one:
his.
These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watchesRoman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.
The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.
“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed
a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:
because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.
The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word, “shame,” which is pronounced
ehdhó,
while line 3 (literally, “And I sit and lose all hope now here”) ends with the demotic word, “here,” which has the identical pronunciation. In the first two couplets, moreover, the katharevousa usages are associated with the oppressive “them” (
without shame, walls
), while the demotic usages are associated with the imprisoned “I” (
here, this fate
). The only pairing in which the rhymed words are both in the demotic is that of lines 6 and 8.The former (literally, “O while they built the walls, how could I not pay attention?”) ends with the
his.
These tango poems, in striking contrast to their ostensibly jaunty meter (which, however, also savors slightly of the Orthodox liturgy), are more often than not about devastating disappointment or frustrated desire: for instance, “In the Taverns,” in which a rejected lover consoles himself by “wallowing” in the demimonde of Beirut; “Temethus, an Antiochene: 400 A.D.,” in which the verses of a poet “suffering in love” are “heated” because the historical figure he writes about is merely a stand-in for his lover; or “On the Italian Seashore,” a historical poem in which an Italian youth of Greek descent stands “pensive and dejected” as he watchesRoman troops unload the booty from their conquest of Greece in 146 B.C. Because this rhythm has such great technical and thematic significance, it seemed to me worthwhile to attempt to reproduce it, where possible.
The second crucial aspect of Cavafy’s prosody is rhyme. The well-intentioned Forster couldn’t have been more wrong when, in introducing the Alexandrian’s poems to his British audience, he claimed that “they are all short poems, and unrhymed.” The great majority of Cavafy’s youthful output of the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s was strictly rhymed; many of those poems, as I have mentioned, are cast as sonnets (most as Italian sonnets), and adhere closely to all of the conventions of that form. Although it is true that as Cavafy matured his verse became freer, he continued to employ rhyme to potent effect for the rest of his career. Examples from three poems—one from the 1890s, another from the early 1910s (which is to say, after the Philosophical Scrutiny, the moment when the poet stood on the threshold of his mature work) as well as a very late one—show how important this device remained for him from the beginning to the end of his career.
“Walls,” a crucial early poem written in 1896 and published the following year, combines, with a marvelous complexity and subtlety, two crucial aspects of Cavafy’s technique: his early penchant for strict rhyme, and his pointed manipulation of tensions between katharevousa and demotic. It consists of eight lines, rhymed
a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d:
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.
And I sit here now in growing desperation.
This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:
because I had so many things to do out there.
O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look out?
But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.
Imperceptibly they’ve shut me from the world without.
The rhymes (which in Greek are strictly homophonous) effectively convey the prisonlike feeling of being locked in; and indeed the poet listed this poem under the thematic heading “Prisons.” But there is far more going on here. For in the case of each set of rhymes but one, the first rhymed word is katharevousa, while the second is demotic, or is at least neutral: hence, for example, line 1 (literally, “without consideration, without pity, without shame”) ends with the katharevousa word, “shame,” which is pronounced
ehdhó,
while line 3 (literally, “And I sit and lose all hope now here”) ends with the demotic word, “here,” which has the identical pronunciation. In the first two couplets, moreover, the katharevousa usages are associated with the oppressive “them” (
without shame, walls
), while the demotic usages are associated with the imprisoned “I” (
here, this fate
). The only pairing in which the rhymed words are both in the demotic is that of lines 6 and 8.The former (literally, “O while they built the walls, how could I not pay attention?”) ends with the
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