Κ. Π. ΚΑΒΑΦΗΣ
Ο δεμένος ώμος
Είπε που χτύπησε σε τοίχον ή που έπεσε.
Μα πιθανόν η αιτία να ’ταν άλλη
του πληγωμένου και δεμένου ώμου.
Με μια κομμάτι βίαιη κίνησιν, 5
απ’ ένα ράφι για να κατεβάσει κάτι
φωτογραφίες που ήθελε να δει από κοντά,
λύθηκεν ο επίδεσμος κι έτρεξε λίγο αίμα.
Ξανάδεσα τον ώμο, και στο δέσιμο
αργούσα κάπως· γιατί δεν πονούσε, 10
και μ’ άρεζε να βλέπω το αίμα. Πράγμα
του έρωτός μου το αίμα εκείνο ήταν.
Σαν έφυγε ηύρα στην καρέγλα εμπρός,
ένα κουρέλι ματωμένο, απ’ τα πανιά,
κουρέλι που έμοιαζε για τα σκουπίδια κατευθείαν· 15
και που στα χείλη μου το πήρα εγώ,
και που το φύλαξα ώρα πολλή—
το αίμα του έρωτος στα χείλη μου επάνω.
Τα κρυμμένα [1919]
***********************
The Bandage
C.P. Cavafy Translated from the Greek by Evan Jones
He said that he'd stumbled into a wall or fallen.
But likely the cut on his shoulder
was caused by something more serious.
He stood up abruptly, reaching for some
photographs on a high shelft
hat he wanted to hold. The bandage
loosened and the cut opened..
I dressed his shoulder again, but was slow
in finishing, because it caused him no pain
and because I liked to look at his blood.
That bloodwas the source of my longing for him.
When he left, I found at the foo
tof his chair a bloodied cloth, cotton,
a cloth that looked ready for the rubbish bin
and that I took to my lips
and held there for a long time
—the blood of longing on my lips.
May 1919 (Hidden)
ΜΙΑ ΕΚΔΟΣΗ ΜΕ ΠΟΙΗΜΑΤΑ ΤΟΥ ΚΑΒΑΦΗ, ΣΕ ΝΕΑ ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣΗ ΣΤΑ ΑΓΓΛΙΚΑ , ΕΝΘΟΥΣΙΑΖΕΙ ΤΟΥΣ ΚΡΙΤΙΚΟΥΣ
Είναι η οικουμενικότητα του καβαφικού πνεύματος, αυτής της κοιτίδας του Νέου Ελληνισμού που με τον πιο ειρωνικό τρόπο για τα συντηρητικά ήθη της χώρας μας, την προσωποποιεί ένας αλκοολικός, ομοφυλόφιλος Έλληνας που έζησε εκτός της Ελλάδα.
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| The Barbarians Arrive Today, £17.99 |
Today's blogpost is written by Evan Jones, translator of the recent Carcanet Classic The Barbarians Arrive Today by C.P. Cavafy.
In the era of prize confirmation and jackpot winnings for writers, Cavafy seems an odd example. He has a large readership that has grown every year since his death in 1933. There are translations and example after example of admiration. There’s Leonard Cohen’s song, ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ an adaptation of ‘Απολείπειν ο Θεός Αντώνιον.’ There’s the title of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians. Cavafy has such a large readership that when the President of the United States bizarrely tweeted out the word ‘Covfefe’ in May 2017, some joked and continue to joke that he must have meant the great poet.
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Photograph of Cavafy seated in his apartment |
But Cavafy’s readership found him without his ever leaving home or winning a prize. Without publishing a book or giving a reading or lunching with an agent. He turned down an offer of publication from Leonard Woolf in the 1920s, arranged by E.M. Forster. The contract was returned to the Hogarth Press with a note in which Cavafy suggested his signing ‘would be premature.’ There is speculation as to why he felt this way, but in the end he never matured and the book did not happen in his lifetime. He self-published pamphlets from a room in his flat on the Rue Lepsius in Alexandria, above a bordello. ‘Where could I live better?’ Robert Liddell reports him confiding to friends, ‘Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’
In a personal note, dated June 1905, Cavafy (age 42) writes about a young poet coming to visit him:
He was very poor, living off his literary work, and he seemed somewhat sad to see the comfortable home where I live, my servant who offered him a cup of tea, my clothes made by a decent tailor.
For Cavafy, these privileges – accustomed as he might have become to them in childhood, when his family had money – were costly in a number of senses. To obtain luxuries he ‘defied…natural inclinations and became a civil servant,’ he continues. There is contradiction here, because in his poetry Cavafy worked to accept and revel in his natural inclinations. Nothing could be more important to him. The story of the young man seems more like a fable, in which case, a what might have been, with a moral lesson: behave one way in your art and another in your life. The separation was important to Cavafy. He calls the young poet, ‘always present, faithful, dedicated child of art.’ He sees a beauty in him, but it is not a life Cavafy could consider leading. His was always pragmatic. From our vantage, we think of Cavafy, via his poems and despite his profession, as the one who is the always present, faithful, dedicated child of art. Or old man of art, maybe.
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| View of the interior of Cavafy’s living room with sofa, armchairs and a desk. |
The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems & Prose, by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Evan Jones (Carcanet Classics): As poets’ lives go, Constantine Cavafy’s was a prosaic one. The scion of a Greek merchant family in Alexandria, Egypt, Cavafy (1863–1933) spent most of his adult life working dutifully as a bureaucrat, publishing little. When he died at the age of seventy, his poetry—born of that swiftly disappearing milieu of cultures that once made up the Old Levant—was known only among a small circle of friends and admirers. Cavafy’s creative vision was vast, looking back to characters from classical and Byzantine history and ahead to the existential stagnation of a modern society “Waiting for the Barbarians,” to quote from a famous title of his coinage. “Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception,” Joseph Brodsky once wrote. “What is exceptional is that he also gains.” Evan Jones has made a strong case for that gaining in this new volume of translations from Carcanet Press.
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