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

      and all of this power that he has

      in his soul, all this vehemence,

      he’d spread it to the people.

      Ah, if only he could be in Syria!

      He was so little when he left his homeland

      that he only dimly remembers what it looks like.

      But in his thoughts he’s always studied it

      like something sacred you approach on bended knee,

      like an apparition of a beautiful place, like a vision

      of cities and of harbors that are Greek.—

      And now?

      Now, hopelessness and dejection.

      They were right, those lads in Rome.

      It’s not possible for them to survive, the dynasties

      that the Macedonian Conquest had produced.

      No matter: he himself had spared no effort;

      as much as he was able, he’d struggled on.

      Even in his black discouragement,

      there’s one thing that still he contemplates

      with lofty pride: that even in defeat

      he shows the same indomitable valor to the world.

      The rest—was dreams and vain futility.

      This Syria—it barely even resembles his homeland;

      it is the land of Heracleides and of Balas.

      [1915; 1919]

       If Indeed He Died

      “Where has he gone off to, where did the Sage disappear?

      Following his many miracles,

      and the great renown of his instruction

      which was diffused among so many peoples,

      he suddenly went missing and no one has learned

      with any certainty what has happened

      (nor has anyone ever seen his tomb).

      Some have put it about that he died in Ephesus.

      But Damis didn’t write that. Damis never

      wrote about the death of Apollonius.

      Others said that he went missing on Lindos.

      Or perhaps that other story is

      true, that his assumption took place on Crete,

      in the ancient shrine of Dictynna.—

      But nonetheless we have the miraculous,

      the supernatural apparition of him

      to a young student in Tyana.—

      Perhaps the time hasn’t come for him to return,

      for him to appear before the world again;

      or metamorphosed, perhaps, he goes among us

      unrecognized.—But he’ll appear again

      as he was, teaching the Right Way. And surely then

      he’ll reinstate the worship of our gods,

      and our exquisite Hellenic ceremonies.”

      So he daydreamed in his threadbare lodging—

      after a reading of Philostratus’s

      “Life of Apollonius of Tyana”—

      one of the few pagans, the very few

      who had stayed. Otherwise—an insignificant

      and timid man—he, too, outwardly

      played the Christian and would go to church.

      It was the period during which there reigned,

      with the greatest piety, the old man Justin,

      and Alexandria, a god-fearing city,

      showed its abhorrence of those poor idolators.

      [1897; 1910; 1920; 1920]

       Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)

      The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them

      declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.

      The salon opened onto the garden;

      and had a delicate fragrance of blooms

      that was mingled together with the perfumes

      of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.

      Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.

      But when the actor had declaimed

      “Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”

      (stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary

      the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),

      at once a spirited boy sprang up,

      mad for literature, and cried out:

      “Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.

      Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.

      Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,

      all your care, and remember your work once more

      in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.

      That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.

      And don’t dismiss completely from your mind

      the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—

      that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,

      those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,

      that Seven Against Thebes—and leave, as your memorial,

      only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—

      that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”

      [1920; 1920]

      That They Come—

      One candle is enough. Its faint light

      is more fitting, will be more winsome

      when come Love’s— when its Shadows come.

      One candle is enough. Tonight the room

      can’t have too much light. In reverie complete,

      and in suggestion’s power, and with that little light—

      in that reverie: thus will I dream a vision

      that there come Love’s— that its Shadows come.

      [?; 1920]

       Darius

      The poet Phernazes is working on

      the crucial portion of his epic poem:

      the part about how the kingdom of the Persians

      was seized by Darius, son of Hystaspes. (Our

      glorious king is descended from him:

      Mithridates, Dionysus