LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

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 the boy’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 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 of any 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 first instance of enjambment—“came out in droves / to have a look”—underscores the ardent curiosity of the local populace, and hence emphasizes the dazzling nature of the occasion (while hinting at the locals’ cynicism about political displays, which is, in fact, emphasized later on in the poem). The second instance—“who for the first / time were being taken”—places extraordinary emphasis on the noun time by separating it from its adjective, first, which is also thereby emphasized: an emphasis that reminds us of the youth and inexperience of the children who are being so cynically exploited by their parents.

      To turn to a work from the poet’s latest phase, the final stanza of the great 1930 poem “The Mirror in the Entrance” suggests how Cavafy continued to hone his handling of this technique. The poem describes an occasion on which a beautiful youth employed by a tailor makes a delivery to a wealthy home; while he waits for a receipt, alone in the vestibule, he approaches an old mirror and fixes his tie, unaware that the mirror itself—here a double for the poet—is, as it were, “watching” him. The poem ends with a description of the mirror’s feelings:

      But the ancient mirror, which had seen and seen again,

      throughout its lifetime of so many years,

      thousands of objects and faces—

      but the ancient mirror now became elated,

      inflated with pride, because it had received upon itself

      perfect beauty, for a few minutes.

      Except for the final two lines, each line is a grammatically independent unit ending with some kind of punctuation—a comma or a dash. Coming at the end of this series of discrete phrases, the penultimate line, which can only be logically and grammatically completed by the line that follows, takes on a tremendous drama and excitement: by withholding the object of the verb “received” until the next line, the poet gives the all-important word “beauty” an enormous climactic force.

      Given the importance of this technique in Cavafy’s prosody, the meticulous care with which he constructed each line, I’ve tried to structure the English of these translations so that it achieves the same effect.

      One final note, concerning a choice on my part that might strike some readers as controversial. In rendering Greek names from the Classical, Hellenistic, Late Antique, and Byzantine past, I have consistently chosen to eschew a phonetic rendering of the way those names sound in Greek, opting instead to adopt the traditional, Latinate forms—which is to say, the forms that will be familiar to English speakers. To my mind, mimicking the contemporary Greek pronunciation of the names of the historical or pseudohistorical characters is, at best, inappropriate and indeed unhelpful in an English translation. When the Greek eye sees the name

, the person brought to mind is the person brought to mind when the eye of an English-speaking person comes across the name “Justinian”; transliterating it as “Ioustinianos” is to obscure, rather than translate, Cavafy’s text.

      Worse, a misguided allegiance to the sound of Modern Greek can lead to a serious misrepresentation of a poem’s deeper meanings. To take “The Seleucid’s Displeasure” once more: certain translators have chosen to render the title of this poem as “The Displeasure of Selefkidis”—that last word being an accurate phonetic reproduction of what the Greek word

, which indeed appears

Скачать книгу