The Alexandrian

[desperance]

I have been (re-)reading Cavafy, partly for simple pleasure and partly because Alexandria holds an abiding fascination for me, and there is probably a book to be written at some time; and I have two things to say about him right now, just the two.

One: for a modernist, he is sometimes surprisingly modern; and

Two: because he is all about failed communication, misreadings, misunderstandings, messages gone astray, I love the fact that I can only read him in translation, which I do not trust. The medium is the message.

Comments

[peake.livejournal.com]

So you're presumably another Lawrence Durrell fan?

I have two collections of Cavafy. Same poems (more or less) but different translations. One is supposedly closer to the original, but the other is the one that often feels better (although maybe that's just familiarity).

But whichever translation I read, I find (unusually for a poet) it's the sense of what he is saying that matters more than the precise choice of words. The two versions of 'Waiting For The Barbarians' or 'The God Abandons Antony' or (my favourite) 'Ithaka' have lots of small differences, in word choice, rhythm, all the things that are supposed to make or break a poem. But both versions work just as well. Maybe that's why he's a poet who does survive translation.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

So you're presumably another Lawrence Durrell fan?

Comprehensively so; he's one of my touchstones.

But whichever translation I read, I find (unusually for a poet) it's the sense of what he is saying that matters more than the precise choice of words.

I think that's exactly right, tho' I've never been certain whether it would be true also in Greek, or whether his translators simply aren't carrying over whatever it is that he does with the language, so that all we have to deal with is the sense. Does he survive translation? I don't know; I sit here reaching for poetry and finding only meaning. Which is why I'm distrustful of what I'm being told, which is what the poetry - and, at least in my mind, the city - is all about...

[martyn44.livejournal.com]

'Waiting for the Barbarians' is the theme song of the second half of the 20th Century.