NOT TEXT BUT TEXTURE:

C.P. CAVAFY’S POEMS UNREAD, UNFINISHED, UNWRITTEN

ABSTRACT

C.P. Cavafy often writes poems about poets and their poems. In many cases,
though, he fails to describe the poems he refers to, if he describes them at
all, in more than the most detached and general terms. A close reading of
these apparently vague accounts of the poetry of others, however, shows that
although Cavafy doesn’t describe that poetry he nevertheless communicates
its nature to his readers. In “Symeon” he does so by associating it with
known literary figures. In most other cases, especially as “That’s the One”
indicates, Cavafy’s poems about the poems others have written constitute
themselves the poems he is writing about. Such poems have a double exis-
tence: the very same text turns out to be both a poem by Cavafy himself and
a work of the fictional poets he is talking about.

The poet’s common tools are peculiarly—one might say, risking a mild paradox, emphatically—

absent from Cavafy’s verse. One looks in vain for erudite vocabulary, complex syntax or convo-

luted imagery, which is why his early Greek audience, brought up on the grandiloquence of

Palamas and Sikelianos (the two “national” poets of Greece during the first half of the twentieth

century), so often dismissed him as “prosaic” and “cerebral.” Yet Cavafy’s singular power to in-

duce his readers to feel the very moods he conjures in his poetry, to breathe directly the at-

mosphere he concocts, and to compel us to see in exquisite detail the images at which he no
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more than hints is as concrete as its sources still remain mysterious. W.H. Auden was aware of

that mystery but, unfortunately, he gave it a name: “What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that sur-

vives translation and excites?” he asked, “Something I can only call, most inadequately,” he an-

swered, “a tone of voice, a personal speech.” Inevitably, Cavafy’s readers have returned to Au-

den’s phrase again and again and the very name of the phenomenon has gradually been assumed

to be its explanation.

But the question is, what is it that generates Cavafy’s “tone of voice,” his “personal

speech”? It is undeniable that his similes are often childish:

VERSE The future’s days stand before us

like a row of little lighted candles—

golden, warm, and lively little candles.

Days gone by are left behind,

a gloomy line of burnt-out candles . . . (“Candles,” 1893/1899)1

His metaphors are elementary:

VERSE Half past midnight. Where did the time go.

Half past midnight. Where did the years go. (“Since Nine o’Clock,” 1917/1918)
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He scarcely uses adjectives, and those he does use he repeats over and over again. In “Kaisarion”

(1914/1918; trans. Keeley and Sherrard (1975), hereafter KS), we find a sarcastic account of the

banality of the language the Ptolemies chose for glorifying themselves on their public monu-

ments:

VERSE The lavish praise and flattery are much the same

for each of them. All are brilliant,

glorious, mighty, benevolent;

everything they undertake is full of wisdom.

As for the women of their time, the Berenices and Cleopatras,

they too, all of them, are marvelous.

But exactly the same can be said of Cavafy’s own language for the many young lovers who in-

habit his poems: they are all young, handsome, attractive, delicate, sensitive, sensual, and erotic

but not much else; everything they undertake usually fails; and they often die (as for the women,

they are not there at all). It is almost as if Cavafy wants his images to lack clear contours or spe-

cific content. And when, in “Kaisarion,” the boring Ptolemaic inscriptions finally give way, the

vision of Caesar and Cleopatra’s son, murdered when he was seventeen by Octavian, that re-

places them is really no more than generic—indeed, to use Cavafy’s own word, it is indefinite:

VERSE Ah, there, you have arrived, with your indefinite

charm. History contains only

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a very few lines about you,

and so I molded you more freely in my mind.

I made you handsome and sensitive.

My art gives your face

a dreamy, attractive beauty.

No other poet has written so many love poems about beautiful young men about whom he has

little more to say than that they are beautiful and young. People, objects, and landscapes enter

Cavafy’s verse with the lightest step, the most indefinite charm. In this connection, it is important

to note the word-play in the Greek words “ἀόριστη” (aoristi /indefinite) and “ἱστορία” (istoria/

history) in the first two lines of the passage above (these are the full poem’s central lines ). Each

word is an anagram (more precisely, an anaphone) of the other. The anaphony allows Cavafy to

perform what he is telling us explicitly: that the areas of history that lend themselves most to po-

etic inspiration are those in which the details are vague—vague details that are sometimes coun-

terbalanced by very specific accounts of the historical setting within which the indefiniteness of

events arises.

But much else is indefinite in Cavafy’s poetry. It is hard to know, for instance, what one

can imagine while eavesdropping on a silversmith who is guiding a client around his shop and

describes one of his works in “Craftsman of Wine Bowls” (1903/1921):

VERSE On this wine bowl – pure silver,

made for the house of Heraclides,

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where good taste is the rule –

notice these graceful flowers, the streams, the thyme.

In the center I have put this beautiful young man,

naked, erotic, one leg still dangling

in the water. (trans. KS)

Cavafy’s vagueness is unmatched, and yet his poems are thoroughly moving and irresistibly

evocative. How to account for it?

No single answer, no master key, can resolve Cavafy’s subtle polyphony. But we can

learn something about it from a family of particularly peculiar “prosaic” poems, whose some-

times overpowering effect forces the question upon us.

We begin with a poem set in the fifth century of our era, in Syria. A sophist—in part a

philosopher, in part a literary critic, in part a rhetorician—has been asked to say what he thinks

of the poetry of a certain Lamon. Both poet and sophist are fictional, characters in Cavafy’s

“Symeon” (1917), named after the famous Christian hermit who spent as long as thirty-six years

on a small platform at the top of a tall column. The sophist’s first answer, in the poem’s opening

lines, can’t fail but remind us of the words most professors have used, in some version or other,

at least once or twice:

VERSE Yes, of course, I am familiar with his new poems,

Beirut is absolutely wild about them.

But I will read them carefully another day.

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Unlike many professors, our sophist is not too busy to read the poems; something else is the mat-

ter:

VERSE I can’t today, I feel strangely unsettled.

Still, mindful of his reputation, the sophist can’t just let it go at that; he knows that some further

comment is required of him, and he duly offers it; urbanity prevails:

VERSE His Greek is certainly more learned than Libanius’s.

But better even than Meleager? I don’t think so.

But the sophist really is unsettled; his troubles shatter his polished façade, take over, and sweep

away both Lamon’s poetry and its criticism:

VERSE Ah, Mebis, why bother with Libanius, and books,

and all these trifles! . . . Yesterday, Mebis, by chance,

I found myself at the foot of Symeon’s pillar.

I squeezed in among the Christians,

who prayed and worshiped silently,

and bowed before him. But, since I am not a Christian,

my spirit couldn’t be, like theirs, serene—

and so I shook from head to foot in agony,

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and I was horrified, dismayed, and aghast.

Ah, stop smiling. For thirty-five years—think of it—

Winter and summer, night and day, for thirty-five years

atop a pillar, he lives and suffers, and bears witness.

Before you and I were born—I am twenty-nine,

and you, I think, are younger—

before you and I were born—try to imagine that—

Symeon climbed up that pillar

and there he has remained, face-to-face with God.

My mind isn’t fit for work today. –

The sophist is perfectly aware of the difference between Symeon’s silent suffering and the noisy

squabbling of Beirut’s intellectuals, between spiritual and social climbing, between an inarticu-

late faith that gives consistent shape to a whole life and a fluent cleverness that sees in language

primarily a tool of accommodation—but his clarity lasts only a moment: life must go on. So, the

sophist collects himself, and the poem closes with his return to the everyday:

VERSE Still, Mebis, it might be better to let it be known

that no matter what other sophists may claim

I, for my part, consider Lamon to be

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the foremost poet of Syria.

Cavafy was always fascinated by characters who fail, for various reasons, to realize their

vision of a better life and inevitably end up back on the path from which, for only a moment,

they were ready to swerve. His attitude toward them is usually taken to be ironic, contrasting no-

ble aspiration with vulgar compromise. For example, in “Orophernis” (1904/1916, trans. KS), its

eponymus hero, a wastrel whose beauty partly redeems him in Cavafy’s eyes, tries for once to

behave as his noble ancestry dictates but his failure is the object of Cavafy’s sarcasm:

VERSE For a little while he gave up lechery and drink,

and ineptly, half dazed,

tried to start an intrigue,

do something, come up with a plan,

and he failed pitifully and came to nothing.

The sophist of “Symeon” is one of these characters. Although he sees that Symeon’s passion

dwarfs Lamon’s verse and is moved by it, he returns to his earlier path and does at last just what

he was asked to do at first: he issues a public verdict, whose brilliant evasion of a direct compari-

son between Lamon and Meleager shows him at his most worldly, cunning, and astute. This

doesn’t seem to be a man Cavafy admires.

Cavafy’s ironic contempt might suggest that, set beside Symeon’s real, extra-literary suf-

fering, poetry is in fact a mere trifle. And so it would, if it was not a poem that says that poetry is
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a trifle—a curiously self-undermining task for a poet to undertake. Why waste your time writing

a poem that says that writing poems is a waste of time? Because, Cavafy answers, poetry is not at

all a waste of time. But in order to hear his answer we must realize that Cavafy’s irony is not ex-

hausted on the sophist’s easy accommodation. His irony lives on, and its afterlife, far from sup-

porting the poem’s obvious message, puts it in doubt and in the end asserts and reinforces the

power of poetry and art. It also turns out to be a much kinder and more generous irony than we

often suppose it to be.

Within the fictional world of the poem, the sophist admits that Symeon’s life, which he

describes for Mebis, obliterates the poetry of Lamon, yet in the end chooses to align himself with

Lamon and not with Symeon. The reason Cavafy disapproves of his choice can’t be that he be-

lieves that poetry is inferior to religious passion, for Cavafy’s devotion to his craft was absolute

and far deeper than his religious commitments, whatever these may have been. If his reason,

then, is not poetry itself, what could it be? It is tempting to say that it must be the kind of poetry

Lamon writes. But what is that? The poem itself seems to tell us nothing about it: how can we

possibly judge the notional work of a fictional poet? Only, I suggest, if we follow the detour to

which we are led by Cavafy’s habitual indirection, his awareness, as Nabokov (1996) writes in

Pale Fire, that “this/[is] the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this: not text, but texture.”

The poem’s filigree pattern, its lacework structure, where Cavafy’s own poetry resides, contains

the poetry of Lamon within it.

Already popular in Beirut, Lamon knows the added value of the sophist’s endorsement,

which he seems to solicit. To readers of Cavafy, such an attitude can’t fail to call to call to mind

Lamon’s rhyming counterpart, the sculptor Damon in “The Retinue of Dionysus” (1903/1907).
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While fashioning his greatest work so far, Damon can think only of the rewards it will bring him:

on the fee the King of Syracuse has promised to pay him, which will allow him to live “like a

wealthy man” and take an active part in public life. Damon is the “most accomplished” sculptor

in the Peloponnese, just as Lamon’s poetry is wildly popular in Beirut. The sophist admits that

Lamon’s Greek is even more learned than the famously learned Greek of Libanius, the fourth-

century rhetorician and sophist who wrote a prose of staggering complexity in his effort to recap-

ture the lost simplicity of Attic prose. Still, he is weaker than Meleager, although the sophist—

political creature that he is—doesn’t insist on it and doesn’t repeat his original judgment from his

official statement. Meleager’s epigrams—most of them about love of women and boys, some

about death and loss, several quite obscene—are among the most subtle, complex and learned

works in the

Greek anthology, full of allusion, word-play and self-reference; they are also—in contrast,

say, to those poems of Callimachus with which Cavafy was familiar2—among the most moving

and affecting.3

Cavafy is not simply dropping names here; he is giving us important information. He

uses the sophist’s reaction to suggest that Lamon’s writing, formally competent and technically

accomplished as it is (in that respect like Libanius’ prose), is (in contrast to Meleager’s poetry)

lacking in emotion, although he is also not simply making the hackneyed point that poetry that is

only technically adept is second-rate. He pits Lamon’s fluent verse against the wordless worship

surrounding Symeon’s silent suffering, which renders even this accomplished rhetorician dumb:

the sophist is stunned by Symeon, and his account becomes unpolished and rough, and his syntax

irregular. The poem contains a double contrast: on the one hand, the sophist’s eloquent praise of
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Lamon’s eloquent verse; on the other, his inarticulate admiration of Symeon’s inarticulate pas-

sion.

But the sophist goes wrong in both respects. Symeon is not obviously to be preferred.

Passion that is merely mute is not clearly superior to verse that is only elegant. The sophist’s ac-

count of Symeon lacks a clear point, which is why he speaks of it in relatively artless prose and

why he retreats from it to the safety of Lamon’s cold verse. His words become poetry only when

Cavafy presents these two distinct sorts of artlessness in his own artful manner. Poetry material-

izes only when the separation of technical virtuosity from dumb emotion, which Cavafy de-

plores, emerges through his masterful conjunction of delicate technique and passionate intensity.

This combination, which also brings together at least two other distinctions Cavafy was

suspicious of—Asia versus Greece, and paganism versus Christianity—is one of the many ver-

sions of the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious mixture that yields Cavafy’s highest term of

praise: “Hellenic.” The final irony of this poem is that, despite appearances, its hero is not really

Symeon but Meleager—or rather Meleager’s modern equivalent, Cavafy himself, the poet whose

learning serves his appreciation of passion and whose emotions are tempered by the discipline of

craft. This is a deep and constructive irony. It makes art out of disparate elements and holds

them in a kind of suspension. It is close to the type of irony Maria Boletsi has called

“reluctant” (2014, 70–74), an irony that refuses to identify fully with either pole of any absolute

distinction, whether between reason and passion, technique and inspiration, or (Boletsi’s main

concern) “civilization” and “barbarism.” For example, in a young man who, like everyone who

lived at the edges of the Greek world, represents a mixture of Syrian, migrated Greek, Armenian

and Mede, it finds the face of one of the purest and most beautiful aristocrats of classical Athens,
12
Plato’s Charmides (“In a Town of Osroene,” 1916/1917). It composes an “Epitaph for Anti-

ochus, King of Commagene” (1923, trans. KS), another out-of-the-way little kingdom, which

concludes:

VERSE He was just, wise, courageous.

In addition he was that best of all things, Hellenic—

mankind has no quality more precious:

everything beyond that belongs to the gods.

This is the same irony that allows, famously, Cavafy to say of himself, “I am Hellenic—careful:

not Greek [Hellene] nor Hellenizing—but Hellenic. Very Hellenic!”4 It understands that the

greatest moments of Hellenism have always been its least insular, when it has acknowledged its

multiplicity, adapted to new conditions, and adopted new configurations; when it was at home in

many places at the same time and refused to identify itself with a fixed, exclusive (and equally

illusive) set of features. These features are specific versions of the general characteristics Boletsi

identifies, more abstractly, in her discussion the irony of the last line of Cavafy’s “Waiting for the

Barbarians,” “They were, those people, a kind of solution: “The doubt encapsulated in the phrase

“a kind of” betrays a hesitation that can be viewed as a sign of negotiation between the two tradi-

tions, 5 instead of a straightforward replacement of one with the other” (68). It is an irony, final-

ly, that accepts even the sophist’s weakness with a kind of capacious generosity. What else can a

man of mere words do, the poem seems to ask, when Symeon’s unaccountable life robs him of

everything he knows and relies on and reduces him to babbling but return to the everyday and
13
take up his life again where he had left it? It may be both sad and funny that the sophist is like

that—like most of us, that is—but Cavafy takes absolutely no malicious pleasure in it.

“Symeon” belongs to a family of poems about poems that have almost nothing to say

about the poems they are about. They are, in that respect, typical of Cavafy’s vague descriptions

of his subject-matter generally. But what these poems show, surprisingly, is that Cavafy’s vague-

ness, far from being an obstacle to a strong poetic effect, is one of its canniest means. Consider,

for example, the poem “That’s the One” (1898/1909):

VERSE Unknown in Antioch, a stranger from Edessa6 produces a stream,

a torrent of writing. And, finally—there—it’s all done.

The last hymn is complete. That is the consummation

of his work—eighty-three poems in all. But so much writing

has exhausted the poet—all that versification,

the strain of following the rules of Greek formation;

his life has now turned flat, dull, totally unexciting.

But one thought all at once removes his desolation:

The wondrous phrase, “That’s the one,”

the phrase that Lucian heard once, in a dream.

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In The Dream, or Lucian’s Career, the great Syrian author of the second century A.D.,

tells us that he once dreamed that Sculpture and Culture competed for him. Culture won because,

among other things, she told him that if he devoted himself to her he would become so famous

that people everywhere would recognize and point him out to one another (Harmon 1921, 218–

224). Not that our nameless poet, sadly, is likely to hear that wondrous phrase. As one critic

claims, writing is not “a need of his soul, but an exhausting and boring job, fueled by his ambi-

tion” (Ilinskaya 1993, 155)—a view she supports by appealing to Cavafy himself, who described

the poet to a friend as a “fake”: “Art was not for him a need, a love, but only a means to an end.

His writing, instead of giving him the joy, the delight of creating new, unknown sounds was a

toil, an imposed chore of versification” (Ilinskaya 1993, 156).

This is certainly a reasonable interpretation and, in the end, it proves correct. But how do

we get there? How do we know, since we know nothing about it apart from its bulk, that this is a

philistine’s poetry? It won’t do to say that this is because he is thinking of the fame he hopes to

achieve: that, after all, was centrally responsible for Lucian’s own decision to become an author

and not a sculptor. To think that Cavafy is here expressing his contempt for “the social aspects of

artistic creation” without showing what’s wrong with such an approach neither explains the

poem’s persistent resonance nor saves it from being yet another obvious illustration of the shop-

worn idea that poetry without inspiration is no good—an idea that “Symeon” has already com-

plicated for us. To come to terms with the poem, to see exactly what it is that it says and why

saying it is an accomplishment and not just more versification, as it would otherwise be, we need

to understand what justifies Cavafy’s calling the poet a “fake,” why he feels he can say that poet-

ry is for him only a means to an end and a toil, why it is appropriate for him to take an ironic
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stand toward the poet’s hope of hearing the words once promised, and delivered, to Lucian. We

need to read once again for texture, not text. We must focus on what Nietzsche (1992, 679) called

“that filigree art of grasping and comprehending in general, those fingers for nuances, that psy-

chology of ‘looking round the corner’” of his own writing, which is also the very art of Cavafy’s

poetry.

The metaphor of “looking round the corner” is exactly right here. If we look at the poem,

so to speak, from the side, not so much at its content but at its performance, we will find our

questions, as my rather forced translation tries to show, answered, again, within the poem itself.

Its rhyme-scheme—abc/dccd/cba—is extraordinarily tight. It is almost artificially formal, a

pyramidal structure whose apex is formed by the terms “versification” and “Greek formation.”

Their position, along with the fact that they represent the most common rhymes of the poem (c . .

. cc . . .c), makes the activities they name absolutely central to Cavafy’s poem. And that, along

with the fact that its tightly regimented verses—every one matching exactly the number of sylla-

bles in its rhyming counterparts—shows them to have been equally as important to the poems of

Cavafy’s nameless poet and his main concern.

In other words, “That’s the One” in fact contains, it is, a sample of the poetry it seems to

say nothing about! Instead of alluding to Libanius and Meleager, Cavafy now shows us directly,

if we know where to look, the kind of poetry he talks about. Such poetry, he is saying, explains,

at least at first sight, the irony in the Edessene poet’s ambition: his poetry fails to fulfill it, and he

remains “unknown”; the poem’s very first word remains his most accurate description and the

rest of the poem shows why. The idea that poetic recognition cannot come from works that are

merely technically accomplished has been transformed and is no longer shopworn, communicat-
16
ed as it is through a work, which in the most technically accomplished way, creates the merely

technically accomplished works it disdains.

The irony of “That’s the One” is not limited to its last stanza, as we might have thought at

first. What gives that irony a point is what I have called its afterlife, which shows why the poet’s

dream is vain by presenting an instance of this poor man’s poetry even as we are asking where it

has gone wrong. In its afterlife, Cavafy’s irony plays more than the negative role to which the

last stanza confines it: at actually creates the object the poem discusses. There is no lack of in-

formation here; Cavafy does not expect his readers to take his word for the poet’s shortcomings;

he gives us the kind of poem he scorns. In a most remarkable manner, Cavafy has created,

through a single poem, two distinct works of art: read as the work of the unknown poet, a poem

that is merely prosaic; read as Cavafy’s own, an inspired accomplishment.

In a most intriguing, and ironic, manner, “That’s the One,” illustrates, before it ever ap-

peared, Borges’ famous tongue-in-cheek account of the effort of a twentieth-century author to

rewrite—not to copy but to produce anew—Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Borges 1998, 88–95).7

Borges cites a passage from Cervantes’ Don Quixote8 and a passage from Pierre Menard’s—each

one consisting of exactly the same words, and argues that while Cervantes’ praise of truth as,

among other things, the daughter of history “is mere rhetorical praise of history.” When Menard,

“on the other hand,” writes that truth is the daughter of history, “the idea,” appearing at the same

time as William James’ Pragmatism, “is staggering.” As for their style, Menard’s is “archaic . . .

somewhat affected,” while Cervantes writes “the Spanish of his time with complete

naturalness” (Borges 1998, 94). Could Borges then be, after all, right when, in examination of

Kafka’s precursors, he made the apparently counterintuitive claim “that each writer creates his
17
precursors” (Borges 1965, 108)? And Borges continues: “Kafka’s idiosyncrasy, in greater or less-

er degree, is present in each of [his precursors’] writings, but if Kafka had not written we would

not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist.” Had Borges not written would his idiosyncrasy

have been present in Cavafy’s poem?

Here, once again, is Nabokov, commenting on Gogol: “We are faced by the remarkable

phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures” (1971, 78). That, for

Cavafy, is exactly the power of art, which gives his own art its power. And the magic of that

power also transforms Cavafy’s own ironic attitude toward the unknown poet: We now have one

his poems, after all: his struggle has not been completely in vain: he is the one. But, of course,

his poem was made for him by Cavafy, who also, perhaps even more than his fictional poet, is

“the one” the poem is about.

“Symeon” and “That’s the One” are about poems that have supposedly been written but

not read by us. “For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610" (1915/1917) is about a poem that has not

yet been written at all. A poet, Raphael, is being asked to compose an epitaph for Ammonis, an-

other poet who has just died. Raphael, the speaker says, is best suited for composing the kind of

“tasteful and refined” (καλαίσθητον και λεῖον) verse that will do justice (ὡς ἀρµόζει) to their

friend. The speaker’s language is itself tasteful and refined, partly in katharevousa, the purist

idiom elements of which were used by the higher and middle classes until the mid-twentieth cen-

tury in Greece. But the speaker, as if forgetting his confidence in Raphael’s talent, goes on to

give him detailed instructions. Up to this point, the tastefulness Cavafy’s poem both values and

expresses, seems to refer appropriately to Ammonis’ own poetry. Yet once it is settled that

Raphael will make it his subject (“Of course you will speak about his poetry”—Βἐβαια θα πεῖς
18
για τα ποιήµατά του) the subject shifts abruptly, as Cavafy’s dash indicates, to Ammonis’ beauty,

that “delicate beauty” which turns out to be what the allusions to elegance and grace were also

about all along. And now a new feeling and a new form of expression enter the poem. The purist

elements recede as the speaker adopts a more consistently demotic Greek and the poem contrasts

the two idioms as it also contrasts Greek with Coptic (the native tongue of Raphael, Ammonis,

and their friends), elegance with passion, technique—once again—with feeling. Raphael’s full

“mastery” (µαστοριά) is needed here. His Greek, though “always musical and graceful” (πάντοτε

ὡραία και µουσικά), is still “a foreign tongue.” And it is in that foreign tongue that Ammonis’

friends’ “sorrow and love” must find a place: Raphael must “pour” his “Egyptian” feeling into

his delicate Greek. But the verb translated as “pour” (χύσε) is also a common Greek word for

“ejaculate,” which gives palpable physical substance to the more refined expression of the image

in the verse and complicates to no end the polished elegance originally requested for the epitaph.

A mixture of Greek delicacy and Egyptian passion, poetic refinement and passionate sensuality,

the poem must reflect Ammonis’ own mixture, which Cavafy here calls “Alexandrian”: it must

show, in the end, that “an Alexandrian is writing about an Alexandrian.”

However appropriate, this reading, even as it draws attention to Cavafy’s canny language

and his resonant last verse, leaves the poem no more alive than Ammonis himself; it doesn’t ex-

plain how by the end of the poem Ammonis’ death has somehow become—as it has—our own

loss, how his image has been fixed in our mind. In order to see how the poem produces its effect,

we must realize that the speaker’s instructions to Raphael, as presented by Cavafy, actually con-

stitute Ammonis’ epitaph: when we have read the poem, we have also read the epitaph itself.

Cavafy creates the epitaph even as he refers to it as an unwritten poem and he has given it every
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feature that his speaker has requested. Ammonis has been actually immortalized just as his

friends wanted—in terms both moderate and fiery—whether or not Raphael ever composed his

verses, with whatever success, in some fictional world.

An almost alchemical transformation of imagination into reality takes place in the alem-

bic of Cavafy’s verse. What better place to watch that transformation, then, than in “According to

the Formulas of Ancient Greco-Syrian Sorcerers” (1931), which actually appeals to magic in or-

der to bring such a transformation about:

VERSE “Is there some potion, distilled

from magic herbs,” a man—both sensual and refined—asked,

“is there some potion made according to the formulas

of ancient Greco-Syrian sorcerers,

which, even for one day (if that’s as long as its

power lasts) or even for a shorter time,

could bring my twenty-third year

back to me; bring back to me my friend

when he was twenty-two—bring back his beauty and his love.

Is there some potion made according

to the formulas of ancient Greco-Syrian sorcerers,

which, as it returns me to the past,

20
could also bring back our little room to me.”

In this monologue, a man wishes that a magic potion could bring back his youth, his

lover, and the room they shared with each other. Again, there are no details—nothing more than

platitudes, at any rate: the man wants to be twenty-three once again, together with the beautiful

boy of twenty-two who loved him; their room was small: that is as vague as poetry can get. And

yet the poem is somehow strangely and sadly poignant. I am sure that is partly because, although

his speaker is asking a question, Cavafy omits question marks altogether, which suggests that the

man is already resigned to the fact that no such potion exists. But, through his sadness, the frag-

ments of the past the speaker cannot bring back for himself are transformed into reality for us.

Although he may not—can not—know it, this “aesthete” has created a real image of his past for

the poem’s audience. The content of that image is vague and lacks vivid detail. But the man’s

attitude toward it is richly textured: his quiet resignation and the very vagueness of his image in-

dicate how distant that past has become for him. He is aware of that distance but, as he mourns

its loss, his past, magically, is made concrete and plangent for us. His sadness, his grief, shows

that it is still living within him, even though he may not himself realize it. Cavafy’s verse out-

does any potion made according to the formulas of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians. His irony is,

once again, kind and generous. It gives poetry the power of magic, transforming fragments of the

dead past into present feeling and, so transformed, vivid, whole, and alive.

The metaphorical fragments of the past of “Greco-Syrian Sorcerers” become literal—

fragments of a broken inscription—in “During the Month of Athyr” (1917): 9

21
VERSE I can just barely read the writing on the ancient stone.

“Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.” I can discern a “So[u]l.”

“During the mon[th] of Athyr” “Leuciu[s] went t[o sl]eep.”

Where there is mention of his age “He lived to be,”

the Kappa Zeta10 tells me a young man went to sleep.

Within the damaged part I see “[H]im . . . Alexandrian.”

Then there are three extremely mutilated lines—

though I can still make out some words—“our tear[s]” and “pain,”

then “tears” again, and “mourned by [u]s his [f]riends.”

I think that Leucius, greatly loved, caused many a friend to weep.

During the month of Athyr Leucius went to sleep.

My translation is stilted, and takes great liberties with the penultimate verse, which, in Greek,

rhymes “sleep” with “loved.” But the closing rhyme is crucial, and without it the poem fails to

make its point. Literally, “During the Month of Athyr” gives us fragments of an inscription;

metaphorically, it gives us fragments of a life—in form, except for its iambic meter (and the final

couplet), it seems closer to a scholarly paper than to a poem. But Leucius is not just anybody:

like Ammonis, he too belongs to the ethnic and religious mixture Cavafy’s poetry celebrates. The

inscription is written in the Greek of paganism but recalls a young man who dies a Christian

death during a month named for an Egyptian goddess, deeply mourned by his friends, some of

whom were certainly his lovers. Leucius, the inscription tells us is, like Ammonis, an Alexandri-
22
an. And the fragments of his life—like the fragments of his tomb’s inscription, two of which (in

the third line) cease to be fragments and, united, form the poem’s last verse—are put together

and turned into poetry by means of the closing rhyming couplet, which confirms that these frag-

ments, isolated as they seem to be, have been transformed into the materials of composition. The

pieces are molded into a full epitaph, a full life, by becoming parts of a poem.

Leucius’ epitaph, although it did not survive, was once complete. “Darius” (1917/1920,

trans. KS, modified), by contrast, concerns a poem that was never finished—not as originally

planned within the world of the work, at any rate:

VERSE Phernazes the poet is at work

on the crucial part of his epic:

how Darius, son of Hystaspes,

took over the Persian kingdom.

(It’s from him, Darius, that our glorious king,

Mithridates, Dionysus, Noble Father, descends.)11

But this calls for serious thought: Phernazes has to analyze

the feelings Darius must have had:

arrogance, maybe, and intoxication? No—more likely

a certain insight into the vanities of greatness.

The poet thinks deeply about the question.

But his servant, rushing in,

23
cuts him short to announce very important news:

the war against the Romans has begun:

most of our army has crossed the borders.

The poet is dumbfounded. What a disaster!

How can our glorious king,

Mithridates, Dionysus, Noble Father,

bother about Greek poems now?

In the middle of a war—imagine, Greek poems!

Phernazes gets all worked up. What a bad break!

Just when he was sure to distinguish himself

with his Darius, sure to make

his envious critics shut up once and for all.

What a setback, terrible setback to his plans.

And if it’s only a setback, that wouldn’t be too bad.

But can we really consider ourselves safe in Amisos?

The town isn’t very well fortified,

and the Romans are the most awful enemies.

Are we, Cappadocians, really a match for them?

24
Is it conceivable?

Are we to compete with the legions?

Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us!

But through all his nervousness, all the turmoil,

the poetic idea keeps coming round insistently:

arrogance and intoxication—that’s the most likely, of course:

arrogance and intoxication are what Darius must have felt.

Phernazes, a court poet—a creature of politics, intrigue, and ambition, not yet quite suc-

cessful—is composing an epic poem intended to flatter his patron by likening him to the Great

King of Persia, whom Mithridates claimed as his ancestor, in the hope of winning his King’s fa-

vor once and for all. But Phernazes is in a tight spot: he has come to the point where he needs to

explain what prompted Darius to take over the throne of the Persian Empire four hundred years

earlier. His first thought is that Darius, who came to power through treachery and murder, was

moved by “arrogance and intoxication,” by blind ambition; but that is not a parallel that Mithri-

dates, who cheated and murdered his own way to the throne, is likely to appreciate. And so cun-

ning Phernazes abruptly blocks that line of thought and tries out a more serviceable interpreta-

tion: “More likely a certain insight into the vanities of greatness.”

Just as he seems to settle on this diplomatic version, Phernazes finds out that Mithridates

has gone to war against Rome. The poet’s ambitions for success at court—a petty version of Dar-

ius’ and Mithridates’ own—are dashed. Worse, he fears that a Roman victory will endanger not
25
just his status but his very life; the poet appears to have no more time for Greek poems than his

own king: “Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.” And yet, despite his own worst intentions,

Phernazis proves better than he seems. While, earlier, poetry was his means for social advance-

ment, he now becomes its instrument. Personified, the active agent for whom Phernazis has be-

come a mere vessel, “the poetic idea keeps coming round insistently: / arrogance and intoxica-

tion—that’s the most likely, of course: / arrogance and intoxication are what Darius must have

felt.” No wonder Phernazes had not succeeded at court; he was more of a poet than he knew.

Through one stroke of Cavafy’s pen, the one genuine poetic thought Phernazes has shows that

his artistic sense is stronger than his own arrogance and intoxication. It reveals what really

moved both kings; it completes Phernazes’ poem on Darius; and, in a final ironic twist, it trans-

forms it from a long, unfinished epic into a polished, pithy epigram, which carries with it a dis-

tant echo of Callimachus.

In these poems, it is as if things—in this case other poems—that belong to a world out-

side Cavafy’s verse are filled out, perfected and even created by his art. The idea that the every-

day world supplies Cavafy only with fragments of life, pieces of ideas, sensations and experi-

ences, or incomplete plans, which are then completed through his verse is central to his work. He

seems to say as much in “I’ve Brought to Art” (1921):

VERSE I am in a contemplative mood. I’ve brought to Art

sensations and desires – Some things half-seen,

faces, or lines; some hazy memories

of loves cut short. Let me submit to her.

26
She knows how to give shape to Beauty’s Form;

almost imperceptibly completing life,

joining impressions together joining the days.

That is a poetics that seems perfectly illustrated by another short poem, “Distant” (1914):

VERSE I would like to speak of this memory . . .

but it’s become so faint . . . it seems like nothing –

because it is so distant, back in the years when I was still a boy.

Skin as if made of jasmine . . .

that August—was it in August? – evening . . .

I can barely remember the eyes: they were, I seem to think, deep blue . . .

Ah yes, deep blue: a sapphire blue.

But something is not quite right here. In “I’ve Brought to Art,” Cavafy portrays himself

as his art’s servant, literally carrying fragments of life to it and letting it put them together into a

coherent whole. Yet “Art” is not an agent—it is Cavafy himself who uses art in order to give his

hazy memories the definite shape of beauty. The poem seems to put life on one side and art on

the other; but both the life and the art are Cavafy’s own, and they are one with his poetry. The

“fragments” of Leucius’ epitaph do not exist outside “During the Month of Athyr”: they are inte-

gral parts of Leucius’ only epitaph—Cavafy’s poem—and once there, they are not fragments at
27
all. Raphael never composed his poem according to the advice he is offered in “For Ammonis”:

the advice constitutes the lines of the epitaph itself. The “faint memory” of “Distant” gradually

takes the most definite shape—the shape of Beauty’s Form—as we hear the speaker first say that

he can hardly remember his lover’s eyes, then make a tentative guess, go on to a definite state-

ment and, finally, give the most exact specification of their color, recalling it perfectly and bring-

ing it directly into the present, no longer distant at all. The memory may be incomplete—eyes,

skin, perhaps the August evening (what else could any memory be, anyway?)—but it becomes

almost physically palpable. Both its original faintness and its final clarity turn out to be parts, and

effects, of the poetry. It is the poetry itself that creates what it pretends not to remember.

And so “I’ve Brought to Art” turns out to be in the end as ironic as “Distant.” Half-seen

things, hazy memories, lines, faces, desires, sensations—they don’t exist independently of the art

that orders them and makes them whole, through an activity that is itself as vague and shadowy

as its materials. How exactly does art shape Beauty’s Form? How does it complete life? Every-

thing the poem describes is indefinite. But the activity it manifests, which places indistinct mate-

rials within the realm of art and art’s independent force within Cavafy’s control, is a precise as-

sertion of his ability, through his writing, to bring into being, things to which, in his writing, he

can only merely allude. That is just what happens in “Their Beginning” (1915/1921):

VERSE Their unlawful pleasure reached

its consummation. They rose from the mattress,

and dress themselves in a hurry without speaking.

they leave the house separately, stealthily; and as they

28
walk rather uneasily down the street it looks as if

they feel that something about them betrays

what kind of bed they lay on only a little while ago.

And yet, how the artist’s life has been enriched.

Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, or years later,

the daring verses whose beginning was here will come to him.

Here we are promised a poem—“the daring verses”—that has not yet been written. And yet,

where these verses had their beginning is also exactly where they meet their end: by the time we

read the poet’s self-confident prediction that they will come in the future, we have just finished

reading them—these are themselves the promised daring verses

Let me close with a poem that brings several of these poems together. Its title is “Painted”

(1914/1915):

VERSE My work is a matter of concern to me; I am very fond of it.

But composing has been slow today, it has discouraged me.

The day has affected me. It’s growing

darker all the time. Nothing but wind and rain.

I’d much rather see than speak.

So now, in this picture, I am looking

at a beautiful boy lying down beside a spring;

29
he seems exhausted from running.

What a beautiful child; what a divine noon has

taken hold of him and is about to put him to sleep. —

I remain that way a long time, sitting and looking.

And, in art again, I rest from its service.

It is difficult to know what to say about this little poem.12 There is, of course, its complex first

line, which turns poetry more into an occupation (ἐργασία) than a calling and cannot be recited,

at least in Greek, without the very fastidiousness it expresses. The picture of the beautiful boy

connects this poem with others that touch on similar themes: visual works of art that feature fig-

ures like “a young Hermes,” a “handsome youth, naked, erotic,” Orophernis, and many others

are common in Cavafy’s work. The last verse confirms his aestheticism. The rest seems im-

possibly prosaic, even by Cavafy’s standards: apart from the hackneyed personification of the

“divine” noon, there are no figures of speech at all; the rhyme-scheme is so haphazard that it ap-

pears inept; the description of the beautiful boy is intolerably vague. The writing is so “cerebral”

that one can see why it doesn’t seem, even perhaps to its own creator, an object of passion but

only a matter of concern. Why, then, has “Painted” haunted and fascinated me for close to forty

years?

Because, it has gradually dawned on me, this poem can’t exist. Written in the first person

and in the present tense, it is being narrated simultaneously with the events it describes. The dis-

couraged poet tells us that he has stopped writing poetry and is looking instead at the picture of

the beautiful boy—but he is also doing so at the very moment that he is writing this poem. The
30
single “I” of the poem is both looking at the picture instead of writing and writing about looking

at the picture instead of looking at it. That is impossible and haunting, ironic and fascinating.

I now think this poem, which comes into being by effacing itself, stands for Cavafy’s po-

etry as a whole. While it insists on its status as poetry, it is bereft of the obvious trappings con-

sidered, especially when it was first composed, essential to poetry. But once we look around the

corner and read for texture, not text, the poem’s prosaic language proves not a shortcoming but a

means to drive that point home. Only by being literal can “Painted” be a metaphor for Cavafy’s

art, whose power—like the poem he pretends not to be writing—remains with him even as he

turns away from it. His art is so close to him that we can’t tell whether he thinks he is its master

or its servant. The poem opens by putting him in charge of his art (“my work”: η εργασία µου)

but it closes with him in “its service” (or “servitude”/δούλεψη: the word is cognate with the

Greek for “work,” δουλειά, which ιis in turn cognate with “slavery,” δουλεία): that reverses their

relationship. Read literally, the last verse says that Cavafy, tired by writing, like the unknown

poet in Antioch, turns away from poetry and rests by looking at the picture, as if writing is a

painful, disheartening task and only seeing can satisfy his need. As a metaphor, though,

“Painted” intimates that since everything, including the picture the poet is looking at, is part of

this poem, which pretends not to exist, Cavafy has not abandoned his poetry even for a moment:

it is poetry that continues to be his means of both expressing and satisfying desire. Once again,

Cavafy unites technical mastery with passion and confesses that there is no rest from art’s service

for him, no part of his life that is not also part of his art. To unite art and the rest of life in that

way requires (and in Cavafy’s poetry employs) immense power but it is not clear to whom that

power belongs—to art itself or to its practitioners. How can we even begin to speak of master
31
and servant here? “Painted” is a poem about a poem that is not merely unread, unfinished, or

even unwritten, but actually impossible. Cavafy’s poetry is truly poiesis: creation. Perhaps he

should have called it “Written.” “Painted” is Cavafy’s poetics.13

32

NOTES

Acknowledgments. This is a revised text of the Cavafy Chair Inaugural Lecture at the University

of Michigan in 2002. I am grateful to Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos for his invitation and to

Peter Mackridge, Paul Cartledge, and David Ricks, as well as audiences at Harvard, Yale, and

Princeton Universities for their comments on an earlier draft.

1 I include the date of composition and (when it is different) the date of publication of

each poem. Unattributed translations are my own.

2 Callimachus was believed to reject long poetical works and was known for his sophist -

icated epigrams and hymns until 1910, when the first substantial excerpt of his long Aetia, which

had been recently discovered, was published for the first time (I am grateful to Lee Clayman for

information about the history of the Aetia’s manuscripts). His attitude was supposed to be ex-

pressed in his famous statement, µέγα βιβλίον µέγα κακόν. In fact, I think, the statement, best

translated as “Big book, big trouble,” concerns the difficult task of returning the rolled papyrus

of a long book back into its original condition after reading it—a delicate and time-consuming

enterprise.
3 So, for example, Whigham (1975, 3–4): “Meleager has sometimes struck critics as too

ingenious to be sincere . . . [but i]is as a love-poet . . . that he is supremely the best of the Greek

epigrammatists. He employs the whole range of traditional erotic imagery and rings all the

changes on it. He is the first poet to give Eros the role which has become so familiar to us in

love-poetry.”
33
4 «--Ἐγώ εἶµαι Ἑλληνικός—προσοχή, ὄχι Ἕλλην, οὔτε Ἑλληνίζων--ἀλλά Ἑλληνικός.

Πολύ Ἑλληνικός!». Stratis Tsirkas reports this statement in a letter to Timos Malanos (1981, 95).
5 The reference is to two ways of understanding “barbarism,” “negative” and “affirma-

tive,” one that “acknowledges the necessity of the old category of the barbarian for civilization’s

self-definition” and one that “hints at the possibility of another ‘kind of solution,’ which would . .

. involve . . . the ‘barbarian’ otherwise: as the foreign agent of radical change” (Boletsi 2002,

68).
6 Edessa, now Sanliurfa in Southeastern Turkey, close to the Syrian border, was the capi-

tal city of Osroene—at the very outskirts of the Hellenic world. By contrast, Antioch (modern

Antakya, in southwest Turkey, even closer to the Syrian border) was the capital of ancient Syria,

a major political, intellectual, and economic metropolis during both Hellenistic and Roman

times.
7 Cavafy’s poem was written, as we saw, in 1898 and published in 1909; Borges’ story

appeared in 1939.
8 It is true that Cavafy’s indirect reconstruction of the nameless poet work is not directly

parallel to Menard’s direct rewriting of the Quixote. But the net result is the same: a text that,

although it is to all effects and purposes one, possesses two fundamentally different meanings, at

least partly as a result of the different times its two versions were composed.
9 Athyr, Athor, or Hathor was a female Egyptian deity, sometimes thought to be a version

of Aphrodite, goddess of love in Greek mythology.

10 “KZ” is how the Greeks represented the number 27.
34
11 Darius, the great Persian emperor, was defeated by the Athenians in the Battle of

Marathon in 490 BC. Mithridates, King of Pontus, was the most dangerous enemy of the Roman

Empire until he was defeated by Pompey in 66 BC. A detailed analysis of the poem can be found

in Maronitis (1970).
35
12 The remarks that follow are a revised version of Nehamas 2002, 98–99.

13 The idea that “Painted” contains a microcosm of Cavafy’s poetics is pursued in much

greater detail by Paul Kalligas 2004, written in response to Nehamas 2002 above. I agree with

Kalligas on several issues, including his detailed analysis of the structure of the poem, the self-

referential nature of Cavafy’s writing, Cavafy’s idealized identification with many of the equally

idealized young men in his poetry, and his occasional wistful regret on account of no longer be-

ing one of them. Where Kalligas and I disagree is on the identification of the beautiful boy in

“Painted.” He believes that the boy is a version of Narcissus, a myth Kalligas examines (pp.

126-129) in relation to its transmission by Philostratus the Elder 1931 and Callistratus 1931.

Now, the most salient feature of Narcissus is that he saw, for the first time, his reflection in a

spring, fell in love with it, that is, with himself and, totally absorbed as he was in his image, fell

into the water and drowned. According to Philostratus’ ekphrasis of a painting of Narcissus

(Imagines (Εικόνες) I), “A youth just returned from the hunt stands over a pool, drawing from

within himself a kind of yearning and falling in love with his own beauty.” But Philostratus’

youth is not at all asleep: on the contrary, he is “standing erect, is at rest (ορθόn αναπαύεται:

Kalligas considers this an oxymoron); he has his legs crossed and supports one hand on the spear

which is planted on his left, while his right hand is pressed against his hip.” Callistratus (De-

scriptions (Εκφράσεις 5), for his part, writes: “There was a grove, and in it an exceedingly beau-

tiful spring of very pure clear water, and by this stood a Narcissus made of marble.” There is no