{"id":2432,"date":"2021-02-20T11:32:57","date_gmt":"2021-02-20T11:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2432"},"modified":"2021-02-20T11:32:57","modified_gmt":"2021-02-20T11:32:57","slug":"the-barbarians-arrive-today-c-p-cavafy-translated-by-evan-jones-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2432","title":{"rendered":"The Barbarians Arrive Today C. P. Cavafy, translated by Evan Jones – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Traditore traduttore.\u2019 All translations involve distortion, dilution or both, and good translations of great poetry tease us with the desire to get closer to the original than any one version can bring us. Evan Jones\u2019s The Barbarians Arrive Today<\/em> gives all the canonical poems and a large number of unpublished ones (Jones calls them \u2018hidden\u2019) in English translation only, together with nine prose pieces. It\u2019s a valuable supplement to existing translations, for those who already know Cavafy, and a good point of entry for those who don\u2019t. There are masterstrokes in it that throw a brighter light on particular poems than any other versions I\u2019ve seen. There are inevitably disappointments, but a number of his versions will become my \u2018go to\u2019 poetic translations. Unfortunately you have to read quite far into the book before reaching these.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in the poems with (for Cavafy) contemporary settings that Jones most fully comes into his own. \u2018He Planned to Read\u2019, \u2018He Asked About the Quality\u2019, \u2018Two Young Men, Aged 23 or 24\u2019 \u2018The Street\u2019 and others give brief, thrillingly vivid glimpses of moments of overwhelming sexual desire or dazed fulfilment. They share an extreme sense of transience, even if the moment of loss that implicitly haunts them lies in an unimagined future. One where Jones scores a particular triumph is \u2018The Bandage\u2019. In this, the speaker recalls a visit by a man with a bandaged shoulder. He says that when this visitor reached for a photograph on a high shelf the bandage came loose, and the wound bled. The speaker retied the bandage, taking his time because he liked the sight of the blood. After the visitor had left, the speaker found a bit of bloody dressing on the floor and pressed it to his lips for a long time. Meticulously, almost pedantically detailing these actions and the visitor\u2019s apparent lie about how he came by the injury, Cavafy builds up a powerful sense of actively suppressed feelings which demand poetic release. Jones\u2019s masterstroke comes in the final line. Keeley and Sherrard translate this tamely and vaguely as \u2018the blood of love against my lips\u2019, Mendelsohn as \u2018the blood of love upon my lips\u2019 but Jones as \u2018the blood of longing<\/em> on my lips\u2019. With the word \u2018longing\u2019 the poem\u2019s implicit drama comes into sharper focus and finds explosive release. The last line resonates and lingers in the mind, and \u2013 as a great last line should \u2013 makes us replay the whole poem in our imaginations again and again.<\/p>\n

Against transience we have memory. At its most basic, there\u2019s the involuntary memory of the body, described in \u2018Return\u2019. Jones\u2019s translation of this beautifully intertwines lyrical symmetries with the more irregular cadences of urgent speech:<\/p>\n

Return often and take me, the loveliest
\nsensations return and take me \u2013
\nwhen memory of another\u2019s body awakens
\nand an aging passion runs through the blood;
\nwhen lips and skin remember,
\nand hands feel as if they touch again.<\/p>\n

\n

Return often and take me in the night,
\nwhen lips and skin remember \u2026<\/p>\n

In its very nature as a prayer for and evocation of involuntary memory, this poem goes beyond such memory, becoming an instance of that memorializing power of art that meant so much to Cavafy.<\/p>\n

Jones\u2019s book is less useful as a way in to the historical poems than to the contemporary ones. This is partly because of the lack of notes. Cavafy was steeped in Greek history and wrote about it in a way that assumes knowledge few non-Greek readers will have. One example is the poem titled \u2018Aemilianos Monae, Alexandrian, 628 \u2013 655 A. D.\u2019 Aemilianos speaks the first eight lines, telling us he\u2019ll craft \u2018an impressive suit of armour\u2019 out of words and body language, hiding his weakness, fear, traumas and vulnerability from \u2018vile men\u2019.\u00a0 Four lines by another speaker call this bluster, tell us that Aemilianos died in Sicily at twenty-seven and wonder whether he ever did craft that armour. We don\u2019t need to know more than the poem tells us for a certain pathos to come through, or to see the typical Cavafian preoccupation with vain intentions. However, we probably wonder why Cavafy specified that Aemilianos was Alexandrian and died in Sicily. The answer is in his dates. The Arabs conquered Alexandria and the Hellenistic kingdoms of the Middle East in 642 AD, when Aemilianos was fourteen. Knowing this sharpens the poignancy of his boast and fate. We see him as an exile or refugee whose fear of humiliation leads him to cultivate a self-protective image, and we see the irony of his choosing the metaphor of \u2018armour\u2019 to describe it. We also see his representative function: his poem marks the end of the Hellenistic world in the Middle East. Jones places it in a section called \u2018Portraits and Memorials\u2019, which ignores this representative function, but the lack of historical background also stops us seeing clearly the kind of person it portrays.<\/p>\n

Lack of contextual knowledge also limits understanding of the much more important \u2018In 200 B.C.\u2019 This begins with a quotation, printed as an epigraph by Jones: \u2018Alexander, son of Philip and all the Greeks excluding the Lakedaimonians…\u2019 The quotation is from a phrase that Plutarch tells us Alexander the Great caused to be inscribed on booty from his conquests when he sent it back to Greece. The Lakedaimonians \u2013 the Spartans \u2013 had refused to accompany his great expedition because, as Jones puts it,<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A countrywide
\ncampaign without a Spartan in command \u2013
\nwho would fear that?<\/p>\n

The longish first stanza considers the Spartan point of view, at first seeming to embrace it as a natural one for the foremost military power of the classical Greek world. Then two shorter stanzas draw the consequences. Pride in past supremacy has led the Spartans to become a backwater in the next phase of Greek history, not participating in Alexander\u2019s crushing defeat of Persia at Granicus, Issus and Erbil or the creation of the great new world of Hellenistic culture with its Greek-ruled kingdoms in Egypt, Syria and Persia:<\/p>\n

Exclude the Lakedaimonians from Granicus;
\nand from Issus; and the final
\nbattle, where the fearsome Persian army
\nat Erbil was swept away.<\/p>\n

The first level of irony in the poem is easy to grasp: it\u2019s directed against the Spartans by the speaker, looking back from a high point of Hellenistic culture 134 years after the battle of the Granicus. Already there\u2019s a subtle balance between such irony and a sense of pathos at what the Spartans have done to themselves. But the key to the poem \u2013 the point of its title \u2013 is a further<\/em> irony at the expense of the speaker<\/em>. In the year 200 BC the Hellenistic world was itself on the brink of defeat by Rome. The speaker reveals his own blindness even as he mocks that of the Spartans. This doubling of the irony expresses Cavafy\u2019s profound pessimism about how the course of events, the processes of history and time, expose illusions and make a mockery of aspirations. That puts it too simply though. This isn\u2019t the kind of crude, simple irony where A really means B. Nor is its gaze at human aspiration simply destructive. The interplay of mutually undercutting but equally partial perspectives releases complex ripples of reflection. However pig-headed it was and however much it\u2019s been wrong-footed by events, the attitude of the Spartans has an integrity that gives it a kind of dignity when compared with the frivolous-sounding complacency of the speaker in 200 BC. This dignity is more fully suggested in the outstanding \u2018In Sparta\u2019 (which unfortunately isn\u2019t one of Jones\u2019s better translations). However, the speaker isn\u2019t treated to simple ridicule either. When he celebrates<\/p>\n

Our influence, our ability
\nto adapt, a common language, Greek,
\ncarried forth to Bactriana, to the Indians<\/p>\n

he\u2019s celebrating a colossal cultural achievement, one that far outlasted Alexander\u2019s or the Romans\u2019 military power. Greek was the language of the Byzantine Empire \u2013 the part of the Roman empire that survived into the fifteenth century \u2013 and of course the language in which Cavafy wrote his poems. From this point of view, the date in the title suggests how long the inheritance has endured.<\/p>\n

Some of the best historical poems are essentially freestanding, of course, in a way that allows Jones the poet-translator to come into his own. One such is the exquisite \u2018Caesarion\u2019. In this, the speaker tells us he was idly reading a book of Ptolemaic inscriptions when he came on a brief mention of the supposed son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, murdered by Augustus. There follows a haunting reverie about this almost unknown youth, who becomes for Cavafy an incarnation and symbol of vulnerable, defeated beauty. The power of the poem depends on a shift between two styles, one detached and mildly cynical, the other lyrically rapt. Despite one or two jarring notes, Jones captures the shift effectively, sometimes departing from literal detail for the sake of a deeper truth to feeling:<\/p>\n

I would have put the book down but for a brief
\nand minor entry on King Caesarion
\nwhich caught my attention …<\/p>\n

Fleshed out in the depth of night,
\nmy lamp flickering \u2013
\nhow I wanted it to flicker \u2013
\nyou came into my room
\nand stood before me \u2013 as\u00a0 you stood
\nin conquered Alexandria,
\npale and tired, in complete sorrow \u2013
\nhoping those wicked men might pity you,
\nthey who hissed, \u2018One Caesar too many.\u2019<\/p>\n

Even more successful is his version of the great \u2018Myris, Alexandreia 340 AD\u2019, which also needs no more information than the poem itself holds. Here, the centre of interest is psychological. Set in a time of transition between paganism and Christianity, it gives a young pagan\u2019s account of attending the wake of his Christian beloved, the Myris of the title. Myris had belonged to a band of pleasure-loving young men, all pagans except for him, and had seemed completely in harmony with them except in a couple of trivial-seeming incidents. Now the speaker\u2019s presence causes hostility and embarrassment to Myris\u2019s Christian relatives. He himself is ill at ease. Grief at the loss of Myris in the present and future gradually gives way to a terror that he\u2019s also losing him in the past \u2013 the feeling that he never really knew Myris and therefore never really loved him or had his love. An abyss opens in the memory that is the last refuge against loss. The narrative arc brilliantly divides our attention between what the speaker feels and what he sees without really understanding it<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A strange
\nFeeling came over me. Somehow
\nI could feel Myris leaving my side;
\nI could feel that he was a Christian,
\nEntirely at home with his people<\/p>\n

The reader\u2019s contact with the speaker\u2019s emotion is piercingly direct, creating a shudder of sympathetic horror, but the intensity of his feelings blinds him to half of what we immediately understand. It\u2019s plainly not true that Myris was \u2018entirely at home with his people\u2019. Conceivably they actually knew nothing of his other life. More probably the fact that they did know something of it explains both their hostility to the speaker and the strenuousness of the efforts they are making now.\u00a0 The point is that neither side really had or knew Myris and now both have lost him, or, to put it differently, the divisions within Myris himself meant that he wasn\u2019t \u2018entirely at home\u2019 with either. Jones vividly transmits these tensions and shifts, making the poem live in our minds with great power, though his translation of the last three lines doesn\u2019t match the violent intensity of Cavafy\u2019s Greek.<\/p>\n

Like \u2018Myris\u2019, many of the historical poems deal with homosexual love but what more importantly links all the historical poems with the contemporary ones is their shared obsession with time and transience, the perishable nature of beauty, the volatility of feeling, the way time and event expose the illusions on which our emotional lives, decisions and actions are based. In the various conventional orderings of Cavafy\u2019s poems the interweaving of contemporary poems with historical ones creates a rich imaginative interplay between the two perspectives, of transience as lived in and transience as looked back on. I value this interplay of voices and experiences across time so I\u2019m uncertain about Jones\u2019s thematic reordering of the poems, but it does bring poems into new associations and perhaps therefore help one look at Cavafy in a slightly different way, as he suggests in his Afterward. For me, though, the essential and very real value of the book lies in its versions of individual poems, some of which are outstanding, and the way they make one see the individual poems in a new light.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Barbarians Arrive Today: Poems and Prose<\/em> by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Evan Jones. \u00a319.99. Carcanet. ISBN 978 1 78410 994-3<\/p>\n

I would like to thank David Cooke for permission to repost this review, first published in The High Window here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Traditore traduttore.\u2019 All translations involve distortion, dilution or both, and good translations of great poetry tease us with the desire to get closer to the original than any one version can bring us. Evan Jones\u2019s The Barbarians Arrive Today gives all the canonical poems and a large number of unpublished ones (Jones calls them \u2018hidden\u2019) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[168],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cavafy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2432"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2434,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432\/revisions\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}