walls

When they were building the walls,

How could I not have noticed?

But I never heard the builders,

Not a sound,

Imperceptibly they closed me off

From the outside world.

~ Constantine P. Cavafy

Cavafy articulates something that happens to all of us.  
Your complicity with other people’s images and expectations of you
 allows them to box you in completely.  It takes a long time to recognize
 how some key people on your life’s journey exercise so much control
 over your mind, behaviour, and actions.  Through the image they project
 onto you or through the expectations they have of you, they claim you. 

 Most of this is subtle and works in the domain of the implicit and unstated
 subtext; it is, of course, all the more powerful for not being direct and obvious.
  When you become conscious of these powerful builders and their work
 of housing you in, something within you refuses to comply; 
you begin to send back the building materials.
  
There is no planning permission here, thanks for the kindness! 
 Such projection and expectation is based on their fear and the need to control. 
 Expectation is resentment waiting to happen. 
 In contrast, friendship liberates you.

~ John O’Donohue
 from Eternal Echoes

waiting for the barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What's the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,

and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,

in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.

He's even got a scroll to give him,

loaded with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today

wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?

Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,

rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes

beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and things like that dazzle the barbarians

Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual

to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today

and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

everyone going home lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

~ Constantine Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Cavafy understood the word "barbarian" in its original Greek meaning, as applied to all those who are outside and have, instead of human speech, incoherent gibberish.  His intuition allowed him to capture a centuries-old opposition between the inside and the outside.

~ comment by Czeslaw Milosz

Che Fece... Il Gran Refiuto

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For some people the day comes

when they have to declare the great Yes

or the great No. It’s clear at once who has the Yes

ready within him; and saying it,

he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.

He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,

he’d still say no. Yet that no—the right no—

drags him down all his life.

~ Constantine P. Cavafy

from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard

Ithaka

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.

As you set out for Ithaka hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don't be afraid of them: you'll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won't encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope your road is a long one. May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter harbors you're seeing for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to learn and go on learning from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you're destined for. But don't hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you're old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you've gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. 

~ C.P. Cavafy

translated by Edmund Keeley

his birthday is today

Constantine Cavafy was born Konstantínos Pétrou Kaváfis in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, the ninth child of Constantinopolitan parents. His father died in 1870, leaving the family poor. Cavafy's mother moved her children to England, where the two eldest sons took over their father's business. Their inexperience caused the ruin of the family fortunes, so they returned to a life of genteel poverty in Alexandria. The seven years that Constantine Cavafy spent in England—from age nine to sixteen—were important to the shaping of his poetic sensibility: he became so comfortable with English that he wrote his first verse in his second language.

After a brief education in London and Alexandria, he moved with his mother to Constantinople, where they stayed with his grandfather and two brothers. Although living in great poverty and discomfort, Cavafy wrote his first poems during this period, and had his first love affairs with other men. After briefly working for the Alexandrian newspaper and the Egyptian Stock exchange, at the age of twenty-nine Cavafy took up an appointment as a special clerk in the Irrigation Service of the Ministry of Public Works—an appointment he held for the next thirty years. Much of his ambition during these years was devoted to writing poems and prose essays.

for the shop

He wrapped them up carefully, neatly,
in expensive green silk.
Roses of rubies, lilies of pearl,
violets of amethyst: according to his taste, his will,
his vision of their beauty - not as he saw them in nature
or studied them. He'll heave them in the safe,
examples of his bold, his skillful work.
Whenever a customer comes into the shop,
he brings out other things to sell - first class ornaments:
bracelets, chains, necklaces, rings.





~ Constantine Cavafy
(translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

hIdden things

.

From all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there distorting
the actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I'd begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing -
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn't worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.






~ Constantine Cavafy
(translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
Cavafy's Painting by Karavia

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