00:12:40,990 --> 00:12:45,550 Bystanders of history as its central experiencers. 114 00:12:46,150 --> 00:12:56,440 Post classical Hellenism as the essence of bleakness, treating the ancient as contemporary and the contemporary as ancient Faulkner's. 115 00:12:56,440 --> 00:13:05,680 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. 116 00:13:10,040 --> 00:13:18,800 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, 117 00:13:19,130 --> 00:13:23,240 um, where he says, I am from Constantinople by descent. But I was born in Alexandria. 118 00:13:23,630 --> 00:13:26,870 I left very young and spent much of my childhood in England. 119 00:13:27,230 --> 00:13:30,230 Um, I have also lived in France during my adolescence. 120 00:13:30,230 --> 00:13:34,070 I lived in Constantinople, and it's been many years since I last visited Greece. 121 00:13:34,430 --> 00:13:39,830 My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. 122 00:13:40,100 --> 00:13:45,860 I know English, French and a little Italian. Probably knows a lot of Italian, but we'll leave it at that. 123 00:13:46,550 --> 00:13:56,570 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. 124 00:13:57,290 --> 00:14:05,390 Um, George Safaris, again in discussing Cavalli's humour and humour, might not be something that you associate with Cavafy, 125 00:14:05,690 --> 00:14:10,370 but according to George Safaris, um, Cavalli's humour is very English. 126 00:14:10,670 --> 00:14:15,440 He links it to the nonsense aesthetic of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. 127 00:14:16,250 --> 00:14:21,290 Um, so Ferriss writes that Cavafy spoke no language but English until the age of nine. 128 00:14:21,410 --> 00:14:25,580 That seems very unlikely to me, and I'm not sure where Severus comes up with that. 129 00:14:25,580 --> 00:14:34,340 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. 130 00:14:34,940 --> 00:14:40,370 His biographer, Robert Little writes that English was Cavalli's second language and that, 131 00:14:40,550 --> 00:14:45,230 but it was the language most commonly used in his family and with many of his friends. 132 00:14:46,070 --> 00:14:51,230 Um, I will not say that Cavafy is an English poet writing in Greek. 133 00:14:52,100 --> 00:14:58,170 That would be facetious and wrong. I withdraw it, and yet I think it is also not without a kernel of truth. 134 00:14:58,190 --> 00:15:04,040 He is as influenced by Gibbon as by Plutarch, and by Browning as much as by Homer. 135 00:15:04,220 --> 00:15:12,590 We will find that his Odysseus is a Ulysses, fetched up as much from Dante and Tennyson as from the Odyssey. 136 00:15:13,580 --> 00:15:23,750 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? 137 00:15:24,110 --> 00:15:30,110 Um, Maria z. Barco. Um, we have here Maria Bartoli, Stillman and Anglia. 138 00:15:30,140 --> 00:15:34,990 You know any of these? Um, these were the three Greek graces of the movement. 139 00:15:35,000 --> 00:15:42,540 Famous beauties, independent minded women, muses, models, and all artists and writers in their own right. 140 00:15:42,560 --> 00:15:45,650 They were cousins and family friends to the Cavafy. 141 00:15:45,650 --> 00:15:48,950 So this is, uh, one removed from Cavafy. 142 00:15:50,420 --> 00:15:56,270 At any rate, I think we find as anglophone, um, readers and speakers of English, 143 00:15:56,270 --> 00:16:01,820 a sense of recognition that seems to accompany the history of Cavafy translations into English, 144 00:16:02,120 --> 00:16:08,450 and plays into the extensive responses and invitations written to his work in our own tongue. 145 00:16:08,690 --> 00:16:15,290 There are even categories of imitation that amount to whole new subgenres of lyric poems. 146 00:16:16,640 --> 00:16:23,420 Almost the very first publication of Cavafy, it's actually his second publication, and again by publication. 147 00:16:23,420 --> 00:16:27,740 I'm referring to this kind of self publication, which was not unusual at the time. 148 00:16:28,220 --> 00:16:34,190 Um, the very second poem that he publishes, he publishes in a bilingual edition. 149 00:16:34,910 --> 00:16:47,030 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. 150 00:16:47,450 --> 00:16:52,790 Um, so this poem came out in Greek and in English at the same time. 151 00:16:53,420 --> 00:16:59,510 Um, John Cavafy versions of his brother works work are always worth looking at. 152 00:16:59,990 --> 00:17:10,430 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. 153 00:17:10,970 --> 00:17:19,190 Um, I guess the problem may be that they reflect English verse conventions of the time, so sometimes they strike us as dated. 154 00:17:19,700 --> 00:17:23,930 Um, but they must have had, at least at the beginning, the poets imprimatur. 155 00:17:24,590 --> 00:17:33,680 Um, John was a poet himself, though he chose to write in English, an option that no doubt had been available to Constantine also. 156 00:17:34,310 --> 00:17:39,830 Um, was is one of the poems I like to show people who think of graffiti as a flat, free verse poet. 157 00:17:40,280 --> 00:17:45,829 Um, and he does have meant most of his poems are unnamed, but about 55 of them. 158 00:17:45,830 --> 00:17:51,860 So a pretty big chunk are rhymed, and some of them are intensely rhymed, like this one. 159 00:17:52,340 --> 00:17:57,200 Um, and in these poems, he also does something kind of interesting with Greek, 160 00:17:57,200 --> 00:18:06,620 where he takes what might be considered a kind of flaw or decadence of modern Greek by, uh, raised me in pronouncing classicists. 161 00:18:07,370 --> 00:18:14,320 Um, but he turns it into a flex. So I will get to this poem and just say, uh, no, I turned it off. 162 00:18:14,330 --> 00:18:17,550 What did I do? That's scary. I just. 163 00:18:17,960 --> 00:18:24,660 This is, um, just very briefly, but modern Greek now has five ways to spell the long e sound. 164 00:18:24,690 --> 00:18:32,610 So iota is e eta is e epsilon is e Omicron. 165 00:18:32,610 --> 00:18:39,839 Iota is yes e epsilon iota is e uh. 166 00:18:39,840 --> 00:18:47,550 So um, but Modern Greek retains the spellings um, as if these changes hadn't happened. 167 00:18:47,850 --> 00:19:00,210 So the result is there's actually a treasure trove of puns available in Greek, and homophones of words that have zero etymological relationship. 168 00:19:00,660 --> 00:19:03,990 Um, and Cavafy kind of uses that to his advantage. 169 00:19:04,410 --> 00:19:07,440 Um, I will try to, you know, forgive me. 170 00:19:07,440 --> 00:19:09,810 I will read this in Greek and struggle through it. 171 00:19:10,170 --> 00:19:21,960 Um, so tiki equals hoodies, petty skip seen hoodies, sleeping hoodies and the mega like Epsilon three zero more active sun T-shirt. 172 00:19:22,650 --> 00:19:26,280 Okay. Casio man. Okay, okay. Apple PS1 matura. 173 00:19:26,290 --> 00:19:29,860 It's all alike then. Skiff domain tournament. 174 00:19:30,060 --> 00:19:36,120 Troy FTT vat pragma Tabula x on the com or econ. 175 00:19:36,630 --> 00:19:51,000 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. 176 00:19:51,480 --> 00:19:58,630 Well, um, so I've highlighted the words that rhyme, but they don't just rhyme, it's rhyme riche. 177 00:19:58,710 --> 00:20:01,890 It's a punning rhyme. They are exactly the same sounds. 178 00:20:02,250 --> 00:20:06,660 So though, which is shame turns into a though which is here. 179 00:20:06,930 --> 00:20:12,480 But I think the most critical one is teehee, which is walls turns into fate. 180 00:20:12,900 --> 00:20:16,050 That is something we can't do in English, but we can get the rhymes. 181 00:20:16,290 --> 00:20:22,770 So this is um, John Phase translation, which came out as the same time as this Greek version. 182 00:20:23,340 --> 00:20:26,400 Without reflection, without mercy, without shame. 183 00:20:26,820 --> 00:20:30,510 They built strong walls and high and compassed me about. 184 00:20:31,200 --> 00:20:34,590 And now I sit here and consider and despair. 185 00:20:35,160 --> 00:20:38,340 My brain is worn with meditating on my feet. 186 00:20:39,030 --> 00:20:42,060 I had outside so many things to terminate. 187 00:20:42,690 --> 00:20:46,510 That's an unfortunate line. But others are not so bad. 188 00:20:46,810 --> 00:20:52,120 Oh, why, when they were building, did I not beware? But never a sound of building. 189 00:20:52,120 --> 00:20:57,280 Never an echo came out of the world. Insensibly they shut me out. 190 00:20:57,850 --> 00:21:05,160 He doesn't follow the rhyme scheme. Which in the Cavafy in the original is a, b a b c, d c, d. 191 00:21:05,650 --> 00:21:08,830 Instead he makes a kind of nesting box of rhymes. 192 00:21:08,830 --> 00:21:17,470 But I think that also works to give the idea of being claustrophobic, which is what these intense rhymes are doing in this poem. 193 00:21:17,860 --> 00:21:20,950 And I will look briefly at two other versions of this. 194 00:21:21,400 --> 00:21:31,410 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. 195 00:21:31,420 --> 00:21:36,490 He does get the rhyme sounds. And without pity, without shame, without consideration. 196 00:21:36,850 --> 00:21:39,910 They've built around me enormous towering walls. 197 00:21:40,360 --> 00:21:44,290 And I sit here now in growing desperation. So he's following the rhyme scheme. 198 00:21:44,590 --> 00:21:50,860 This fate consumes my mind. I think of nothing else because I had so many things to do out there. 199 00:21:51,820 --> 00:21:54,940 While they built the walls, why didn't they look out? 200 00:21:55,570 --> 00:21:59,410 But no noise, no sound from the builders. Did I hear there? 201 00:21:59,410 --> 00:22:02,290 There's a little bit of strain trying to get the rhyme at the end of the line. 202 00:22:02,770 --> 00:22:11,140 Um, imperceptibly, they've shut me from the world without, um, that kind of banging shut on the out, I think works quite well. 203 00:22:11,950 --> 00:22:19,149 Um, Tony Barnes stone, um, his sister, Leaky Barnes stone, um, actually did a complete Cavafy translation. 204 00:22:19,150 --> 00:22:23,500 Tony is an American poet. Um, who does some translation as well. 205 00:22:23,500 --> 00:22:24,520 They are half Greek. 206 00:22:25,120 --> 00:22:33,399 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, 207 00:22:33,400 --> 00:22:38,680 and I was like, if only someone could try to get these rhymes in, that would be so cool. 208 00:22:39,040 --> 00:22:43,989 And, um, uh, Tony did do so, so with no compassion, pity, shame. 209 00:22:43,990 --> 00:22:54,100 They wrought these massive walls around me, walls so high I sit here and despair until the rot consumes my thoughts. 210 00:22:54,790 --> 00:23:03,460 How poor my look, how I had wished many things, had many things I wish to do out there when they were building. 211 00:23:03,490 --> 00:23:07,630 How could I not hear? I never heard the builders racket. 212 00:23:07,930 --> 00:23:11,290 Their clangs as they walls me up in here. 213 00:23:11,890 --> 00:23:15,130 Um. So we have the rhyme race here. Rot and rot. 214 00:23:15,490 --> 00:23:19,420 Hi. How I there, there, here, here. 215 00:23:19,420 --> 00:23:25,000 It can't do the trick where walls turns into fate. Um, English doesn't have a vehicle for that. 216 00:23:25,360 --> 00:23:29,860 Um, but I also like that he's got the builders racket, um, that we had in the Greek, 217 00:23:29,860 --> 00:23:37,059 because the Greek is quite noisy there, where you have conductor sounds throughout your throat on the stone. 218 00:23:37,060 --> 00:23:41,470 It's kind of hard to say. Um, so it's nice to have racket there. 219 00:23:42,400 --> 00:23:49,570 Um. So. We have these, um, translations of walls. 220 00:23:49,840 --> 00:23:55,320 Cavafy divided up his poetry into three areas the philosophical or the area of thought. 221 00:23:55,330 --> 00:24:04,210 So walls will belong, I think, to that category, the historical of which we will see a couple, and the hedonistic or sensual. 222 00:24:04,810 --> 00:24:10,420 Um, often a poem sits somewhere in the overlap of a Venn diagram of two or more of these. 223 00:24:10,990 --> 00:24:23,740 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. 224 00:24:23,740 --> 00:24:30,040 I maybe one of you can enlighten me, um, later with an introduction by Rex Warner, 225 00:24:30,040 --> 00:24:35,889 with the Hogarth Press in the UK and in 1952, you in the US with Grove. 226 00:24:35,890 --> 00:24:39,130 It was widely reviewed in all the right places, 227 00:24:40,000 --> 00:24:51,460 probably the most significant American poem to be born under the zodiac sign of Cavafy is this one by Alan Dugan. 228 00:24:51,970 --> 00:24:55,840 Um, Alan Dugan was a poet who was born in 1923. 229 00:24:55,840 --> 00:24:59,620 And Brooklyn. He died in 2003. 230 00:25:00,010 --> 00:25:03,879 Um, he fought in World War two. He served in World War two. 231 00:25:03,880 --> 00:25:09,930 So he's a war poet? Um, he won all the right prizes and was widely anthologised for a while. 232 00:25:09,940 --> 00:25:15,370 I think now he's mostly known for this poem and for his love song, I and thou. 233 00:25:15,400 --> 00:25:18,880 Maybe you'll hear it. Nothing is plumb level or squared. 234 00:25:19,360 --> 00:25:30,120 Um, but this poem recently came up in a Facebook group that I belong to called, um, American Poems of the mid 20th century. 235 00:25:30,130 --> 00:25:33,610 It's, uh, run by the wonderful, um, American poet Sam Gwin. 236 00:25:34,030 --> 00:25:39,160 And, um, as soon as this poem came up for discussion, I said, well, that's got Cavafy all over it. 237 00:25:39,520 --> 00:25:42,520 And it was interesting to me because people said, oh, how so? 238 00:25:43,300 --> 00:25:53,020 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. 239 00:25:53,500 --> 00:25:57,879 We'll see if I can do that, because it's wonderful to hear Alan Dugan reading this poem in his own voice. 240 00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:05,740 He's got this, um, Brooklyn, um, mid-century kind of accent of a sort of American G.I. 241 00:26:05,740 --> 00:26:08,230 That sounds like it's right out of a World War Two movie. 242 00:26:10,830 --> 00:26:21,330 How they named the river lockdown because, as at many a military victory indicative of war or official acts upstream. 243 00:26:22,170 --> 00:26:26,159 But what about it all goes by? That is the thinking, I think. 244 00:26:26,160 --> 00:26:31,610 Other than us soldiers are issuing drunk and we gas. 245 00:26:31,630 --> 00:26:34,780 And why even this junk comes out of us. 246 00:26:34,780 --> 00:26:38,640 So from the past upstream friends, is a. 247 00:26:39,090 --> 00:26:46,350 The great battle of the Granicus has just been won by all of the Greeks except the lesson nobody arms and by sight. 248 00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:53,360 This is a joke between a man named Alexander um and involves a hero. 249 00:26:53,550 --> 00:26:58,740 That's a god. It's wonderful. See if I can now get back to the poem. 250 00:26:58,740 --> 00:27:07,290 Do I need help? Correct. The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris is indicative of war or official acts upstream. 251 00:27:07,590 --> 00:27:12,110 Um. Let's see. Here we go. But it went by. 252 00:27:12,110 --> 00:27:15,499 It all goes by. That is the thing about the river. Then a soldier on a log went by. 253 00:27:15,500 --> 00:27:19,520 He seemed drunk, and we asked him why had he and this junk come down to us? 254 00:27:20,030 --> 00:27:29,269 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. 255 00:27:29,270 --> 00:27:35,060 This is a joke between me and a man named Alexander, whom all of you babas will hear of as a god. 256 00:27:36,020 --> 00:27:44,420 Um, I think Granicus and Lacedaemonians are some of these terms that immediately bring to mind Cavafy. 257 00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:50,690 Um, and in fact a particular poem, um, in the year 200 BC. 258 00:27:50,750 --> 00:27:54,110 This is in the Maverick audio translation. 259 00:27:54,530 --> 00:28:00,290 Um, it starts with an inscription at a plucked Plutarch um, where after the Battle of Granicus, 260 00:28:00,290 --> 00:28:03,950 which is the first of these three major battles against the Persian Empire, 261 00:28:04,280 --> 00:28:14,450 where Alexander starts to carve off the carve up, uh, carve out prepositions, carve out this, um, huge empire to the East. 262 00:28:14,900 --> 00:28:21,110 Um, but the Lacedaemonians, that is, the Spartans refused to go along with him on this expedition, said he. 263 00:28:21,110 --> 00:28:26,719 He had a kind of, uh, vindictive temper. So whenever he had one of these victories, he would post. 264 00:28:26,720 --> 00:28:32,090 You know, I like this victory is by Alexander. And the Greeks accept the Lacedaemonians. 265 00:28:32,780 --> 00:28:37,430 Um, but that battle is in 334 BC. 266 00:28:37,940 --> 00:28:43,550 So the title is already this kind of Cavafy, an ironic slippage. 267 00:28:44,330 --> 00:28:48,920 It's the year 200 BC, so we're a good hundred years out. 268 00:28:49,430 --> 00:28:53,120 Um, and we also 200 BC. 269 00:28:53,240 --> 00:29:00,720 It's this kind of. Height of Hellenistic, um empire and culture. 270 00:29:01,080 --> 00:29:07,920 So it's looking back into the past where Dickens is kind of looking into the future, and it begins. 271 00:29:07,920 --> 00:29:14,790 We are able to imagine how completely unaffected they must have been at Sparta by that inscription, accepting the Lacedaemonians. 272 00:29:15,030 --> 00:29:20,340 But naturally they were not the Spartans to be led about and to be ordered like valuable servants. 273 00:29:20,790 --> 00:29:27,180 And besides, a Panhellenic expedition without a Spartan king for leader would not have appeared to them of much standing. 274 00:29:27,510 --> 00:29:30,660 Oh, most certainly accepting the Lacedaemonians. 275 00:29:31,260 --> 00:29:35,520 Um. But it ends with, um, there's this new Greek world and great. 276 00:29:35,910 --> 00:29:43,020 And it's spoken in the first person plural, as Alan Dugan's poem is we, the Alexandrians, the Men of Antioch, 277 00:29:43,290 --> 00:29:49,499 the solutions, and the numerous Greeks over above, of Egypt and of Syria, and those in media, 278 00:29:49,500 --> 00:29:56,489 and those in Persia and all the others, with their far reaching dominations, with various influence prudently adapted, 279 00:29:56,490 --> 00:30:02,460 and our Greek common speech into the midst of Bactria, we carried it even to the Indians. 280 00:30:02,740 --> 00:30:11,910 Talk about the lesser dominions. Now, um, so there's this attitude, um, but it may not necessarily be the speak the poets attitude. 281 00:30:11,910 --> 00:30:20,730 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. 282 00:30:21,030 --> 00:30:25,620 But there are things about the poem that are essentially Cavafy. 283 00:30:25,620 --> 00:30:34,650 And I think we have that prose beginning, which is almost in the the kind of prose of a historian or a chronicler. 284 00:30:35,100 --> 00:30:43,230 The river brought down dead horses, dead men and military debris indicative of war or official acts upstream. 285 00:30:43,590 --> 00:30:47,850 That feels very Cavafy and in its tone, and how it sort of steps back. 286 00:30:48,450 --> 00:30:51,629 Um, then we have, I think, something that's very dug in. It all goes by. 287 00:30:51,630 --> 00:30:59,370 That is the thing about the river, um, we have this very, um, eccentric figure that is not central figure. 288 00:30:59,370 --> 00:31:04,020 He's somebody from the battle floating by in a log. Who is the we who are speaking? 289 00:31:04,350 --> 00:31:09,990 Um, are they barbarians in the ad who are just getting news about Granicus? 290 00:31:10,350 --> 00:31:15,360 Ah, is it us here in the future now, because the past is far upstream. 291 00:31:15,810 --> 00:31:20,010 And I thought a bit about even who the speaker is. Um, of the guy in the log. 292 00:31:20,370 --> 00:31:25,440 The great battle of Granicus has just been won by all the Greeks except the last and myself. 293 00:31:25,770 --> 00:31:31,860 At first I thought maybe this is one of the Greek mercenaries who were actually fighting on the Persian side and ended up enslaved. 294 00:31:31,860 --> 00:31:39,030 But I think this is just a regular soldier who doesn't buy into this whole war project, um, 295 00:31:39,030 --> 00:31:44,640 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. 296 00:31:45,270 --> 00:31:53,070 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. 297 00:31:53,460 --> 00:32:02,430 I was a premature anti-fascist, a mature anti-fascist, and now I'm a post mature anti-fascist, as the joke goes. 298 00:32:02,820 --> 00:32:07,890 Um, so there is something very Dugan to ask, I think also about this attitude. 299 00:32:08,190 --> 00:32:17,640 Um, but going through Cavafy and through this historical irony, I think makes it a very powerful anti war war poem. 300 00:32:24,950 --> 00:32:32,029 1961 is actually when, um, the Alan Duggins book came out, um, his first book. 301 00:32:32,030 --> 00:32:41,420 But it was a big year for Cavafy in America. 1961 marked the publication in America of Lawrence Girls Alexandria Quartette, 302 00:32:42,020 --> 00:32:50,330 and the publication of Ray devons translation of The Complete Poems of Cavafy, with an introduction by W.H. Auden. 303 00:32:51,320 --> 00:32:55,450 Ray Delvin is a fascinating figure in her own right. 304 00:32:55,460 --> 00:33:05,900 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, 305 00:33:06,320 --> 00:33:13,940 and has written books and plays about the Romanian Jews, um, whom she went and visited and um learned a lot about. 306 00:33:14,270 --> 00:33:22,850 Um, and one of the reasons this is so important is that population was essentially completely wiped out, um, by the Nazis. 307 00:33:22,880 --> 00:33:28,730 Um, in World War Two, you and the Romani Jews had been, um, in Greece since the time of Nero. 308 00:33:28,730 --> 00:33:33,830 And there are separate, um, cultural strands to the Sephardic Jews that were in Thessaloniki. 309 00:33:34,700 --> 00:33:40,609 Um, but Auden's introduction might be just as important as the translation. 310 00:33:40,610 --> 00:33:44,719 Um, and it is a very important essay on translation in its own right. 311 00:33:44,720 --> 00:33:53,390 It presented an essential conundrum about Cavalli's work that poetry could be found in translation, he writes, 312 00:33:54,260 --> 00:34:01,459 ever since I was first introduced to his poetry over 30 years ago, Cavafy has remained an influence on my own writing. 313 00:34:01,460 --> 00:34:07,790 That is to say, I can think of poems plural, which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, 314 00:34:07,790 --> 00:34:11,030 I should have written quite differently, or perhaps not written at all. 315 00:34:11,690 --> 00:34:19,940 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. 316 00:34:20,660 --> 00:34:27,230 This perplexes, and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry. 317 00:34:27,710 --> 00:34:36,920 I have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be translated into another tongue, but poetry cannot. 318 00:34:37,580 --> 00:34:43,760 But if it is possible to be influenced by work which one can read only in translation, this belief must be qualified. 319 00:34:44,330 --> 00:34:53,900 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. 320 00:34:54,320 --> 00:35:00,020 I have read translations made by different hands, but every one of them was recognisable as a poem by Cavafy. 321 00:35:00,470 --> 00:35:05,570 Reading any poem of his. I feel this reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world. 322 00:35:06,020 --> 00:35:09,469 Um, a unique tone of voice, he adds, cannot be described. 323 00:35:09,470 --> 00:35:15,560 It can only be imitated, that is to say, either parodied or quoted. 324 00:35:17,680 --> 00:35:23,530 This, I think, is the most obvious poem that Auden must be talking about Atlantis. 325 00:35:24,160 --> 00:35:29,920 Um, it was written, um, in 1940, after he had moved to United States. 326 00:35:30,430 --> 00:35:35,890 Uh, and it is in some ways a meditation on the dream of America. 327 00:35:36,700 --> 00:35:40,120 Uh, and it is very much based on Ithaca. 328 00:35:40,480 --> 00:35:46,840 On the one hand, it has it's in syllabus, although I think there are points where the numbers don't add up. 329 00:35:46,840 --> 00:35:51,520 And maybe he made some adjustments. You know, later on I won't read the whole thing cause it's quite long, 330 00:35:51,520 --> 00:35:58,360 but I'll read a few of these stanzas being set on the idea of getting to Atlantis. 331 00:35:59,170 --> 00:36:06,280 You have discovered, of course, only the Ship of Fools is making the voyage this year, as gales of abnormal force are predicted, 332 00:36:06,730 --> 00:36:15,040 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, 333 00:36:15,040 --> 00:36:19,930 horseplay and noise, should storms as may well happen. 334 00:36:20,380 --> 00:36:27,250 Drive you to anchor a week in some old harbour city of Ionia, then speak with her witty scholars, 335 00:36:27,460 --> 00:36:38,140 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. 336 00:36:38,650 --> 00:36:42,790 Thus, they shall teach you the ways to doubt that you may believe. 337 00:36:43,480 --> 00:36:51,340 If later you run aground among the headlands of Thrace, where, with torches all night long and naked barbaric race leaps, 338 00:36:51,340 --> 00:36:57,910 frenzied lead to the sound of conk and dissonant gong on that stony savage shore. 339 00:36:58,240 --> 00:37:07,330 Strip off your clothes and dance, for unless you are capable of forgetting completely about Atlantis, you will never finish your journey. 340 00:37:08,540 --> 00:37:11,689 Um. Oh. Oh. We'll skip. 341 00:37:11,690 --> 00:37:15,200 I've kind of, uh, moved one of the things around. 342 00:37:15,590 --> 00:37:20,990 Um, again, should you come to gay Carthage or Corinth, take part in their endless gaiety. 343 00:37:21,260 --> 00:37:26,180 And if in some bar a tart as she strokes your hair should say, this is Atlantis, dearie. 344 00:37:26,510 --> 00:37:28,850 Listen with attentiveness to her life story. 345 00:37:29,150 --> 00:37:37,360 Unless you become acquainted now with each refuge that tries to counterfeit Atlantis, how will you recognise the true kind of, um. 346 00:37:37,610 --> 00:37:43,640 Got the stanzas in the wrong order. Um. So some of this is very Cavafy and very Ithaca. 347 00:37:44,060 --> 00:37:51,590 Um, there is that didactic second person singular that might also be self-reflexive. 348 00:37:51,800 --> 00:38:01,730 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. 349 00:38:01,730 --> 00:38:08,180 For instance, um, should storms as may well happen, that prose block that becomes part of the verse. 350 00:38:08,330 --> 00:38:12,440 There's also stuff that is totally odd and not Cavafy at all. 351 00:38:12,770 --> 00:38:18,770 Um, especially, I think the campiness of the Carthage or Corinth take part in their endless gaiety. 352 00:38:18,770 --> 00:38:23,570 And if in some bar a tart as she strokes your hair should say, this is Atlantis, dearie. 353 00:38:23,780 --> 00:38:32,870 That could not be in coffee. Um. In the 1960s, Edmund Keeley was writing about Cavafy, an influence on American poets. 354 00:38:32,870 --> 00:38:38,540 So even then, and got this response from Auden back about Atlantis. 355 00:38:38,540 --> 00:38:45,560 Quote, If I'd known Cavafy would become as famous as he's becoming, I wouldn't have published the poem at all. 356 00:38:48,720 --> 00:38:53,290 Um, what other poems might Auden be referring to when he says poems looking over them? 357 00:38:53,310 --> 00:38:56,940 I wonder if the fall of Rome, or even the Shield of Achilles, 358 00:38:57,330 --> 00:39:04,890 which both contain slippage between ancient history or myth on the one hand, and contemporary doom for a moment on the other, 359 00:39:05,280 --> 00:39:14,310 the Unknown Citizen has something of the flatness of tone and mythology making of waiting for Their barbarians, as does epitaph on a tyrant. 360 00:39:14,940 --> 00:39:25,739 Indeed, the opening of the Mosaic Bazaar, with its prose thinness and elevated inverted syntax, feels Cavafy in as well about suffering. 361 00:39:25,740 --> 00:39:32,750 They were never wrong. The Old Masters considered it translated into Greek petty, pithy, mutters Potter. 362 00:39:32,760 --> 00:39:36,690 Then it kind of us in a pie, the rascally. 363 00:39:36,990 --> 00:39:45,240 It sounds very Cavafy. Um, so Atlantis is just one of a whole subgenre of Cavafy imitations that are versions of Ithaca. 364 00:39:45,570 --> 00:39:46,740 Um, here is another one. 365 00:39:46,770 --> 00:39:56,700 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. 366 00:39:56,700 --> 00:40:05,879 He was a major figure in the generation of 19, um, 68, of 68, rather, um, so he was born in. 367 00:40:05,880 --> 00:40:09,090 And I'm not going to pronounce this correctly. I should have found someone to help me. 368 00:40:09,090 --> 00:40:17,550 Lvov. Um, but they're. His family was expelled after World War two, and now this is living in Ukraine. 369 00:40:18,360 --> 00:40:23,129 Um, so it's a city like Ithaca, but it's a city to which he. 370 00:40:23,130 --> 00:40:29,100 From which he is exiled and to which he cannot return, partly because the name of the city has changed. 371 00:40:29,280 --> 00:40:34,020 So there is no way to go back to this city, to go to Verve. 372 00:40:34,590 --> 00:40:38,579 Which station for verve, if not in a dream at dawn? 373 00:40:38,580 --> 00:40:43,650 When do gleams on a suitcase? When express trains and bullet trains are being born. 374 00:40:43,920 --> 00:40:49,860 To leave in haste for love, night or day in September or in March? 375 00:40:50,130 --> 00:40:59,430 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. 376 00:40:59,700 --> 00:41:05,519 That also feels like a very Cavafy and move. Um, the ending though, it goes somewhere else. 377 00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:10,350 And um, I think maybe also sheds light a little bit on to give off his poem. 378 00:41:11,160 --> 00:41:14,580 Um. And the cathedral trembled. 379 00:41:14,820 --> 00:41:18,719 People bade goodbye without handkerchiefs. No tears. 380 00:41:18,720 --> 00:41:23,530 Such a dry mouth. I won't see you anymore. 381 00:41:23,550 --> 00:41:29,760 So much death awaits you. Why must every city become Jerusalem and every man a Jew? 382 00:41:30,090 --> 00:41:33,870 And now in a hurry. Just past always each day. 383 00:41:33,870 --> 00:41:38,580 And go breathless. Go to live. After all it exists. 384 00:41:38,910 --> 00:41:43,650 Quiet and pure as a peach. It is everywhere. 385 00:41:47,580 --> 00:41:52,500 There are lots of languages that there have been Ithaca poems and translations and versions. 386 00:41:52,800 --> 00:42:03,060 Um, Robert Crawford had a version of Cavafy poems, um, in his book Testament um, from Greek after Cavafy, 387 00:42:03,060 --> 00:42:08,549 and they are in Scots and I I'm sorry to inflict this on you in my pronunciations, 388 00:42:08,550 --> 00:42:12,450 but I will do the best that I can just to at least get you the beginning and the end. 389 00:42:12,720 --> 00:42:18,270 And I like this just called home so we don't even have to have a name for the place, you know? 390 00:42:18,270 --> 00:42:24,420 So we don't even need Ithaca. It's now him as you start for him, take tent the long road back. 391 00:42:24,900 --> 00:42:29,100 Uh, Marvel's, uh, Whig Mallory's Margaret Thatcher. 392 00:42:29,490 --> 00:42:33,120 Sorry being butcher Cumberland. Do not fear them. 393 00:42:33,540 --> 00:42:38,010 You'll never bump into trash like yarn as long as you keep a good start. 394 00:42:38,310 --> 00:42:42,360 As long as a really good kerfuffle fires up your body and soul. 395 00:42:42,870 --> 00:42:50,130 Margaret Thatcher Sarnie being butcher Cumberland, you'll never meet them if you do not cart them along in your own soul. 396 00:42:50,280 --> 00:42:54,420 If your soul does not cast them up to you to greet the, um. 397 00:42:54,720 --> 00:42:58,070 So obviously he's taking the Lister goatee. 398 00:42:58,080 --> 00:43:03,870 Ian's the Cyclops and, um, angry Poseidon and turn them into Margaret Thatcher. 399 00:43:04,020 --> 00:43:08,040 Sorry. Been butcher Cumberland. Um, you know, this is not my poem. 400 00:43:08,040 --> 00:43:14,459 I'm not making a statement myself. Um, although there is something kind of interesting in the Lister gonads, of course, 401 00:43:14,460 --> 00:43:23,670 where this gigantic people that Odysseus, um, and his men met who sacrificed visitors to a gigantic cannibal queen. 402 00:43:24,330 --> 00:43:28,830 Um, the end is moving, though, even though there's humour in here. 403 00:43:29,430 --> 00:43:32,669 Um, I keep your name in mind. Hams. What's your for? But dinner. 404 00:43:32,670 --> 00:43:36,719 Hurry, mind and take your time. See, I see that you're chuckled. 405 00:43:36,720 --> 00:43:40,890 By the time you're back. It was your home that gives you the long road. 406 00:43:41,220 --> 00:43:47,970 Without home can you narrow? Started out and now your home has nothing left to give you. 407 00:43:48,420 --> 00:43:52,290 Um. So I think that actually works quite well. 408 00:43:53,250 --> 00:43:57,420 Um, you might think there is no obvious. 409 00:43:59,210 --> 00:44:05,030 Source for Cavafy, Ithaca, but he does have a source in his own poems. 410 00:44:05,450 --> 00:44:10,010 Um, so this is about 15 years before he writes Ithaca. 411 00:44:10,310 --> 00:44:14,330 It's one of the hidden poems. So he didn't repudiate it, but nor did he publish it. 412 00:44:14,720 --> 00:44:27,530 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. 413 00:44:27,770 --> 00:44:31,880 Grander than the first. But no homer, no hexameter. 414 00:44:32,150 --> 00:44:36,890 His father's roof was too small. His father's city was too small. 415 00:44:37,280 --> 00:44:46,010 All of Ithaca was too small. The affection of Telemachus, the faith, the Penelope, the age of his father, his old friends. 416 00:44:46,190 --> 00:44:53,120 And you'll see that that repeats also later the affection of Telemachus, the faith of Penelope, the age of his father. 417 00:44:53,360 --> 00:44:56,989 Just as we have the last or gone aeons. Um. 418 00:44:56,990 --> 00:45:06,590 And we have the Cyclops and angry Poseidon. There is this triad that gets repeated exactly in that very plain Cavafy and repetition. 419 00:45:07,220 --> 00:45:14,660 Um, he talks about a nostalgia for travels, mornings when arriving in a new port for the first time. 420 00:45:14,660 --> 00:45:21,190 What is happy? When Cavafy goes to essentially rewrite this poem. 421 00:45:21,880 --> 00:45:27,700 Um, first off, he casts it in the second person and he changes it. 422 00:45:27,730 --> 00:45:38,290 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, 423 00:45:38,290 --> 00:45:46,810 but instead has Odysseus or Ulysses with all of his crew, so they haven't died, set out to the West on new adventures. 424 00:45:47,290 --> 00:45:51,219 Somehow, though, Cavafy kind of combines these into it again. 425 00:45:51,220 --> 00:46:02,710 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, 426 00:46:02,890 --> 00:46:07,240 which is also important to poets like George to Paris, plays a part. 427 00:46:07,600 --> 00:46:10,839 Um, the idea that the journey is the thing. 428 00:46:10,840 --> 00:46:21,340 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, 429 00:46:21,490 --> 00:46:24,490 which is but a poor home, but, you know, home sweet home. 430 00:46:24,790 --> 00:46:37,630 So in a certain way, I feel that we are actually triangulating among Dante, um, uh, Tennyson and Du to come up with Ithaca. 431 00:46:38,750 --> 00:46:43,010 Um, I probably won't go too far into the days of poems. 432 00:46:43,040 --> 00:46:49,609 Um, these are the hidden poems, um, where he is talking about Frank, frankly, 433 00:46:49,610 --> 00:46:54,710 about homosexual experience as odd and says as a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest. 434 00:46:54,920 --> 00:46:59,300 He neither bold realises nor glamorises, nor giggles. 435 00:46:59,900 --> 00:47:11,540 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. 436 00:47:12,290 --> 00:47:21,980 A lyric poem is often in the present or in the perfect past, but the days of poems are free, quantitative and earnest. 437 00:47:22,610 --> 00:47:29,550 Where can we live? But in days there are days when, you know certain people go to certain places, do certain things. 438 00:47:29,570 --> 00:47:35,840 It is your life. Then one day it is over and those days recede into the irretrievable past. 439 00:47:36,230 --> 00:47:41,090 Unless you are the poet necromancer and can call them back to life. 440 00:47:41,600 --> 00:47:49,819 Um, James Marrow, who died 30 years ago, um, this year, uh, very important American poet, uh, poet, 441 00:47:49,820 --> 00:47:57,410 also of the gay experience, a poet of exquisite technique, um, and who lived in Athens and knew Greek. 442 00:47:57,410 --> 00:48:02,120 He translated 3 or 4 poems of Cavafy. Each of them is a gem. 443 00:48:02,450 --> 00:48:09,770 I have learned things from Merrill's translations about the Greek days of 1908. 444 00:48:11,720 --> 00:48:20,210 That year, he found himself without a job. Accordingly, he lived by playing cards and backgammon and the occasional loan. 445 00:48:21,290 --> 00:48:28,460 A position had been offered in a small stationers at £3 a month, but he turned it down unhesitatingly. 446 00:48:28,850 --> 00:48:35,060 It wouldn't do. That was no wage at all for a sufficiently literate young man of 25. 447 00:48:35,840 --> 00:48:39,620 2 or 3 shillings a day won't hit one hit or miss. 448 00:48:40,160 --> 00:48:45,560 What good cards and backgammon earned the boy at his kind of working class cafe? 449 00:48:46,010 --> 00:48:49,310 However quick his play, however slow his picked opponents. 450 00:48:49,910 --> 00:48:54,020 Worst of all, though, were the loans rarely a whole crowd, usually half. 451 00:48:54,260 --> 00:49:03,200 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. 452 00:49:03,620 --> 00:49:09,620 He'd cool off with a swim by morning, light his clothes by then were in a dreadful state. 453 00:49:10,100 --> 00:49:15,770 He had the one same suit to wear, the one of much discoloured cinnamon. 454 00:49:16,910 --> 00:49:21,320 Uh, days of summer days of 1988. 455 00:49:21,860 --> 00:49:30,040 Excluded from your vision tastefully. Was that cinnamon discoloured suit your vision preserved him. 456 00:49:30,050 --> 00:49:34,370 And the very act of casting it off. Throwing it all behind him. 457 00:49:34,880 --> 00:49:38,750 The unfit clothes the men did under clothing. 458 00:49:39,350 --> 00:49:46,760 Naked he stood impeccably fair, a marvel his hair and combed, uplifted, 459 00:49:46,970 --> 00:49:53,810 his limbs tanned lightly from those mornings, naked at the baths and at the seaside. 460 00:49:55,660 --> 00:50:02,020 This poem was actually written in 1932, um, at the very end of Cavalli's life. 461 00:50:02,020 --> 00:50:06,970 So it's looking back quite a long time to 1908 and this summer. 462 00:50:07,450 --> 00:50:11,620 Um, this is a poem I've read in lots of translations and in Greek, 463 00:50:12,100 --> 00:50:19,600 and only really through Merrill's translation did I notice that there was some irregular rhyming in the poem, 464 00:50:19,810 --> 00:50:29,470 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, 465 00:50:30,040 --> 00:50:35,080 but sometimes for a week or more, set free from the gasolina of staying up all night. 466 00:50:35,410 --> 00:50:41,170 He'd cool off with a swim by morning, light his clothes by then were in a dreadful state. 467 00:50:41,560 --> 00:50:48,490 He had the one same suit to wear. The one of much discoloured cinnamon, uh, days of summer. 468 00:50:48,490 --> 00:50:57,280 Days of 1908. Um, there's this brief bit where it almost goes into song, um, where you can really hear those chimes. 469 00:50:57,670 --> 00:51:03,670 Um, and also you have this sense of, you know, Cavafy is stingy with figurative language and he's stingy with metaphor, 470 00:51:03,940 --> 00:51:09,429 and therefore a detail comes to serve, um, as a metaphor or simile. 471 00:51:09,430 --> 00:51:12,610 And that detail is this cinnamon discoloured suit. 472 00:51:13,030 --> 00:51:16,929 Um, this really ugly colour. I can kind of see it kind of reddish. 473 00:51:16,930 --> 00:51:24,730 Yellowish. An inappropriate colour for a seat. Um, sag frog ugly translates this as faded light brown suit. 474 00:51:25,210 --> 00:51:28,300 Kelly Sherrod as faded cinnamon brown suit. 475 00:51:28,720 --> 00:51:31,840 Ray Donovan has faded cinnamon coloured suit. 476 00:51:32,260 --> 00:51:39,480 Um, marrow, who is, uh, you know, a excellent poem himself. 477 00:51:39,490 --> 00:51:43,660 Poet himself, I think kind of hits on on something that works very well. 478 00:51:43,960 --> 00:51:48,010 Um, not faded, but discoloured. Discoloured cinnamon in Greek. 479 00:51:48,010 --> 00:51:54,640 It's kind of. Yeah. So, um, Greek is canela is cinnamon, and canela is a colour word made from cinnamon. 480 00:51:55,030 --> 00:52:00,810 Um, so cinnamon as a colour word. The cinnamon discoloured suit of much discoloured cinnamon. 481 00:52:00,820 --> 00:52:04,330 He even gets that very slight variation that Cavafy has. 482 00:52:04,960 --> 00:52:09,430 And I think the cinnamon, you know, not having it be light brown, for instance, 483 00:52:09,430 --> 00:52:15,310 is very important because it also I think we can't help but import a kind of odour or aroma. 484 00:52:15,640 --> 00:52:23,350 Um, perhaps there's a kind of body odour or spiciness to this suit, this one suit that this poor young man wears. 485 00:52:23,740 --> 00:52:27,100 Um, or maybe even, you know, the odours of food, cooking. 486 00:52:27,370 --> 00:52:34,720 Um, but it also then I think, um, contrasts quite sharply with the freshness of the sea air. 487 00:52:35,020 --> 00:52:39,070 The body that's been swimming. Um. And the air of the sea. 488 00:52:39,520 --> 00:52:43,690 Um, so that is one of the days of poems. 489 00:52:44,410 --> 00:52:49,810 Merrill does write his own days of poems. Naturally. Days of 1964 is one of them. 490 00:52:50,110 --> 00:52:53,890 Um, this is a manuscript, and that is an image of his house. 491 00:52:54,850 --> 00:53:00,219 Um, for gay poets. American poets. During the Aids crisis in the 1980s, of course, 492 00:53:00,220 --> 00:53:07,990 Cavafy and his frank and unapologetic homoeroticism would become a touchstone, mostly this time in Kelly and Share. 493 00:53:07,990 --> 00:53:16,510 It's 1975, um, translations, with the excellent notes by survivors Mark Doty, who was born in 1953. 494 00:53:16,540 --> 00:53:22,899 Um, an important poet of gay experience. His third book of poetry was titled My Alexandria. 495 00:53:22,900 --> 00:53:26,500 So it's entirely interacting with Cavafy. 496 00:53:26,830 --> 00:53:29,830 Um, it's a book of grief and nostalgia and loss. 497 00:53:30,160 --> 00:53:35,820 In 1989, um, Dottie's partner, Walter Wally Roberts, tested positive for HIV, and he. 498 00:53:35,860 --> 00:53:40,740 I think he died before this book came out. This is a quite long poem, and I invite you to go look it up. 499 00:53:40,750 --> 00:53:43,090 I think it's too long for us to look at tonight. 500 00:53:43,300 --> 00:53:53,830 It is about Mark Doherty's very first, um, sexual encounter, um, uh, which is an anonymous pick up at a gay bar. 501 00:53:54,100 --> 00:54:01,620 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. 502 00:54:01,630 --> 00:54:08,350 Of course it would be a sculptor. You see the slippage here days of 1981, but this is coming out in 1993. 503 00:54:08,350 --> 00:54:12,640 So that's a very important, um, essential element to the days of poem. 504 00:54:13,120 --> 00:54:18,490 This poem is much more even Cavafy. And this is from a book earlier, The Death of Continuous. 505 00:54:18,850 --> 00:54:23,680 It's a gorgeous poem. Um, I invite you to check it out. 506 00:54:24,280 --> 00:54:29,230 Um. Marilyn Hacker, American poet. Um, born, I think, in 1945. 507 00:54:29,530 --> 00:54:33,190 Here we have a days of 1994. Alexandrians. 508 00:54:33,550 --> 00:54:39,580 Um, this about the end of the 20th century. And old friends who are perhaps dying. 509 00:54:40,000 --> 00:54:46,390 Um, so, again, it just becomes a whole genre of poems. 510 00:54:47,260 --> 00:54:55,060 Um, I have been thinking a lot about what the ironies of Cavafy offer. 511 00:54:55,210 --> 00:55:02,140 To poets and particularly. American poets are not okay right now. 512 00:55:02,200 --> 00:55:08,230 We are not fine. Um, I have been posting almost daily on social media. 513 00:55:08,620 --> 00:55:13,780 Why isn't anything going on in the Senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? 514 00:55:14,930 --> 00:55:24,260 Um. And I don't know that American poetry is currently up to the task of confronting the moment that we're having. 515 00:55:24,270 --> 00:55:36,210 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. 516 00:55:36,630 --> 00:55:45,510 And, um, you know, perhaps do that kind of sentimental sentimentality of virtue signalling. 517 00:55:45,840 --> 00:55:49,950 Um, but perhaps Cavafy irony will give us a way forward. 518 00:55:50,190 --> 00:55:57,510 Certainly. I read this poem very differently right now in a large Greek colony, 200 BC. 519 00:55:57,930 --> 00:56:03,630 Again, 200 BC will be this kind of sweet spot of, uh, the Hellenistic empires. 520 00:56:04,080 --> 00:56:07,790 Um, there's the vagueness of in a large Greek colony. 521 00:56:07,800 --> 00:56:11,130 This could be any Greek colony. This could be your Greek colony. 522 00:56:12,910 --> 00:56:16,330 That the affairs in the colony are not going well. 523 00:56:17,290 --> 00:56:24,160 Not the slightest doubt remains. And though somehow or other we are moving along. 524 00:56:24,880 --> 00:56:30,160 Perhaps, as many believe, the time has come to bring in a political reformer. 525 00:56:31,270 --> 00:56:37,450 But the obstacle and the difficulty is that these reformers make a great issue out of everything. 526 00:56:38,140 --> 00:56:45,070 A blessing it would be, if nobody ever needed them. They examine and inquire about the slightest little thing, 527 00:56:45,070 --> 00:56:51,940 and they set their mind immediately on radical reforms, demanding that these be executed without delay. 528 00:56:53,080 --> 00:56:58,030 They also have an inclination towards sacrifices. Give up that possession of yours. 529 00:56:58,210 --> 00:57:04,150 Your control over it is precarious. It is precisely such possessions that are detrimental to the colonies. 530 00:57:04,840 --> 00:57:08,860 Give up this revenue and that other similar one and this third. 531 00:57:08,860 --> 00:57:12,760 As a natural consequence, they are indeed substantial. But what can you do? 532 00:57:13,240 --> 00:57:21,250 They create for you a harmful liability. And as they continue with their investigation, they find more and more redundant things. 533 00:57:21,250 --> 00:57:27,520 And they ask for these for their suspension things, however, that one cannot readily relinquish. 534 00:57:28,480 --> 00:57:32,170 And when in good times they complete their assignment, 535 00:57:32,590 --> 00:57:39,640 and having specified and reduced everything down to the last detail, they depart, taking away their rightful wages. 536 00:57:40,000 --> 00:57:43,960 Then let us see what else is left after such surgical dexterity. 537 00:57:44,590 --> 00:57:48,850 Well, possibly the times may not as yet be ripe. 538 00:57:49,300 --> 00:57:52,930 Let's not be hasty. Rashness is a hazardous thing. 539 00:57:53,440 --> 00:58:01,900 Untimely measures. Foster regrets. To be sure, there is unfortunately, a lot that's out of place in the colony. 540 00:58:02,680 --> 00:58:06,219 But is there anything human devoid of imperfection and. 541 00:58:06,220 --> 00:58:09,640 Well, one way or another, we are moving along. 542 00:58:12,060 --> 00:58:16,560 This is the latest book by Scott Cairns. It came out in 2024. 543 00:58:16,980 --> 00:58:24,270 Um, the Democratic State, I think, is partly this poem that we've just read and a little bit, maybe waiting for the barbarians. 544 00:58:24,780 --> 00:58:33,870 Um, the Democratic this book correspondence with my Greeks is all poems responding either to Cavafy or to other Greek poets living and dead. 545 00:58:35,010 --> 00:58:38,430 The the democratic state after Konstantinos gadhafi's. 546 00:58:40,260 --> 00:58:45,710 That things in the Democratic state are not as they should be, is without question. 547 00:58:45,750 --> 00:58:55,469 And while despite the plethora of numbskulls and dipshits, the roads continue to be paved, the bridges in turn replaced or refurbished, 548 00:58:55,470 --> 00:59:01,200 and certain of the numbskulls and dipshits have made their way to court and thereafter to jail. 549 00:59:01,620 --> 00:59:05,940 One cannot help but think that things will not get better any time soon. 550 00:59:07,260 --> 00:59:12,239 The catch remains an expansion of ill will that threatens to replace our long 551 00:59:12,240 --> 00:59:17,280 evolving system of laws with the sudden whims of numbskulls and dipshits. 552 00:59:18,000 --> 00:59:22,710 The senators continue to attempt redress of things that are not as they should be. 553 00:59:23,370 --> 00:59:27,690 This much is mildly reassuring, but the outcome remains uncertain. 554 00:59:28,170 --> 00:59:32,850 Have I mentioned the legion of Numbskulls and dipshits? 555 00:59:33,300 --> 00:59:37,220 Have I also made note of their intransigence and wilful ignorance? 556 00:59:37,230 --> 00:59:44,610 Well, I offer that note for now. For your consideration, certainly, and with chagrin felt by all safe. 557 00:59:44,880 --> 00:59:55,530 Perhaps the numbskulls and the dipshits, much in the democratic state, has succumbed to manifest absurdity, regardless if without much hope or cheer. 558 00:59:55,860 --> 01:00:08,970 We do proceed. Um, anyway, I'm not sure if we have arrived at the end of our journey knowing what these articles mean. 559 01:00:09,000 --> 01:00:17,250 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. 560 01:00:17,910 --> 01:00:22,380 Ithaca so ingrained that it is entered the ear of the popular subconscious. 561 01:00:22,680 --> 01:00:29,280 I was recently watching television when a Cunard ad came up for cruises on Cunard. 562 01:00:29,580 --> 01:00:33,390 Um, in a dramatic reading by Alan Watts. 563 01:00:35,310 --> 01:00:40,880 I wonder. I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream any dream you wanted to dream. 564 01:00:40,890 --> 01:00:44,310 It says as the cruise ship is going to fabulous places. 565 01:00:44,730 --> 01:00:47,340 Um, Egypt and Phoenician trading places and all. 566 01:00:47,790 --> 01:00:54,420 You would, I suppose, start out by fulfilling all your wishes love affairs, banquets, wonderful journeys. 567 01:00:54,810 --> 01:01:01,320 And after that, for some, after you've done that for some time, you'd forget that you were dreaming. 568 01:01:01,770 --> 01:01:05,910 Um, but the one thing I will say is Cunard does not sail to Ithaca. 569 01:01:06,540 --> 01:01:06,870 I you.