The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy - Daniel Mendelsohn

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morning sea and cloudless sky

      a brilliant blue, the yellow shore; all

      beautiful and grand in the light.

      Here let me stop. Let me fool myself: that these are what I see

      (I really saw them for a moment when I first stopped)

      instead of seeing, even here, my fantasies,

      my recollections, the ikons of pleasure.

      [?; 1916]

       Song of Ionia

      Because we smashed their statues all to pieces,

      because we chased them from their temples—

      this hardly means the gods have died.

      O land of Ionia, they love you still,

      it’s you whom their souls remember still.

      And as an August morning’s light breaks over you

      your atmosphere grows vivid with their living.

      And occasionally an ethereal ephebe’s form,

      indeterminate, stepping swiftly,

      makes its way along your crested hills.

      [1891; 1896; 1905; 1911]

       In the Entrance of the Café

      Something they were saying close to me

      drew my attention to the entrance of the café.

      And I saw the lovely body that looked as if

      Eros had made it using all his vast experience:

      crafting with pleasure his shapely limbs;

      making tall the sculpted build;

      crafting the face with emotion

      and leaving behind, with the touch of his hands,

      a feeling in the brow, the eyes, and the lips.

      [1904?; >1915]

       One Night

      The room was threadbare and tawdry,

      hidden above that suspect restaurant.

      From the window you could see the alley,

      which was filthy and narrow. From below

      came the voices of some laborers

      who were playing cards and having a carouse.

      And there, in that common, vulgar bed

      I had the body of love, I had the lips,

      sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness—

      the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now

      as I write, after so many years have passed!,

      in my solitary house, I am drunk again.

      [1907; 1916]

       Come Back

      Come back often and take hold of me,

      beloved feeling come back and take hold of me,

      when the memory of the body reawakens,

      and old longing once more passes through the blood;

      when the lips and skin remember,

      and the hands feel like they’re touching once again.

      Come back often and take hold of me at night,

      when the lips and skin remember …

      [1904; 1909; 1912]

       Far Off

      I’d like to talk about that memory …

      But by now it’s long died out … as if there’s nothing left:

      because it lies far off, in the years of my first youth.

      Skin, as if it had been made of jasmine …

      That August—was it August?—evening …

      I can just recall the eyes: they were, I daresay, blue …

      Ah yes, blue: a deep blue, sapphirine.

      [1914; 1914]

       He Swears

      Now and then he swears to begin a better life.

      But when the night comes on with its own counsels,

      its own compromises, and with its promises:

      but when the night comes on with a power of its own,

      of a body that desires and demands, he returns,

      lost, once more to the same fateful pleasure.

      [1905; >1915]

       I Went

      No restraint. I surrendered completely and I went.

      To gratifications that were partly real,

      partly careening within my mind—

      I went in the illuminated night.

      And I drank powerful wines, just as

      the champions of pleasure drink.

      [1905; 1913]

       Chandelier

      In a small and empty room, four lone walls,

      covered in a cloth of solid green,

      a beautiful chandelier burns and glows

      and in each and every flame there blazes

      a wanton fever, a wanton need.

      In the small room, which has been set

      aglow by the chandelier’s powerful flames,

      the light that appears is no ordinary light.

      The pleasure of this heat has not been fashioned

      for bodies that too easily take fright.

      [1895; 1914]

Poems 1916–1918

      Since Nine—

      Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed

      since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp

      and sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,

      without speaking. With whom should I speak,

      so utterly alone within this house?

      The apparition of my body in its youth,

      since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp,

      has come and found me and reminded me

      of shuttered perfumed rooms

      and of pleasure spent—what wanton pleasure!

      And

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