verb
proséxo,
“pay attention”—but to the Greek ear, the word is indistinguishable from the prepositional phrase
pros éxo,
“towards the outside”: which is to say, the very direction in which the speaker failed to look. (To the Greek ear, it sounds as if the line is going to be something like, “O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look towards the outside?”) In my translation I have tried to convey this provocative confusion by translating the first word by means of the casual English expression “look out,” which has the further advantage of enabling the loaded repetition, which we find in the Greek, of the word “out.”
Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case
a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a.
Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme to hammer home a crucial point. The first stanza provides a useful example:
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (
thaméni,
the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek,
tha méni,
“will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of
thaméni,
inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (
khalassa,
“wasted”/
thalassa,
“sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.
In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:
Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá
That year he found himself without a job;
ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá
and so he made a living from cards,
apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.
from backgammon, and what he borrowed.
The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of theboy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in
proséxo,
“pay attention”—but to the Greek ear, the word is indistinguishable from the prepositional phrase
pros éxo,
“towards the outside”: which is to say, the very direction in which the speaker failed to look. (To the Greek ear, it sounds as if the line is going to be something like, “O while they built the walls, why didn’t I look towards the outside?”) In my translation I have tried to convey this provocative confusion by translating the first word by means of the casual English expression “look out,” which has the further advantage of enabling the loaded repetition, which we find in the Greek, of the word “out.”
Similarly, the two eight-line stanzas that make up “The City,” which Cavafy published in 1910 after fifteen years of constant revision of an earlier version, and which he selected as the opening poem for his 1905–15 collection (and which is, therefore, the first of his poems that his readers encounter), follow a strict rhyme scheme, in this case
a-b-b-c-c-d-d-a.
Here, as before, he employs a strict homophonous end-rhyme to hammer home a crucial point. The first stanza provides a useful example:
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
In line 4 a desperately frustrated youth describes his heart as something that, like a corpse, lies “buried” (
thaméni,
the last word in the line in the original), and in the following line he asks, with great anguish, how long his mind will remain in a state of stagnation; the sound of the last words of this line in the Greek,
tha méni,
“will remain,” are indistinguishable from those of
thaméni,
inextricably linking the boy’s abject feeling of being buried alive to a predicament that is indeed desperate. For as we learn, he will in fact remain in Alexandria for the rest of his life, imprisoned by a hopeless, soul-destroying drudgery. The return in each stanza’s final line to the rhyme with which the stanza begins (
khalassa,
“wasted”/
thalassa,
“sea”) is, moreover, itself indicative of the way in which the boy is trapped, doomed always to return to “the same place.” There is no forward motion in the rhymes, as there is no forward motion in his life.
In the late poem “Days of 1908,” to recur to a by-now-familiar example of so many of Cavafy’s most characteristic themes and techniques, rhyme is similarly used to great effect. The first three lines, for instance, quickly sketch a portrait of the dire economic position of the beautiful young man whom the narrator will later see naked on the beach:
Ton khróno ekeínon vréthike khorís dhouliá
That year he found himself without a job;
ke sinepós zoúsen ap’ ta khartiá
and so he made a living from cards,
apó to távli, ké ta daneiká.
from backgammon, and what he borrowed.
The triple repetition of accented final syllables ending in a short a, which I have attempted to mimic here, conveys the dreary monotony of theboy’s endless quest for money. The conclusion of the poem shows a similar interest in exploiting the potential of rhyme. The two penultimate stanzas are composed of three lines each, the sequence of end-rhymes in the first repeated by that in
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