Daniel Mendelsohn - The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy

there’s one thing that still he contemplates

with lofty pride: that even in defeat

he shows the same indomitable valor to the world.

The rest—was dreams and vain futility.

This Syria—it barely even resembles his homeland;

it is the land of Heracleides and of Balas.

[ 1915 ; 1919]

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

Following his many miracles,

and the great renown of his instruction

which was diffused among so many peoples,

he suddenly went missing and no one has learned

with any certainty what has happened

(nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).

Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.

But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never

wrote about the death of Apollonius.

Others said that he went missing on Lindos.

Or perhaps that other story is

true, that his assumption took place on Crete,

in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—

But nonetheless we have the miraculous,

the supernatural apparition of him

to a young student in Tyana.—

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

for him to appear before the world again;

or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us

unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again

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

he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,

and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”

So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—

after a reading of Philostratus’s

“Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—

one of the few pagans, the very few

who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant

and timid man—he, too, outwardly

played the Christian and would go to church.

It was the period during which there reigned,

with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,

and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,

showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.

[ 1897 ; 1910 ; 1920 ; 1920]

The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them

declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.

The salon opened onto the garden;

and had a delicate fragrance of blooms

that was mingled together with the perfumes

of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.

Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.

But when the actor had declaimed

“Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”

(stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary

the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),

at once a spirited boy sprang up,

mad for literature, and cried out:

“Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.

Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.

Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,

all your care, and remember your work once more

in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.

That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.

And don’t dismiss completely from your mind

the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—

that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,

those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,

that Seven Against Thebes —and leave, as your memorial,

only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—

that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”

[ 1920 ; 1920]

One candle is enough. Its faint light

is more fitting, will be more winsome

when come Love’s— when its Shadows come.

One candle is enough. Tonight the room

can’t have too much light. In reverie complete,

and in suggestion’s power, and with that little light—

in that reverie: thus will I dream a vision

that there come Love’s— that its Shadows come.

[ ? ; 1920]

The poet Phernazes is working on

the crucial portion of his epic poem:

the part about how the kingdom of the Persians

was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our

glorious king is descended from him:

Mithridates, Dionysus and Eupator.) But here

one needs philosophy; one must explicate

the feelings that Darius must have had:

arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more

like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.

Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.

But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes

running and delivers the momentous intelligence:

The war with the Romans has begun.

Most of our army has crossed the border.

The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!

How, now, can our glorious king,

Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,

be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?

In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems.

Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!

Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”

to make his name, and to reduce his critics,

those envious men, to silence at long last.

What a setback, what a setback for his plans!

And if it had only been a setback: fine.

But let’s see if we are really all that safe

in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.

The Romans are most fearsome enemies.

Is there any way we can get the best of them,

we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?

Can we measure up to the legions now?

Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—

And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,

a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—

far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;

arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.

[< 1897? ; 1917 ; 1920]

She laments in the prologue to her Alexiad,

Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.

Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with

freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge

mine eyes. … Alack the breakers” of her life,

“alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her

“unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”

Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one

mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:

that she had only one profound regret

(even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:

for all of her dexterity she ­didn’t manage

to secure the Throne; instead he took it

practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.

[ 1917 ; 1920]

Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.

In serious matters I have always been

most diligent. And on this I will insist:

that no one has a better knowledge of

Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.

On every question that he had, Botaniates—

every difficult ecclesiastical matter—

would take counsel with me, me first of all.

But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful

Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,

it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself

by crafting verses of six or seven lines—

divert myself with mythological tales

of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,

or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;

or with composing strict iambic lines

such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs

of Constantinople don’t know how to write.

That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.

[ 1921 ; 1920]