Pendulum´s song

18 januari 2006 Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception. What is exceptional is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poet, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia – rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately “poor” means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds “green” and describes bodies as being “young and beautiful.” This technique comes out of Cavafy’s realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses language for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.

Cavafy’s use of “poor” adjectives creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader´s imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to their accomplishments. For these reasons a translation of Cavafy is almost the next logical step in the direction the poet was moving – a step which Cavafy himself could have wished to take.

Perhaps he didn’t need to take it: his handling of metaphor alone was sufficient for him to have stopped where he did or even earlier. Cavafy did a very simple thing. There are two elements which usually constitute a metaphor: the object of description (the “tenor”, as I.A. Richards called it), and the object to which the first is imagistically, or simply, grammatically, allied (the “vehicle”). The implication which the second part usually contains provides the writer with the possibility of virtually endless development. This is the way a poem works. What Cavafy did, almost from the very beginning of his career as a poet, was to jump straight to the second part: for the rest of that career the developed and elaborated upon its implicit notions without bothering to return to the first part, assumed as self-evident. The “vehicle” was Alexandria; the “tenor” was life.

The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy’s poems, in dealing with that Hellenic “special love”, and touching en passant upon conventional broodings and longings, are attempts –or rather recognized failures- to resurrect once-loved shadows. Or: photographs.

Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his hopelessness for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy’s love poetry is not “tragic” but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the fait accompli, terror is the product of the imagination (no matter where it is directed, toward the future or toward the past). His sense of loss is much more acute than his sense of gain simply because separation is a more lasting experience than being together. It almost looks as though Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like “Before Time Altered Them” or “Hidden Things” represent a complete reversal of Susan Sontag’s formula “Life is a movie; death is a photograph.” To put it another way, Cavafy’s hedonistic bias, if such it is, is biased itself by his historical sense, since history, among other things, implies irreversibility, Alternatively, if Cavafy´s historical poems had not been hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes.

One of the best examples of the way this dual technique works is the poem about Kaisarion, Cleopatra’s fifteen-year-old son, nominally the last king of the Ptolemaic line, who was executed by the Romans in “conquered Alexandria” by the order of the Emperor Octavian. After finding Kaisarion’s name in some history book one evening, the narrator plunges into fantasies of this young boy and “fashions him freely” in his mind, “so completely” that, by the end of the poem, when Kaisarion is put to death, we perceive his execution almost as a rape. And then the words “conquered Alexandria” acquire an extra dimension: the torturing recognition of personal loss.

Not so much by combining as by equating sensuality and history, Cavafy tells his readers (and himself) the classic Greek story of Eros, ruler of the world. In Cavafy’s mouth it sounds convincing, all the more so because his historical poems are preoccupied with the decline of the Hellenic world, the situation which he, as an individual, reflects in miniature, or in mirrors. As if unable to be precise in his handling of the miniature, Cavafy builds us a large-scale model of Alexandria and the adjacent Hellenic world. It is a fresco, and if it seems fragmentary, this is partly because it reflects its creator, but largely because the Hellenic world at its nadir was fragmented both politically and culturally. With the death of Alexander the Great it began to crumble, and wars, skirmishes, and the like kept tearing it apart for centuries after, the way contradictions tear one´s mind. The only force which held these motley, cosmopolitan pieces together was magna lingua Grecae; Cavafy could say the same about his own life. Perhaps the most uninhibited voice we hear in Cavafy´s poetry is when in a tone of heightened, intense fascination he lists the beauties of the Hellenic way of life – Hedonism, Art, Sophistic philosophy, and “especially our great Greek language.”