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| Photo
credit: Andrea Augé |
CRIME
A one scarcely
visible, next nine, next
one, the
fourth number looks like a nine.
This was found among some poet’s papers.
It’s dated, but quite illegibly.
Stavros dealt out our
shares in the loot.
The alpha youth in our
gang,
smart, tough, and too
beautiful for words.
The most capable, though
except for me
(I was twenty) he was the
youngest.
My guess is he wasn’t
quite twenty-three.
Our haul was three
thousand pounds.
He kept, as we convinced
him was fair, half of it.
But now, at eleven at
night, we were working on
putting him on the lam the
next morning,
before the police found
out about the burglary.
Not a lightweight heist,
but grand larceny.
We were down in a cellar,
safe-housed in a basement.
After we’d decided on the
plan for his escape,
the other three left us,
me and Stavros,
with the understanding
they’d return at five.
(stanza break)
There was a ripped up
mattress on the floor.
Dead-tired, the two of us
dropped. And with our shaky
feelings, and the extreme
fatigue,
and with the anguish over
his getaway
in the morning––I hardly
realized, didn’t realize at all
that in these last hours
together our love had come to its end.
(1927)
*
FOURSOME
Their way of making money was surely not aboveboard.
But they’re street-smart
boys, the four of them, who’ve
figured out
how to do their
business steering clear of the
police.
Apart from being
smart, they’re super tough together.
Since two of them are
joined by the bond of pleasure
so are the other two
joined by the bond of pleasure.
They can dress to
kill as is quite suitable
for such handsome
boys, and the theater and bars,
and their snazzy car, and a trip now and then
to Cairo
Their way of making
money was surely not aboveboard,
with an occasional
scare of getting cut up
or of doing time in
jail. But look at how Love
has such power to
take the dirty money they make
and fashion it anew into something blindingly pure.
That money none of
them wants for himself or
for personal
interests. None of them tallies it
up
grossly or with
greed. They never take note
if one brings in less or another more.
In common they hold their money, using it
to dress with style, to bankroll the outlay
that makes their
lives elegant and well-suited
to such handsome
boys, for helping out their
friends,
and then, as is their
way, just forget about it.
(1930)
ZENOBIA
Now that Zenobia’s become
queen of numerous great lands,
now that she’s the wonder
of the Anatolian world,
and now that even the
Romans fear her,
why shouldn’t her
greatness be fulfilled?
Why should she be
pigeonholed as Woman/ Asian?
Two scholars well versed
in history
will prepare her genealogy
forthwith.
Look at how she’s clearly
descended from the Lagids.
Look at how clearly from Macedonia
into the stream of her noble Semitic spring: “Augusta
Clearly one day soon she’ll parade through Rome
(1930)
(1930)
[a note to zenobia. Septimia Zenobia (Bat-Zabbai in Aramaic; al-Zabba
in Arabic), who was born around 240 A. D. and died some time after 274, the
“warrior queen” of the Roman colony of Palmyra (in present day Syria), was the
second wife of King Septimus Odaenathus and succeeded him after his
assassination in 267. Unusually ambitious, beautiful, courageous, and highly
cultured (the rhetorician and critic Longinus lived in her court), and expert
in creative biographic enhancements, she proclaimed herself “Augusta” and ruled
from 268 to 272, conquering several Roman provinces, including Egypt and
Anatolia, before she was subjugated by the emperor Aurelius (270––275). There
are numerous accounts of what happened to her after her military losses, but
the most accepted one is that Aurelius proved merciful and granted her a good
Roman life in exile after she was displayed in golden chains (a star even in
defeat?) at his triumph.]
on
finishing cavafy: a note on the process. The three poems in this third and final installment
from an ongoing project that will be published by Shearsman Books in the fall
of 2015 as the first part of a work entitled Finishing Cavafy’s Unfinished & Selected Poems and Translations,
present two unusual features in a collaboration with Cavafy that I have
previously described as un métissage de l’écriture, a trans-compositional approach in which the work
of translator and poet have been combined in order to create a finished poem in
English out of the variable complex elements in the unfinished drafts of their
Greek originals. The making of the
first two poems in this trio, “Crime” and “Foursome,” was basically carried out
following the same process that directed the composition of most of the poems
in this collection out of the drafts, variants, and marginal comments and
corrections that portray the singular
nature of each of Cavafy’s unfinished poems as diplomatically edited and
reconstructed by Renata Lavagnini (Atele
Poiemata, 1918-1932, Athens:
Ikaros, 2006).
“Crime” and “Foursome”(provisionally entitled “A Company
of Four” by its author) stand out among the “unfinished poems” but also among
all the other poems––published, unpublished and rejected––because of the poet’s
explicit and sympathetic treatment of their attractive young criminals. It is
well-known that many of Cavafy’s poems explore the lives of poor young men, an
interest he expressed in a note he wrote on June 29, 1908: “I am pleased and
moved by the beauty of the masses, of poor young men. Servants, workers, petty
clerks and shop attendants. It is the compensation, one imagines, for their
deprivations” (Selected Prose Works,
translated and edited by Peter Jeffreys, Ann Arbor, 2010, p. 136). Although at
times these poems skirt the shadows of questionable and rough and tumble life-styles
and occasionally even obliquely suggest some sort of illicit or criminal
activity, none so openly represent, or actually celebrate as in “Foursome,”
beautiful young mobsters as do these two poems. If in finishing them, I have at
times resorted to idiomatic expressions unmistakably rooted in our own
underworld culture, I have done so in response to the emotional force that
pervades and impels these two extraordinary poems.
The unique demand of the third unfinished poem of this
group, “Zenobia,” that I complete
rather than merely finish it, was
anticipated by a small distraction in Professor Lavagnini’s reconstruction of “Foursome”
in which the tenth line lacks its second half, a defect Cavafy never allows in
any of the numerous poems in which he uses this unusual, personal form of verse
consisting of lines divided by caesura-like spaces into two metrically
analogous parts. I have addressed the problem caused by this puzzling omission
by shifting the phrase in the first half of the line to the second half and completing
the line with the phrase “to Cairo in the winter” on the strength of Cavafy’s
addition of it in one of the draft stages in the poem’s file. Further confirmation
of the cogency of using this added phrase came when I read the final paragraph
in Lavagnini’s commentary on this poem, which begins: “The trip to Cairo (added
here at sheet 4, line 8) symbolizes an easy-going and carefree life,” and
continues with an account of how Cavafy recalled that his father made frequent
trips to Cairo (p. 288).
That Professor Lavagnini’s reconstruction of “Zenobia”
comes to an abrupt stop mid-poem with two crosses, each of which, according to
her editorial apparatus, represents two illegible letters, after the word “
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