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The Poems: English & Greek,

 

Fifteen poems of C.P. Cavafy

translated into English by Rae Dalven

transformed into songs by

Joe Dolce

 

 

1. Body Remember

2. For Them To Come

3. Candles

4. Monotonous Village

5. At The Cafe Entrance

6. Return

7. Days of 1903

8. In Despair

9. Supplication

10. Voices

11. Very Seldom

12. Melancholy of Jason

13. At The Foot of the House

14. Far Off

15. When They Are Aroused

 

It has been said that one of the main distinctions between prose and poetry is that prose can be translated from one language into another and poetry cannot. But W.H Auden wrote, in the introduction to the Rae Dalven English translation of Cavafy's poetry:

"What then is it in Cavafy's poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: 'This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world."

Cavafy himself wrote in a letter in 1896:

" I'm rather satisfied with the diction of my poems over which I have taken many pains. I have tried to blend the spoken with the written language and have called to my help, in the process . . . all my experience and as much artistic insight as I possess in the matter - trembling, so to speak, for every word."

 

Nobel prize winning author George Seferis made an insightful observation about the basic unity, as he called it, of Cavafy's poetry. I'd like to compare this idea of a unity, in a way, to the last poems of Sylvia Plath, especially the Ariel poems. Seferis said this:

"My own view is that from a certain point of time - I should place this point at about 1910 - the work of Cavafy should be read and judged, not as a series of separate poems, but as one and the same poem - a work in progress, as James Joyce would have said, which is only terminated by death. We shall understand Cavafy more easily if we read him with the feeling of the continuous presence of his work as a whole, This unity is his grace."

Constantine Cavafy worked as a clerk for the government in the irrigation department. He was a copyist and he would copy letters and documents by hand, long before the days of carbon paper and photocopiers. But, occaisionly, he would lock himself in his office and fellow office workers, peeking through his keyhole could observe him gesturing madly, like an actor, and raising his hands. Then he would bend down and write something.

One of the first established writers to appreciate Cavafy's work was E.M Forster. He said:

"I often think of my good fortune and the opportunity, which the chance of a horrible war gave me, to meet one of the great poets of our time."

Forster wrote this beautiful portrait of Cavafy in his book, Pharos and Pharillon:

"A Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless, at a slight angle to the universe. His arms are extended, possibly. 'Oh, Cavafy . . .! 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 of 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. Sometimes the sentence is finished in the street, sometimes the traffic murders it, sometimes it lasts into the flat. It deals with the tricky behaviour of the Emperor Alexius Comnenus, in 1096, or with olives, their possibilities and price, or with the fortunes of friends, or with 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 judgments, one feels that it, too, stands at a slight angle to the universe: it is the sentence of a poet."