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

one must explicate

      the feelings that Darius must have had:

      arrogance and intoxication, perhaps; but no—more

      like an awareness of the vanity of grandeur.

      Profoundly, the poet ponders the matter.

      But he’s interrupted by his servant, who comes

      running and delivers the momentous intelligence:

      The war with the Romans has begun.

      Most of our army has crossed the border.

      The poet stays, dumbfounded. What a disaster!

      How, now, can our glorious king,

      Mithradates, Dionysus and Eupator,

      be bothered to pay attention to Greek poems?

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

      Phernazes frets. What bad luck is his!

      Just when he was sure, with his “Darius,”

      to make his name, and to reduce his critics,

      those envious men, to silence at long last.

      What a setback, what a setback for his plans!

      And if it had only been a setback: fine.

      But let’s see if we are really all that safe

      in Amisus. It’s not a spectacularly well-fortified land.

      The Romans are most fearsome enemies.

      Is there any way we can get the best of them,

      we Cappadocians? Could it ever happen?

      Can we measure up to the legions now?

      Great gods, protectors of Asia, help us.—

      And yet in the midst of all his upset, and the disaster,

      a poetic notion stubbornly comes and goes—

      far more convincing, surely, are arrogance and intoxication;

      arrogance and intoxication are what Darius would have felt.

      [<1897?; 1917; 1920]

       Anna Comnena

      She laments in the prologue to her Alexiad,

      Anna Comnena laments her widowhood.

      Her soul is in muzzy whirl. “And with

      freshets of tears,” she tells us, “I deluge

      mine eyes. … Alack the breakers” of her life,

      “alack for the upheavals.” Anguish burns her

      “unto the very bones and marrow and rending of my soul.”

      Nonetheless the truth seems to be that she knew one

      mortal grief alone, that power-loving woman:

      that she had only one profound regret

      (even if she won’t acknowledge it), that supercilious Greekling:

      for all of her dexterity she ­didn’t manage

      to secure the Throne; instead he took it

      practically right out of her hands, that upstart John.

      [1917; 1920]

       Byzantine Noble, in Exile, Versifying

      Let the dilettantes call me dilettante.

      In serious matters I have always been

      most diligent. And on this I will insist:

      that no one has a better knowledge of

      Church Fathers or Scripture, or the Synodical Canons.

      On every question that he had, Botaniates—

      every difficult ecclesiastical matter—

      would take counsel with me, me first of all.

      But since I’ve been exiled here (curse that spiteful

      Irene Ducas) and am frightfully bored,

      it’s not at all unseemly if I divert myself

      by crafting verses of six or seven lines—

      divert myself with mythological tales

      of Hermes, and Apollo, and Dionysus,

      or the heroes of Thessaly and the Peloponnese;

      or with composing strict iambic lines

      such as—if I do say so—the litterateurs

      of Constantinople don’t know how to write.

      That strictness, most likely, is the reason for their censure.

      [1921; 1920]

       Their Beginning

      The fulfillment of their illicit pleasure

      is accomplished. They’ve risen from the bed,

      and dress themselves quickly without speaking.

      They emerge separately, covertly, from the house. And while

      they walk rather uneasily in the street, it seems

      as if they suspect that something about them betrays

      what kind of bed they’d fallen into just before.

      Nonetheless, how the artist’s life has gained.

      Tomorrow, the day after, or through the years he’ll write

      powerful lines, that here was their beginning.

      [1915; 1921]

       Favour of Alexander Balas

      Oh I’m not put out because my chariot’s

      wheel was smashed, and I’m down one silly win.

      I shall pass the night among fine wines

      and lovely roses. All Antioch is mine.

      I am the most exalted of young men.

      I’m Balas’s weakness, the one he worships.

      Tomorrow, you’ll see, they’ll say the race wasn’t proper.

      (But if I were vulgar, and had secretly given the order—

      they’d even have placed my crippled chariot first, the flatterers.)

      [1916?; 1921]

       Melancholy of Jason, Son of Cleander: Poet in Commagene: 595 A.D.

      The aging of my body and my looks

      is a wound from a terrible knife.

      I have no means whatsoever to endure it.

      Unto you I turn, Art of Poetry,

      you who know something of drugs;

      of attempts to numb pain, in Imagination and Word.

      It’s a wound from a terrible knife.—

      Bring on your drugs, Art of Poetry,

      which make it impossible—for a while—to feel the wound.

      [1918?; 1921]