It was Auden who said, famously, in his introduction to Rae Dalven's Cavafy, that there were poems he would have written differently, or not at all, if he had not read Cavafy first, and I know this is true of myself and of others I could think of as well, yet I would hesitate to identify just what the influence was, whether an attitude to history, or a certain irony, or a use of personae, or a kind of passionate objectivity, or something else. What is interesting is that the poets I might refer to do not necessarily write like each other or even relate to one another. This I believe reflects the power of a major poet, his or her influence is shared by dissimilars, be it Stevens or Yeats or Rilke we are talking about. I think, if anything, it is a tender humanism, a humanitas supreme, we can identify particularly as Cavafy's.

It is this humanitas that emerges, above anything else, in the translations, and I would venture to say that one can measure the very degree of success of the translation by the keenness of retaining the original human feeling, that there is where the verisimilitude lies, or should lie. I am speaking of Cavafy's sensibility. Auden, for want of a better term – and he bespeaks his own inadequacy here – calls it a tone of voice and a personal speech. As Auden says, every translation of Cavafy, no matter by whom, "is immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it." It is, of all things, the "self-disclosure," the confession, that is translatable. The poem may have – and generally was – rhymed in the original, it contained a peculiar, unique, and totally original combination of "purist" and demotic Greek, but those things do not in any way emerge in the translations. In fact, we might assume a great, even a deadly, loss by their absence, by the fact that they were not translated, were the translations – by all hands – not so moving and so apparently accurate as they are. I must confess that I sometimes worry that we can't get the true Cavafy without what I'll call his poetics and his linguistics, but I thank God that all the major translators were wise enough not to make those things the object of their translations. How could they anyway?

I have compared the different translations to the best of my ability. One notices the difference – often very slight – and longs for the original. I have, of course, in poem after poem, moved from the literal to the poetic rendering and agonized over the difficulties as well as the difference between the "versions." The virtue of having a number of translations is obviously that one rendering, or interpretation, or structure, will be more accurate, or more delightful, than another – and the more minds at work the better. In different ways, I like the three major translations I own, Dalven, Keeley, and Theoharis, as well as their notes and their commentary, but I admire Aliki Barnstone's the most because it is, finally, a little less stiff and more lovely – and cunning – nearer what it seems to me the original might be and I love the extensive notes and the exhaustive commentary. Barnstone is a poet, and she is able to construct, to create – or re-create – the poem. There is, in addition, the magical connection (between poet and translator) that there always is. I'll call it a sympathy, a fellow-feeling, she shares, or she has, with Cavafy. She herself writes in English, but her father, the scholar, translator, and poet Willis Barnstone, is Jewish and her mother, the painter Elli Tzalopoulou-Barnstone, is Greek, so she has lived in a double-diaspora, in Nevada now, of all places, which gives her even more kinship with Cavafy.

This being said, I must add that in every translation, what comes through is a kind of aloofness, even a coldness, a distance let's call it, whether the subject be Hellenic-historical on the one hand or lyric-personal on the other. But I want to suggest that coldness is not the word, that the poems are burning, and that it is only his irony, his tender irony, that saves them, as it were, from being consumed. Indeed they are heartbreaking poems. Carefully wrought, labored over, but heartbreaking. Sometimes he forgets the irony, the flimsy curtain or the light cover he seems to place on everything and he speaks "directly from the heart" as if he were some romantic fool or lost nostalgic. Look at this early poem:

Voices

Ideal and loved voices
of the dead, or of those
lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in dreams;
sometimes the brain hears them in thought.

And, for one moment, with their sounds,
sounds come back from the first poetry of our lives —
like music at night, remote, fading away.
                                                            [1904]

or this later one, lest we assume rawness and vulnerability were issues of maturity:

In Despair

He's utterly lost him.    And now he seeks
his lips    in the lips
of each new lover;    in the union with each
new lover,    he seeks to fool himself
that he is the same young man,    the same one he gives himself to.

He's utterly lost him,    as if he never existed.
Because he wanted – he said –     he wanted to save himself
from the stigma    of that morbid pleasure,
from the stigma    of that shameful pleasure.
There was still time –     he said – to save himself.

He's utterly lost him,    as if he never existed.
In his fantasy,    in his hallucination,
he seeks his lips    in the lips of other young men;
he wants to feel    his passion again.
                                                      [1923]

Cavafy is not Rimbaud. He doesn't achieve his intensity, his purity of thought, through metaphor. In fact he eschews metaphor altogether, unless we see the whole poems as a kind of metaphoric wonder where one state magically becomes another. His style is loose and idiomatic, based on and explicating the educated speech of his native Alexandria. It is "learned" but only learned in the manner of a well-read, well-rounded citizen of that city, including that citizen's complacency and presumptuousness, though there is a sly crafty wild and sometimes brutal eye – and tongue – behind that citizen.

Like most of the other great moderns, Cavafy combines a certain conservatism with a poetic radicalism. But it is a conservatism based on hard-earned knowledge rather than loony economic and political ideas. He more or less rejects progressivism but there isn't one whiff of fascism or proto-fascism anywhere, unlike in, say, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. In a poem published in 1928, certainly years after Mussolini's arrival and the mean scapegoating of the London, and Idaho, senescents, he argues against the Political Reformer (capitalized in the poem) in a gentle and sane manner, pointing out, as he sees it, a kind of eternal truth, as far as poets are concerned, Greek, Egyptian, probably even Babylonian, that "it doesn't change," except that the Reformer collects his salary, but he – Cavafy – does so without rancor and without recourse to monstrosity. Here is the poem in toto:

In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.E.

There is not the slightest doubt
that things in the Colony don't go as one would wish,
and though we move forward, anyway,
perhaps, as not a few think, the time has come
for us to bring in a Political Reformer.

Yet the obstacle and difficulty
is that they make a big deal
out of everything, these Reformers.
(It would be a stroke of good luck
if one never needed them.) Everything,
every little thing, they ask about and examine,
and instantly radical reforms come to mind
and they demand they be implemented without delay.

They lean toward sacrifice.
Give up that property of yours,
your owning it is risky:
such possessions are harmful to the Colonies.
Give up that income
and that coming from it,
and this third one, as a natural consequence.
They are essential, but it can't be helped;
They create an adverse liability for you.

And as they proceed in their inspection,
they find (then find again) needless things,
which they demand must go —
things that nevertheless are hard to dismiss.

And when, with good luck, they finish their work,
having ordered and pared everything down to the last detail,
they leave, taking away their rightful wages, as well.
We'll see what remains, after
so much expert surgery.

Perhaps the time had not yet come.
Let's not rush; haste is a dangerous thing.
Premature measures bring regret.
Certainly and unfortunately, there is much disorder in the Colony.
But is there anything human without imperfection?
And, anyway, look, we're moving forward.
                                                             [1928]

The last two stanzas are delicious and the penultimate line is the signature supreme. Maybe it's Cavafy's main question "But is there anything human without imperfection?" It may be his homosexuality – and the fact that it was such an omnipresent subject for him – placed him inevitably on the radical edge and even created in him a huge tolerance, an understanding of loneliness, isolation, and suffering, a pity for the despised, for the outcast, and a sympathy for the outsider, Jew, Pagan, Christian, which made it impossible for him to demonize the other, what the politically stupid, thoughtless, or narrow of our time required, artists included. Also he was manifestly good, and sane, and whole, and most of all, kind. Nary a whiff.

Every artist makes a virtue of his weakness – in a way he makes it his subject. Cavafy, overwhelmingly Greek, lived in the diaspora, in a city, Alexandria, that was overwhelmingly mixed, as if it were some Athenian, some Macedonian, backwater, as if a Greek king, minor beyond belief, once reigned there, and he was forgotten, even his name was mispronounced. He lived consciously, deliberately, at a time in the future called the present, where the past was murky, if important. He really had no country, he only had a language. In a way he lived at the end of history, where everything, indeed almost anything, was justified. So he could move easily, and personally, from place to place, from century to century, and he could forgive it all, which is what a truly great poet does.

                                                                             — Gerald Stern
                                                                                  Lambertville, New Jersey

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