27 June 1906, 2 p.m.

As the Christians took him to be hanged
the seventeen-year-old innocent child,
his mother who close by the gallows there
crawled upon the earth and beat herself
beneath the midday, the savage sun,
sometimes she howled, and cried out like a wolf, like a beast
and sometimes exhausted the witness-woman keened
“Seventeen years only you lived, my child.”
And when they took him up the gallows steps
and over him passed the rope and choked him
the seventeen-year-old innocent child,
and pitiably hanging in the void
with the spasms of his black agony
his youthful fine-built body,
the mother witness writhing on the earth
and keening no longer for the years now:
“seventeen days only,” she keened,
“seventeen days only my delight, my child.”

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

notes on Denshway and after

The impetus for the Denshway massacre (or, to use the preferred term of its British perpetrators, “incident”) was unremarkable enough: in June of 1906, a group of occupying British soldiers marched into the Egyptian village of Denshway (or Denshawai) with a plan to hunt pigeons. Pigeons were plentiful in Denshway, as many of the locals raised them, in pigeons cotes, mostly for the purposes of subsistence. The previous year, British officers pigeon-hunting in Denshway had been involved in an altercation with Hassan Mahfouz, a sexagenarian local leader (in several accounts described as frail, and ‘with a cough’) who attempted to prevent them; after this incident, pigeon hunting in Denshway was banned by the colonial authorities. Notwithstanding, a year afterwards, five officers returned to Denshway with pigeon-poaching on the brain — among them an individual who had come hunting at Denswhay before, the ominously named Major Pine-Coffin.

Once more, the British officers were confronted by local villagers. The British backed off a nominal distance, and started shooting birds; incensed, the villagers, Mahfouz among them, set upon the group in protest, attempting to wrest their guns away.

In the scuffle, shots fired by the British injured four men and gravely wounded one woman, the young wife of a twenty-five-year-old man named Muhammad Abd-el-Nebi (or el-Nabi), whose granary had also somehow been set on fire during the melee. Abd-el-Nebi retaliated by beating his wife’s attacker with a stick; Mahfouz also used a stick in an attempt to fend off the intruders. An officer named Bull, running off to seek backup, collapsed in the midday Egyptian sun — 42 degrees Celsius, according to one report — and died; another managed to summon reinforcements. Upon arriving on the scene, the fresh influx of British soldiers saw a villager attempting to revive the expired Bull, assumed that the fellah was responsible, and promptly beat him to death. At the same time, elders from the village had managed to calm things down, intervening on behalf of the scuffed-up British, who were let free to leave.

The following day, the British arrived in force at Denshway, arresting fifty-two villagers. Lord Cromer, a dubious character then Consul General of Egypt, defended the show of force, meant to humiliate and subdue the residents of Denshway, and presumably, send a threatening message to the rest of the occupied country. At a British-rigged show trial, more than twenty villagers were sentenced to hard labour and flogging with fifty lashes; and four — among them Hassan Mahfouz — were sentenced to death, for their role in “murdering” the man who’d died of sunstroke.

Mustafa Kamil Pasha, an ardent Egyptian nationalist, lawyer, and journalist, wrote in the pages of Le Figaro in July of that year, “A tragic affair took place in the Egyptian delta village of Dinshaway, which has managed to emotionally touch humanity in its entirety.” The trial, he explained, was a charade and mockery of justice from the beginning, with the Home Office openly pressuring the judges to apply the death penalty, and the gallows having been sent to Denshway a week before the trial had even taken place. The court’s majority belonged to the English, and no appeals were allowed. The trial would be just in name only; the result openly a foregone conclusion.

An account Kamil wrote for the Alexandrian francophone newspaper Le Phare d’Alexandrie, published two days following the execution, described the harrowing scene at the site: “The women and children of the accused gathered around the gallows and emitted baleful cries: (Oh my misfortune, my beloved, oh my brother, oh my father, and so forth.) The sight was heartwrenching.” According to one source, one of those executed, a man named Mohammed Darweesh Zahran, is supposed to have said, from the scaffold: “May God compensate us well for this world of meanness, for this world of injustice, for this world of cruelty.” Mostafa Kemil writes simply that he faced death with courage, and “died without a word.” According to Kemil, the youngest victim, El Sayed Issa Salem, a man of twenty-five, when brought to the gallows kept repeating softly, as if to himself, “I have been wronged.” (Other accounts state the age of the youngest victim as twenty.1)

For his piece in Le Phare, Kamil described in wrenching prose the screams of the men being flogged in a separate tent at the site of the execution; how the screams of the tortured mixed chillingly with those of the women and children; how many of the tortured men had to be carried away from the scene on stretchers.

Back in England, in the acid preface to his play critiquing the occupation of Ireland, John Bull’s Other Island, British writer George Bernard Shaw described what he called the “Denshway Horror”:

English anti-imperialist poet (and husband of Lord Byron’s granddaughter) Wilfrid Scawen Blunt’s diary entries for the 21^st, 28^th, and 29^th of June give a sense of anti-regime public opinion in Britain at the time (that parliamentarians who protested the murders at Denshway were accused of being ‘unpatriotic’ gives equal sense of the opposing view, likely familiar still to modern readers):

Egyptian writers immediately composed works inspired by the tragedy at Denshway, among them Mahmoud Taher Haqqi ( writer of The Maiden of Denshway, a novel originally serialized in the paper — and over which he lost his job) and poets Ahmad Shawqy and Hafez Ebrahim. Later on, Salah Abdel Sabour would write the famed poem “The Hanging of Zahran,” adapted for film by Nagui Riad as Friend of Life. Cavafy appears to be the only Greek-language poet, however, who responded to Denshway in his work (and his poem, “27 June 1906, 2 p.m.” would remain hidden until decades after his death).

Left-wing Cairo-born novelist and Cavafy scholar Stratis Tsirkas was sensitive to the lack of awareness of the events at Denshway in the broader world; “For Egyptians however,” he writes, “and those who know a little of Egyptian history, the 27^th June, 1906 means roughly what the 3^rd May, 1808 does for every Spaniard and the 1^st May, 1944 for every Greek: the mass execution of innocent people by the occupier of their homeland.” Indeed, since it occurred, the story of Denshway reliably abides in the consciousness of Arabic speakers in Egypt and beyond, continuing to be invoked by nationalists, freedom fighters, polemicists, and anti-imperialist terrorists alike. In the wake of the Suez crisis of 1956, Denshway was referenced by Egyptian journalist and historian Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, who pointed out that, the “pigeons of Denshway had come home to roost.” Former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat remarked that, as a child, the “ballad which affected me most deeply was probably that of Zahran, the hero of Denshway.”

Cavafy kept a collection of his clippings and notes on the events at Denshway among his papers for the rest of his life. It is not surprising that he was so moved by this tragedy; the obvious grotesquerie and rank injustice of the proceedings speak for themselves. And Cavafy was by then already opposed to capital punishment; in October of 1902, the thirty-nine-year-old had noted in his journal,

At the poem’s moving conclusion, the mother of the murdered boy imagines that her time together with her son was so agonisingly brief, it lasted a mere seventeen days, rather than seventeen years. Cavafy himself had lost several dear friends in his youth; his portrayal of the young, beautiful dead, and of their mourning mothers is a theme embroidered throughout his life’s work. In this case, the mourning mother’s fantasy, in her state of extremis, of the impossible, unbearable brevity of her young son’s life makes her unspeakable pain all the more brutal. According to Tsirkas, the compression and expansion of time to express extreme feeling is a common Egyptian folk and literary formulation; he cites a work song in which men start out singing that they’ve been working for sixty nights and days; but by the end of the song, exhausted, the job has taken sixty years.

As Bernard Shaw noted (and Cavafy might well have agreed): “In any case let no Englishman who is content to leave Abd-el-Nebi and his twenty-year-old neighbor in penal servitude for life, and to plume himself on the power to do it, pretend to be fit to govern either my country or his own.” As if thinking of Cavafy’s poem, or of the writings of Haqqi Shawqy, Ebrahim, and Sabour, Shaw added that he had a “warning to England”: that if “her empire means ruling the world as Denshawai has been ruled in 1906 — and that, I am afraid, is what the Empire does mean to the main body of our aristocratic-military caste and to our Jingo plutocrats — then there can be no more sacred and urgent political duty on earth than the disruption, defeat, and suppression of the Empire, and, incidentally, the humanization of its supporters…”

In its immediate aftermath, the Denshway affair resulted in the forced retirement of Britain’s Lord Cromer; in the longer run, it proved to be a catalysing event that set the stage for the Egyptian revolution. It remains a symbol and byword for anti-colonial resistance in the national discourse to this day.

more poems of mourning:

Dearest M— The First Day of Her Death (As Recorded by Her Father) by Hayden Carruth

Myris: Alexandria, 340 A.D. by C.P. Cavafy

Road Trip, Southern Ontario, 1999 by Stuart Ross

The Death of Myron by Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou

For Oliver Jackman by Derek Walcott

On the Anniversary of the Bombing of Guernica by Eva H.D.

Meteors

It’s summer, the streets smell like mulberries and piss and
two-month love. What does two-month love smell like?
Mulberries and piss, probably, and chlorine from the
latenight public pools, new clothing from Sears, too,
that new car smell of fresh sundresses on the teetering
twentysomethings negotiating the wine cooler sidewalk
in high-heeled sandals. There’s nothing smelly about

forgetting, but if there was I suppose that would be a summer
smell, too: the tall men ducking from bar to bar,
forgetting their wedding ring in a trouser pocket,
in the clutch of their own right hand; and the forgotten,
rotten garbage on every front stoop in this neighbourhood,
and the teenagers curled up in the park with forties of
malt liquor have been forgotten, too, until September.

Every summer I’m in love with you again, just for a week
or a day, those solid nights of heat, or the smell of
Varsol and linseed oil, some old guy braiding rope
in the harbour. The forgetting is sweet and easy, like
a woman who loves horses or that pop song you heard
all summer long the year we realigned the planets

and the stars also, right up to August, when they fell,
and less spectacularly, we followed them.

— Eva H.D.

more summer pomes:

Faroff - C.P. Cavafy

Epilogue - Maria Laïna

House - Eva Stefani

My Soul You Danced - Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou

I Thought On His Desire For Three Days - Linda Gregg

Road Trip, Southern Ontario, 1999 - Stuart Ross

Cavafy’s Imaginary Shopping List
(a day in the life)

my eyes my eyes where are my eyes

-

in this heat I can’t even hear

-

it is August. I would like coffee and wine and yesterday
so much yesterday others are ignorant
of history only I know.

I showed him.

-

the building’s yellow wall
reflects shadows.

this poem is called
the building’s yellow wall.

-

strike this from the record.

-

I don’t usually ask
questions I won’t
begin today.

-

could you not have answered me?

-

that summer you have probably

forgotten.

~

— Eva H.D.

more poems:

Brief Biography of the Poet Constantine Cavafy - Nikos Engonopoulos

August Credos - Haris Vlavianos

The Invisible - Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou

I Was At Home - Thanos Stathopoulos

Second Odyssey - C.P. Cavafy

On the Outskirts of Antioch

We were shocked at Antioch when we learned
of Julian’s latest antics.

Apollo in speech expressed himself, in Dafni!
He didn’t want to give prophecy (how we fretted!),
he had no plans to speak oracular, if firstly
his temple in Dafni was not purified.
They annoyed him, he declared, the neighbouring dead.

In Dafni lie many graves. —
One of those there entombed
was the wondrous, glory of our church,
the saintly, triumphant martyr Babylas.

To him he alluded, he the false god feared.
Long as he felt him near he begrudged
to produce his prophecies; crickets.
(Our martyrs made the false gods tremble.)

Unholy Julian rolled up his sleeves,
got riled and shouted: “Get up, transport him,
remove him, this Babylas, straight away.
You hear? Apollo is annoyed.
Raise him up, grab him forthwith.
Dig him up, take him where you want.
Remove him, chase him off. Are we playing now?
Apollo said to purify the temple.”

We got them, we brought the sainted remains elsewhere;
We got them, we brought them in love and honour.

And nicely forsooth throve the temple.
It didn’t take long at all ‘til a great
fire blazed up: a fearsome fire:
and it burned the temple and Apollo too.

Ashes the idol; sweepings, for the trash.

He cracked and he spread about —
what else to do — that the fire was set
by we Christians. Let him talk.
It wasn’t proved; let him talk.
The crux is that he cracked.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

some peregrinations on the outskirts

Cavafy wrote this poem in 1932-33, the last months of his life. Fibrillating with irony, it has been mistaken as an earnest defence of Christianity — given the rest of Cavafy’s oeuvre, and his ambivalence regarding the Christian faith, a meta-frosting of irony itself. Suffering acutely from the throat cancer that would kill him, Cavafy was by that point unable to speak, forced to jot his thoughts and needs on small slips of paper, a number of which remain in his archive today. He did, however, manage to keep writing and editing this poem, which he finished a few days before he died on the morning of 29 April, 1933, his seventieth birthday.

In the poem, a righteous Christian mob recounts Julian’s antics in the Roman-ruled Syrian city of Antioch in 362 CE: Julian learns that at the temple in the nearby suburb of Dafni, the god Apollo has refused to prophesy while in proximity of the Christian martyr Babylas’ bones1; Julian, the “apostate” emperor, thereupon demands the removal of the bones. Shortly afterwards the temple —a masterwork of the Hellenic sculptor Bryaxis — burns to the ground; Julian loses his temper and spreads a rumour that the upstart Christians are responsible for the fire. Emperor Julian, the object of the Christians’ bone-dry scorn, is, for all his imperial trappings, a pathetic figure here: his religion is a joke, his god in the dustbin, his rage and desire twin impotencies. Like Cavafy, Julian was raised in the Orthodox religion; like Cavafy, his soul called him elsewhere. (That the Hellenism to which Julian converted was tolerant of homosexuality, and that ‘Hellenism’ was understood in the Victorian era as code for queer is worth considering.) As Cavafy would have known, Julian was a student of philosophy, a Neo-Platonist, and (relatively speaking) clement; as Cavafy also knew, Julian’s own funeral took place at Antioch. His assassin was later popularly understood to be St. Mercurius, driven by an edict straight from heaven. The ironies breed and multiply.

Cavafy’s caustic wit and ambiguity generally leave his intents to the imaginations and predilections of his audience: just as so many straight men have been able to see themselves in his lines, so too have many Christians considered this final poem a paean to their religion. That the poem has been interpreted as a clarion defence of the Christian faith, or as a straightforward tale of a plucky mob speaking truth to power is a testament to the poet’s skill in drawing characters that charm the reader into quiescent misdirection. (Oddly the poem’s Orthodox fans do not seem to be troubled that its triumphant Christians appear to believe in Hellenism’s ‘false gods’ — at least enough to take satisfaction in their trembling.) Cavafy was a double-bluffer par excellence; the layers of deadpan irony, humour, pathos, and profound ambivalence may be too labyrinthine for lovers of orthodoxy to parse.

Cavafy’s outer landscape: Alexandria, 1933

By Cavafy’s era, the Christians had become who the Hellenes had been in early Roman times: lions. The majority Muslim population of Egypt had for decades been struggling via political and military means to liberate the country from the colonial grip of the British Empire.

Cavafy’s Alexandria was home to communities from all over North Africa and the Mediterranean basin, alongside its indigenous Egyptian population: around twenty percent of its population was composed of “foreigners” — immigrants who, despite in many cases having generations-old roots in Alexandria, in the Ottoman tradition retained the citizenship of their countries of ethnic origin, exempt from local laws and taxes.2. The nineteenth century expansion of the cotton export trade had brought a major influx of Greeks to the city, where they lived alongside Armenians, Italians, Jews from all over the Mediterranean, Lebanese, Libyans, Syrians, and Sudanese; native citizens, who remained the city’s vast majority, were also its least wealthy.

The Cavafy family came to the city in 1855 to deal in the cotton export business, and counted themselves among Alexandria’s merchant elite; after the death of Cavafy’s father in 1870, the family’s fortunes declined, and they settled into shabby gentility. Cavafy, as trained by his socially-conscious, anglophile mother, would mourn the family’s class shift for his entire life. Paradoxically, he nonetheless revelled in the somewhat outré quality of his lifestyle: he delighted in the shocking fact that his small rooms, crammed with ornate antiques saved from his early life of luxury, overlooked a brothel. His risqué longings and peripatetic ways brought him into contact with some aspects of the city’s seedier side; the sounds and scents and life of the decidedly proletarian street informed his imagination, his sexuality, and his writing.

Although Alexandria was a city of rich, cosmopolitan pluralism and cultural exchange, a polyglot metropolis noted for its religious tolerance — home to Copts and Muslims, Jews and Orthodox Greeks, Syriac and Roman Catholics — most members of the upper classes lived in self-imposed ignorance of the language, culture, and presence of the majority surrounding them. (Alexandria’s Jews — hailing from a range of nations — were more likely to speak Arabic alongside Italian, French, and Greek, and there appears to have been a higher degree of cultural mixing amongst the middle and working classes. This is the Alexandria that comes alive in the work of 20th century novelists Edwar al-Kharrat and Stratis Tsirkas.)

Cavafy grew up in an environment as discordant as it was ideologically capacious. (As with people, cities are not one-note organs. Anyone who has visited New York City can attest that a culture-rich, delightfully dissolute playground for the comfortable middle and upper classes may also simultaneously be an overpoliced wasteland in which opportunity for shelter, education, and employment is limited, and a stint in prison is often more accessible than a plate of fresh food.) Cavafy lived in what Alexandrian-born historian Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘age of extremes.’ The Alexandria of his youth and adulthood was the ‘summer capital’ of Egypt, where the royal family and its sizeable entourage spent the hottest months of the year in ostentatious opulence. It was also a place where anti-colonial nationalism competed with imperialism, royalists faced off with democrats, Italian fascists and Muslim fundamentalists proclaimed from their soapboxes, angry mobs, inflamed by decades of persecution, took their complaints to the streets, and protest both non-violent and otherwise made regular headlines. In his lifetime, Cavafy’s birthplace underwent riots and bombardments, a war of independence and colonial collective punishment, class struggle and political scandal, and clashes internecine and interethnic; even as it lulled itself with the garden parties and dances of the elite, the debauched afterhours entertainments that Cavafy and many in his émigré circle so prized, and the ubiquitous cafe culture of the lively, multiethnic, mercantile street.

paroxysms of 1933

In the first months of 1933, as Hitler’s political star ascended, Cavafy, an avid follower of current events in three European languages, ill as he was, must have noted the news. Messianically devoted to Art as the prime driver of his existence, Cavafy was nonetheless keenly aware of the fallibility of dogma; Lord Acton’s remark that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” was axiomatic for him. He wrote regularly about religion, politics, and empire, maintaining the pointed ambivalence of a slyly-placed mirror. He sang the praises of the Greeks while abjuring chauvinism, just as he eulogised the life of the street while glorying in his aristocratic pedigree; he used his elaborately religious settings and characters in order to explore the emotions and motivations of sinners, outsiders, doubters, and apostates. His sympathies lie with the complex and the complexed: the aspirationally dutiful sons who cannot commit to a life of asceticism (“Of the Jews”); the queer, rambunctious Hellenes who fear they never really knew their Christian playmates (“Myris”); the decidedly un-Greek Greeks of the diaspora (“Homecoming from Greece”); the sensitive citizen of a conquered culture who becomes a compromised courtier in the palaces of the coloniser (“The Satrapy”). His poetry is as suffused with queer code as it is with historical acumen; Cavafy deployed the latter to invoke the former. The cultural cross-pollination, political foment, sense of decay amid the expiration of imperial aspirations, and perhaps most of all the amorality of Hellenistic Alexandria enchanted him.3

Ever suspicious of power and its implicit shades of tyranny, Cavafy’s “On the Outskirts of Antioch” offers a portrait of an inflamed and unjustly persecuted mob, on the one hand, and on the other, a hapless if nominally powerful individual who is, unbeknownst to him, nearing the end of his life. Julian’s imperial tantrums, as Cavafy, writing nearly two thousand years after the event knew, would not be enough to stem the tide of Christianity; by Cavafy’s day, the fanatic, rebel Christians would induce society to conform to their dictates — not least of all, to control and suppress the lives of people like him.

Alexandria of the 1930s was as bubbling with conflict as it was with cosmopolitan élan, divided by class, ethnicity, language, and religion; roiling with imperial ambitions, rattling with political agitation; on the verge of a world war and a national revolution. (It had, a scant decade before, seen one of each.) Its political scene was plagued by scandal, corruption—both colonial and indigenous—, and a severe economic crisis. Amidst this turmoil, the Greeks of Egypt, despite being active community members and zealous defenders of their economic, political, and cultural interests within the broader Egyptian context, were of their own volition mostly non-citizens of the country, exempt from its taxes and immune to its laws.4 The question of Egyptian-Greek relations was hotly debated within Greek Alexandrian intellectual circles during the 1920s and 1930s5. As the Egyptians campaigned for and gained economic autonomy, so the Greeks would have to give up some of their privileges. Like the so-called petit blancs of colonial Haiti, many middle-class Greeks, while by no means occupying the top rung of Egyptian society, were loath to relinquish what standing they possessed, and were enthusiastic proponents of the oppressive status quo, indifferent to the sufferings of indigenous Egyptians, who in turn harboured colonial ambitions vis-à-vis Sudan.6

When Cavafy writes of the aspirations of cultural and religious groups, the longings of mobs and monarchs, outcasts and bureaucrats, foot soldiers and generals, enslaved tutors and ennobled orphans, he is painting a double portrait: of his own conflicted inner landscape, and of a troubled, abundant, politically charged and ethically ambiguous past that reflects the present — his, and, should we care to see it, ours, too.

The Egyptian political scene

Saad Zaghloul’s Wafd party had won the fight for independence in 1922, ending an eight-year British protectorate8. With Wafd in government for decades, the British carried on pursuing their interests relatively unfettered in Egypt until Nasser’s ascent to power in the revolution of 1952. Egyptian Communists were decidedly anti-Wafd: “Wafd is the party of the bourgeoisie and the landlords, counter-revolutionary national reformists. It unites the rich capitalists, lawyers, speculators and liberal landlords, whose policy is to bargain with the enslavers of Egypt out of fear of a national revolution and in hopes of small concessions for themselves. It is the party of national deceit and national treachery. It bargains with imperialism and the Fuad gang for small and unimportant concessions […]”9 In counterpoint, the nascent Muslim Brotherhood, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, aimed to end British interests in Egypt, invoking fidelity to Islam as a bulwark in resisting western imperialism.10 Meanwhile, inspired by European fascism, a student named Ahmed Hussain established the Young Egypt Association (later the Young Egypt Party) in 1933, a paramilitary organization that advocated the use of force in achieving its nationalist aims.

Though Cavafy might have recognized the political predicament of contemporary Greeks in the Comintern’s description (had he read it) of the Egyptian people carrying “on their shoulders a double oppression–British imperialism and a servile, violent and bandit monarchy,” this did not prevent him from enjoying the benefits of being a diaspora Greek in Alexandria. Perhaps he read the 1928 column in the Greek-language Alexandrian daily Tachydromos, written by a local chemist named Yorgos Petridis, who argued that the Greeks of Egypt had bought into the western colonial myth that they were a “chosen people,” so-called civilisers of an inferior culture (even as that myth placed them in lower standing vis-à-vis western Europeans). Would Cavafy have agreed with this interpretation? He might have preferred to take refuge in the distant past, gleaning in its incessant upheavals broad parallels to the competing vanities and violence of the daily headlines. On 5 March, 1933, Greece held (yet another) national election, the last that Cavafy would survive, in which Liberal anti-monarchist Eleftherios Venizelos lost out to the monarchist People’s Party; characteristically, an assassination attempt, a failed military coup, and a dictatorship were not long in following.11

Cavafy’s inner landscape: the desolate imperial time machine

Cavafy lived in an age of crumbling empire, at a time when the forces that would go on to shape and ravage the twentieth century were fomenting and roiling: ethno-nationalism, anti-colonialism, fascism, communism, antisemitism, sectarianism, capitalism. Hobsbawm writes of this era, quoting Max Reinhardt: ‘What I love,’ he said, ‘is the taste of transience on the tongue – every year might be the last.’ It gave Weimar culture a unique tang. It sharpened a bitter creativity, a contempt for the present, an intelligence unrestricted by convention, until the sudden and irrevocable death. Moments when one knows history has changed are rare, but this was one of them. That is why I can still see myself walking home from school with my sister on the cold afternoon of 30 January 1933, reflecting on what the news of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor meant. In contrast to the doughty Hobsbawm — confident, Communist, practical — Cavafy was consumed by the paroxysms of the distant past, that of Alexandria and its environs almost two millennia prior; an obsession simultaneously escapist and deeply sensitive to his environment and the manifold horrors gestating within it.

If the Christians in Cavafy’s poem are oppressed fanatics, his Emperor Julian is a lonely and nominally powerful figure, petulantly grasping at straws as his authority slips through his long fingers. Julian hated Christianity in no small part because his pious Christian extended family had murdered one another off, one by one, from which bloodbath he had emerged unscathed only by chance. Christianity, for him, was the rule of murderers and hypocrites; all sanctimony, and no mercy. Cavafy and his readers knew what his characters do not: the young emperor would die not long after the events in the poem take place, with his short life and even shorter reign ending in murder and betrayal.

Julian was the only openly non-Christian Roman Emperor to rule following the reign of his cousin Constantine the Great. Over the course of his life, Cavafy wrote at least a dozen poems about Julian; the character appears as a sort of tormented alter ego, part spirit animal, part foil (see: “Julian in the Mysteries”). A polarising leader, although Julian was celebrated throughout the empire upon his ascent to the Caesarship, his downfall was variously mourned and exulted over, politics dependent. Upon Julian’s death, his friend and mentor, the politically moderate philosopher Libanius lamented, “Alas, great indeed is the grief that has beset not just the land of Achaia, but the whole empire where the laws of Roman hold sway. Gone is the glory of the good; the company of the wicked and the licentious is uplifted. . . . Now the broad path, the great doors lie wide open for the doers of evil to attack the just. The walls are down.” Conversely, Gregory of Nazianzus, a Christian theologian, called the young emperor “the Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind, the Assyrian, the public and private enemy of all in common, him that has madly raged and threatened much upon earth, and that has spoken and mediated much unrighteousness against heaven.” Another detractor, the Christian John of Chrysostom derisively described Julian’s choice to reveal himself as an adherent of the Hellene religion: “Julian cast aside his mask and all its trappings and thereafter barefacedly flaunted for the world to see all those impious superstitions which he had previously concealed.” This last could hardly have seemed a defect to Cavafy; in his poetry, if not his life, he had a pronounced soft spot for those who flaunted their unconventional predilections for all the world to see. More importantly, for Cavafy, the destruction of a beautiful sculpture by the foot soldiers of sectarian pettiness would constitute a minor tragedy. Religion aside, the righteous Christians’ response to Julian’s power-addled obduracy was in fact a desecration of that to which Cavafy had dedicated his life: Beauty.

Endings

In late April of 1933, weakening by the day and confined to his bed at the Greek hospital of Alexandria, Cavafy gave in to his friend and protegee Rika Sengonopoulos’ urging and accepted holy communion from Meletios Metaxakis, then Patriarch of Alexandria. The rite completed, Cavafy made a gesture of high ceremony, interpreted variously as one of supplication, surrender, Christian prayer, or theatrical camp. (That Cavafy should acquiesce to receive holy communion has struck some as unusual, in much the same way as certain readers and friends were surprised by the recital of the Kaddish prayer at the secular Hobsbawm’s London funeral in 2012. But as anyone who has attended the wedding ceremonies of hardline atheists, or observed the shoe collections of devout communists can attest, human beings are complicated creatures; poets and historians are certainly no exception.) Cavafy finished the poem “On the Outskirts of Antioch” around the same time as the prelate’s visit; he would not live to see it printed.

In the poem, when Julian cracks, loses his cool and gives in, it is difficult not to see Cavafy in the shards. Hellenism, the cultural practice Cavafy had considered most amenable to his sexuality is in ashes, for the trash — never to return. The snide invitation of the Christians to “let him talk” is addressed to a flailing Julian whose power is diminishing apace; he can talk all he likes, but no one will hear him. It also conjures Cavafy himself: a man accustomed to declaiming to a rapt audience in fluid paragraphs, now unable to speak, reduced to scribbling thoughts on paper scraps, to be read or ignored by friends and visitors. Let him talk! Let him talk! It is difficult to read this twice-repeated phrase and not hear a plea from its author, desperate to the last to give his version, silently suffocating.

Working away in his hospital bed, Cavafy was beset and broken by mortality; by the tyranny of cultural and familial inheritance; the dissolution of youthful fantasies; by the non-compliance of his own throat; hemmed in on all sides by etiolated dreams and expiring empires and the rising tide of intolerance; powerfully ambivalent about certainties of every stripe, about the nature of belief itself; unable ‘til the end to speak the most essential plain truth of his passion-fired mind aloud. The crux, he might have thought, rueful in the face of death’s vainglorious triumph, is that—as do we all, in the end—he cracked.

Those were the days
When there was so much energy in and around me
I could take it off and put it back on, like clothes
That one has bought only for a ski trip
But then finds that one is using every day
Because every day is like a ski trip—
I think that’s how I was at twenty-three.

Seeing those six young women in a boat I was on a ski trip.
They said, We are all from Minneapolis. This was in Stockholm.
The melding of American and Swedish-American female looks was a ski
trip.
Although I had no particular reason at that time to put all my energy on
Yet there it was, I had it, the way a giant has the hegemony of his nerves
In case he needs it, or the way a fisherman has all his poles and lines and
lures, and a scholar all his books
The way a water heater has all its gas
Whether it is being used or not, I had all that energy.
Really, are you all from Minneapolis? I said, almost bursting with force.
And yes, one of them, about the second prettiest, replied. We are here for
several days.

I thought about this moment from time to time
For eight or ten years. It seemed to me I should have done something at
the time,
To have used all that energy. Lovemaking is one way to use it and writing
is another.
Both maybe are overestimated, because the relation is so clear.
But that is probably human destiny and I’m not going to go against it
here.
Sometimes there are the persons and not the energy, sometimes the
energy and not the persons.
When the gods give both, a man shouldn’t complain.

— Kenneth Koch

This poem was recommended by Tracy Quan, author of Diary of A Manhattan Call Girl.

July 1990

—Hey, Marco Polo
“Christ” yelled at me then
Fokiοnos Negri empty
only the two of us
had stuck around
and the dogs.

— Miltos Sahtouris
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

Miltos Sahtouris was born in Αthens on 29 July, 1919. When asked by Stathis Tsagkarousianos what use poetry might be, he replied, “A poet is useless. He is a sort of luxury. He helps only certain sensitive people to overcome the hardships this life contains.” Miltos Sahtouris died in Athens in March, 2005.

more gnomic Athens poems:

Unhide & Seek - Yannis Ritsos

“Molly has said it all” - Eva Stefani

Like Stone - Miltos Sahtouris

“I was at home” - Thanos Stathopoulos

Petros - Miltos Sahtouris

He Came to Read —

He came to read. Lying open,
two or three books; historical and poesy.
But he barely read ten minutes,
‘til he gave up. On the settee
he’s half-asleep. To books he belongs entire—
but he’s twenty-three years old, and awfully pretty;
and this afternoon love transpired
into his ideal flesh, onto his lips.
Into his flesh so gorgeous
hotly love passed;
without foolish shame at the form of the pleasure…..

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

More poems by C.P. Cavafy:

Half An Hour

The Horses of Achilles

Greys

Whoever Has Failed

Jabbering from the future

Poetry has no cancel button.
Go on invoking insatiable fires
singing the immaculate freezes.
I’m the one telling you; who shacks

in damp basements
with invisible tetanus that lurks

and spiders so profane.

— Nikos Karouzos
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

more poems by Nikos Karouzos:

What Is Music

Exhortation

Walking

Younger

Identify

14

God’s Game and So Many Colours

Nikos Karouzos, one of the most prominent figures in modern Greek poetry, was born on 17 July, 1926 in Nafplio. His work is sudden, rangy, and endlessly inventive in its use of Greek, taking shape as often on a bar napkin as on lined page. A self-confessed “word addict,” Karouzos’ interest in Greek’s deep roots and lurching adventure into its modern form never waned; in a 1990 interview with poet and translator Haris Vlavianos, he wryly remarked that the “formal plural is a European incursion on the Greek language,” as if the vouz and Sies and Leis of Europe had staged an invasion of his solar plexus. He died in Athens in 1990.

Road’s Ode and Elegy

The tramp of the first passerby;
the first vendor's vivid cry;
the opening of the first windows,
the first gate — the song
of the streets in morning.

The tread of the last passerby;
the last vendor's final cry;
the closing of gates and windows —
night's notes falling
song of streets in mourning.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated with more liberties than usual from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

Sometimes of course there are no more songs.

More poems by C.P. Cavafy:

Greys

Sensed

I Went

Windows

“Molly has said it all...”

Molly has nothing to say because she’s said it all
She has an old body
She tumbles along Panepistimiou
A small fluffy ball

Oh, what’s left of Molly

Molly dreams of frogs and carp,
Dreams of excrement outside of toilets
Runs and mops it up but more she sees more

All night in her sleep she cleans soiled tiles
Again scrubs the same tiles
Always something missing
from a pen
to a hand
a tuft of hair in the wrong spot
or the chest back to front

She has pale little white paws
and big red socks
Molly licks the trafficguard’s hands
over the fake gloves

At the market she slips among the antiques
Along with the other lovelorn dogs
greets the spring.

— Eva Stefani
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

more dreamy Greek poems:

Conversation by Eva Stefani

In the depths by Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou

House by Eva Stefani

The Bound Shoulder by C.P. Cavafy

Ikaros by Rea Galanaki

Eyes by Eva Stefani

Like Stone by Miltos Sahtouris

The Fig Tree by E.C. Gonatas

What A Shame by Maria Laϊna

Whoever Has Failed

Whoever has failed, whoever’s been cut low
how hard to learn of penury’s
new language and new ways.
To abject foreign houses how will he go! —
with what heart will he walk in the street
and when at the door he finds him where will be found
the strength to touch the bell.
For the bread of contemptible need
and of shelter, how thankful will he be!
How he’ll face the cold eyes
that will show what a burden is he!
The ever proud lips how now
they’ll start to speak humbly;
and the head held high how it shall stoop!
The remarks, how he’ll hear them tear
the ear with each word — and moreover
must you make as if you do not feel it
as if you are simple and do not understand.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

more poems by C.P. Cavafy:

Myris: Alexandria, 340 A.D.

December of 1903

In the House of the Soul

Whereas the Wise What’s Coming

This again

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option. A difficult one, I admit,
impossible even, but in a process sense, it requires no knives
or cars or evil and can be conveyed in a simple phrase:
See someone, love someone. Or, Love thy neighbor
as thou loves apple pie. Or, love thy stranger
as thou loves starlight for touching us
without knowing our names. Have you ever felt
as brittle as kindling shattering to pieces
just under the shower curtain of your skin?
It’s a rhetorical question because I know you have
and will, as I have and do right now.
So screw every cult of hate. Every bullet and knife
and bomb and shitty thing said under the breath
or with the full conviction of the lungs. If you see a Jew,
be a Jew. If you see a Muslim, be a Muslim. If you see a human,
be a human. The lend-an-ear or a hand kind.
The “how’s it going” kind. The kind kind. No one chooses who
or where or when to be. We just sort of collectively are.
So hating you for being you makes no more sense
than you hating me for being me. And I don’t want to be raped
or have my throat slashed or get thrown off a cliff,
hard as that is to believe. I want to see the cliffs of Ithaca
in moonlight. The Kaaba in Mecca circled by a crowd
pulsing with faith. The Ice Hotel in a snow storm.
I want a really good pizza with an egg on it.
To kiss my wife on top of the Eiffel Tower.
All the parts of her that are Jewish
and all the parts that are human
and all the parts that make her sigh and moan.
Being human means understanding that being human
is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
That we’re all partisans in this struggle,
fellow teamsters in not knowing
what the hell is going on, brothers and sisters
stuffing our befuddlement every morning
into pants and dresses we hope
don’t make us look fat and stupid and lost.
Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is
to feel lost together. Maybe you have a map
and I have a canteen. Certainly someone
has a pogo stick or cyclotron. We need food
and light and harmonicas and theremins
and stories about monsters
who decide not to eat the child
or stomp the village or fly over the night
with death on their wings. Lost together,
our nowhere becomes our somewhere. Lost together,
the dream of home never dies.

— Bob Hicok

More poems that love the world anyway:

Personal - Mihalis Ganas

The Invisible - Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou

The Mercy - Philip Levine

Epilogue - Maria Laïna

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid - William Stafford

In order for me to write… - Marwan Makhoul

Identify

Here near me is the other
he’s delight and honest space
for me to spill the waters of the barrens within me
my fellow.

In the bush
the hand’s inclination weds the leaf.
How does beauty arise in footfalls …
And the sober figure of the acacia
her leaves rustling
in the invisible blank breeze.

The man spades the earth with sorrow
regarding days and years
the good dwelling place.

The great rain with water aplenty
shuts reality
so each can enter into fairytale
beyond the lightning’s rage
solitary.

Winter city the rain like the end of the soul.

— Nikos Karouzos
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

More Athenian meditations:

Sokrates to Krito (letter from prison) by Anne Carson

“I was at home…” by Thanos Stathopoulos

In the gardens of the manor by Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou

In the Depths by Niki-Rebecca Papageorgiou

What is Music by Nikos Karouzos

Fishbowl by Marios Hakkas

House and Garden

I would’ve liked to have a country house
with a very large garden — not so much
for the flowers, for the trees, and the greenery
(certainly those too; they’re most beauteous)
but for the animals. Ah to have animals!
Seven cats at least — two jet-black,
and two whiter than snow, for contrast.
A marvellous parrot, for me to ken him
speaking with emphasis and conviction.
As for dogs, I believe three will do me.
I’d like two horses also (horsies are lovely).
And by all means three or four of those worthy,
winsome animals, donkeys,
to laze about, and please their pretty heads.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

On irony, gardens, and rooms with a view

While Cavafy may have been on record as being fond of animals, his purported desire to live in a country house is undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek. As noted by Eusebi Ayensa, Basque poet and translator and Cavafy scholar extraordinaire, in Cavafy’s Notes Poetical and Ethical, he refers in his papers to a poem of his that did not survive, likely of a similar theme to that of “House and Garden.” About this poem, Cavafy wrote, “I’ve never lived in the countryside. Nor did I visit the countryside even for a short time, as did others. Notwithstanding, I wrote a poem in which I sing the praises of country life, writing that to it I owe my verses. The poem is of little worth. It is the most dishonest thing possible: a true falsehood.” Ayensa adds that when Cavafy was in Athens being treated for the throat cancer that eventually killed him, at his doctors’ suggestion he moved to Kifissia, to heal from his operation in peace, far from the hubbub of the city. When his friend Yorgos Sareyannis visited him there, Cavafy told him that the blue sky, mountains, and valleys seen from the window of his room disturbed him. A few days later, he moved into a hotel near Omonoia — a bustling square in the centre of Athens, complete with newly-built electric train station, and plenty of nightlife.1 In the coming decades, Omonoia would go on to become a popular cruising spot for gay Athenians.

Fleeing

It was none other our love
it fled returned again and brought
us a lowered lingering glance
a marble smile, lost
in the morning graze
a strange seashell our soul
doggedly tried to explain.

Our love was none other palpating
softly that which encircled us
to explain why we don’t want to die
with such passion.

And if we were held by the hips and if we embraced
with all we had other napes
and if we mingled our breath with the breath
of that person
and if we closed our eyes, it was none other
only this deepest yearning to hold on
mid flight.

—Yorgos Seferis
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

More Greek poems of hanging on & fleeing:

The Last Day - Yorgos Seferis

“if you cut a boat” - Prokne

Personal - Mihalis Ganas

Younger - Nikos Karouzos

Among Sword-lilies - Viktoria Theodorou

Conversation - Eva Stefani

The Bound Shoulder - C.P. Cavafy

Homecoming from Greece

So now, we’re close to arriving, Ermippus.
The day after tomorrow, I reckon; so said the captain.
At least in our own sea we sail;
waters of Cyprus, of Syria, and of Egypt,
our homeland’s beloved waters.
Why so quiet? Ask your heart,
the further we betook ourselves from Greece
did you not grow the gladder? Ought we fool ourselves? —
surely this wouldn’t be Greek-worthy.

Let us accept the truth already;
we, too be Greeks — what else be we? —
but with loves and with emotions of Asia,
but with loves and with emotions
sometimes estranged from Hellenism.

It doesn’t suit us, Ermippus, we philosophers
to ape those petty kings of ours
(remember how we laughed at that bunch
when they visited our study halls)
who, from under their ostentatiously Greek-spun,
and (the nerve!) Macedonian exteriors,
some Arabia noses every so often, some
Media that isn’t gathered in,
and with what comical contrivances the poor sods
strain so that it not be noticed.

Ah, no it doesn’t suit us, all that.
For Greeks like us these pettinesses won’t do.
Of the blood of Syria and of Egypt
that flows in our veins, let us not be ashamed,
let us honour it, let us vaunt it.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

*

I know it well. No need to tell me!
I’ll talk so when I teach
again the day after tomorrow. Teacher of Hellenism
occupied (enslaved, rather)
by worship of the thoughts of Greek-dom,
I won’t myself diminish all things Hellenic
(and if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how).

Greeks we be in the libraries,
but when some feeling takes us —
some moment of pleasure or devotion,
as something touches our heart, our loves —,
cold and faroff is Greece – and strange.

More travelling poems by Cavafy:

Taken

The Satrapy

Second Odyssey

Like Stone

Spring is for the happy
you said then

now you’ve grown hard
like stone.

— Miltos Sahtouris
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

more minimalist Greek poems:

14 - Nikos Karouzos

And If You’re A Man - Nikos-Alexis Aslanoglou

[untitled teeth] - Elio Xrysallis

Ikaros - Rea Galanaki

He Swears - C.P. Cavafy

Myris: Alexandria, 340 A.D.

When I learned of the calamity, that Myris died,
I went to his house, tho’ I avoid
entering the homes of Christians,
above all when they have sorrows or celebrations.

I stood in the hall. I didn’t want
to continue inside, because I realised
that the relatives of the deceased were looking at me
with obvious confusion and displeasure.

They had him in a big room
of which from the corner where I stood
I could see a part: all precious tapestries,
and vessels of silver and of gold.

I stood there crying in a corner of the hall.
And I was thinking that our gatherings and our outings
without Myris would no longer be worthwhile;
and I was thinking that no longer would I see him
on our fine and shameless nights out
enjoying himself, and laughing, and reciting verses
with his perfect sense of Greek rhythm;
and I thought that I had lost forever
his beauty, that I had lost forever
the youth that I ardently adored.

Some old ladies, near me, spoke low about
the last day he lived —
Christ’s name constant on his lips,
bearing in his hands a cross.—
Then there came into the room
four Christian priests, who fervent recited
prayers and supplications to Jesus,
or to Mary (I don’t know their religion well).

We knew, of course, that Myris was a Christian.
From the very first we knew it, when
the year before last he came into our crowd.
But he lived entirely as we did.
Of us all more dissolute in pleasures;
scattering his money lavishly on amusements.
Insouciant to the world’s regard,
pitching readily into late-night street scraps
when our crowd happened
to meet an opposing crowd.
Never did he speak of his religion.
Indeed, once we told him
that we’d take him with us to Serapion.
But it was as if he were displeased
with our joking like this: I remember now.
Oh and two other times now come to my mind.
When we made libations to Poseidon,
he pulled out from our circle, and turned his gaze away.
When one of us enthusiastically
said, May our company fall under
the grace and the protection of the great,
the gorgeous Apollo — Myris whispered
(the others didn’t hear) “except me.”

The Christian priests were supplicating
aloud for the soul of the youth.—
I noticed with what diligence,
and with what intense attention
to the rites of their religion, they readied
everything for the Christian funeral.
And suddenly a queer feeling
overcame me. Vaguely, I felt
as though Myris had left my side;
I felt that he’d joined, Christian,
with his own, and that I was becoming
myself a stranger, very strange; I felt just then
a doubt sidle near: perhaps I had been fooled
by my passion, and I was always a stranger to him.—
I burst out from their ghastly house,
left quick before it could be snatched, before Myris’ memory
could be tainted by their Christendom.

— C.P. Cavafy
(translated from the Greek by Eva H.D.)

note: Cavafy lost two dear friends — from a group of four highschool pals who referred to themselves collectively as “the clique” — while he was still quite young: first Stefanos Skylitzis, who died at age nineteen in 1886, then his beloved Mikés Rallis, who died in 1889 at the age of twenty-three.

More historical poems by Cavafy:

The Horses of Achilles

The Satrapy

In Sparta

In 200 B.C.

Let Them Take Care