the second:
His clothes were in a dreadful state.
There was one suit that he would always wear,
a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.
Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,
your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared
that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.
But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.
As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.
A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.
Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack ofany spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.
Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium.
The
His clothes were in a dreadful state.
There was one suit that he would always wear,
a suit of a very faded cinnamon hue.
Oh days of the summer of nineteen hundred eight,
your vision, quite exquisitely, was spared
that very faded cinnamon-colored suit.
But here, the similarity in sound is pointedly belied by a crucial difference in sense. The first of these two stanzas describes the shabby state of the boy’s clothes, as observed by the poet, while the second declares that Time itself (the apostrophized “days of 1908”) has been spared the sight of that ugliness—and will, as we learn in the final stanza, already quoted above, redeem the boy’s tawdry circumstances by preserving forever the vision of his beauty once it has been stripped of the dreadful clothes.
As these few examples will indicate, a primary concern of the present translation is to try—as much as possible, and without contorting the English—to convey this vital element of Cavafian prosody. As these examples also show, I have made use of off-rhymes, assonance, consonance, and slant-rhymes when strict rhymes were difficult to achieve in English, in the belief that readers should be able to feel the formal elements of Cavafy’s verse whenever possible.
A short word on Cavafy’s striking use of enjambment—the way he allows a sentence or thought to continue past a line break—is in order, because this device, too, puts interesting demands on the translator.
Cavafy’s use of this device is the more noteworthy because he is quite happy to eschew it altogether, as he does, for instance, in the poems “Whenever They Are Aroused” and “In the Church.” In the latter (which I quote below in its entirety), published probably in 1912, the lack ofany spillover from line to line gives the poem just the right incantatory, ecclesiastical feel:
I love the church—its labara,
the silver of its vessels, its candelabra,
the lights, its icons, its lectern.
When I enter there, inside of a Greek Church:
with the aromas of its incenses,
the liturgical chanting and harmonies,
the magnificent appearance of the priests,
and the rhythm of their every movement—
resplendent in their ornate vestments—
my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
to our Byzantium, illustrious.
With this we might compare another, historical poem of 1912, “Alexandrian Kings.” Here Cavafy describes the magnificent ceremony, staged in Alexandria by Antony and Cleopatra in 34 B.C., at which the power-hungry royal couple publicly proclaimed Cleopatra’s still-small sons (aged thirteen, six, and two) the rulers of a number of foreign possessions stretching far into Asia—an event that demonstrated the couple’s international aspirations, even as the ironic contrast between the magnificence of the honorifics and the tender age of their recipients, made much of in this poem, highlights the ruthless ambition of the royal parents.
Cavafy’s characteristic interest in the ironies of this occasion is evident precisely in his use of enjambment. Take, for instance, the first few lines of the poem:
The Alexandrians came out in droves
to have a look at Cleopatra’s children:
Caesarion, and also his little brothers,
Alexander and Ptolemy, who for the first
time were being taken to the Gymnasium.
The
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