Sunday Pages: "The City"

A poem by C.P. Cavafy

Dear Reader,

In 331 BC, Alexander the Great founded what he hoped would become a great metropolis on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast—a place worthy of bearing his glorious name. Thus was Alexandria born. As was usually the case, the Macedonian conqueror got what he desired: within a century of its establishment, Alexandria was the biggest city in the (“known”) ancient world. Its lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders; its library, the most extensive. A major trading center from antiquity until the Age of Exploration, Alexandria was always a melting pot, a place where diverse peoples lived together, more or less in harmony—with Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews the most populous ethnic groups.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Alexandria became a hotbed of poets, writers, and artists, Lawrence Durrell among them. From 1957-60, the British expat wrote four novels—Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea; collectively, the Alexandria Quartet—set in the city in the late 1930s and early 1940s, chronicling the movements and machinations of a colorful cast of characters—all of them brilliant, creative, bohemian, tormented, damaged, and insatiably horny. But the true protagonist of the Quartet is the city itself, which, he writes, used him and his friends “as its flora—precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!”

Durrell continues, in the first few paragraphs of the first book:

Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash my mind’s eye shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today—and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either.

Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demonic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place.

One of the poets who partook of the prevailing sexual provender was Constantine P. Cavafy—known in the Quartet as the “old poet of the city.” Like Raphael and Shakespeare and Ingrid Bergman, he died on his birthday: April 29, in his case, in 1933, at age 70. He was born in Alexandria and died in Alexandria and lived most of his adult life in Alexandria, after spending his formative years in London and in Constantinople. A consummate outsider—a Greek in the land of the Egyptians; a gay man, as out as it was possible to be at the time, in a heterosexual world—he is described as “the leading poet of the periphery.” He thought of himself as “Hellenic,” and his poems harken back to the Greeks of mythology, the Greeks of antiquity, and the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire: glorious Greek worlds that, by the time he was active around the turn of the last century, existed only in memory. He wrote of faded glory, of forgotten realms, of the dispossessed. Other poems evoke homoerotic desire, and are full of wistfulness and longing and unrequited desire. He didn’t believe in flowery language or complex metaphor. He wrote to be understood.

Having bought a lovely deckle-edged edition of Justine a few weeks ago at my favorite used bookstore in my hometown, I am working my way again through the Quartet, and I took a detour this week to read the work of Cavafy, whom Durrell so openly admires. I was shocked to find a poem about Anna Komnene, the “Anna K.” who is the (pretend) author of the “secret history” that makes up my historical novel, Empress:

In the prologue to her Alexiad,
Anna Komnene laments her widowhood.

Her soul is dizzy with grief.
“And I bathe my eyes,” she tells us,
“in rivers of tears.... Alas for the waves” of her life,
“alas for the revolutions.” Sorrow burns her
“to the bones and the marrow and the splitting” of her soul.

But the truth seems to be that this power-hungry princess
knew only one heartbreak that really mattered;
even if she doesn’t admit it, this arrogant Greek woman
had only one consuming anguish:
that with all her shrewdness,
she never managed to gain the throne,
all but snatched out of her clutches by impudent John.

That his take on Anna—arrogant, shrewd, performative in her grief, bitter—squares with my own was, I must say, a bit of a relief.

In the “Ramble” last week, I read his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians,” with its haunting last lines:

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

In Justine, Durrell quotes from Cavafy’s poem “The City.” The “standard” translation goes like this:

The City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind molder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. 

Durrell offers his own version in the end notes to Justine. “By now the Cavafy canon has been established,” he writes, in 1957, “and in a sense the poet has been freed for other poets to experiment with; I have tried to transplant rather than translate—with what success I cannot say.”

THE CITY
You tell yourself: I’ll be gone
To some other land, some other sea,
To a city far lovelier than this
Could ever have been or hoped to be—
Where every step now tightens the noose:
A heart in a body buried and out of use:
How long, how long must I be here
Confined among these dreary purlieus
Of the common mind? Wherever now I look
Black ruins of my life rise into view.
So many years have I been here
Spending and squandering, and nothing gained.
There’s no new land, my friend, no
New sea; for the city will follow you,
In the same streets you’ll wander endlessly,
The same mental suburbs slip from youth to age,
In the same house go white at last—
The city is a cage.
No other places, always this
Your earthly landfall, and no ship exists
To take you from yourself. Ah! don’t you see
Just as you’ve ruined your life in this
One plot of ground you’ve ruined its worth
Everywhere now—over the whole earth?

If Durrell is going to “transplant” the poem, well, I’m up for the challenge! Here is my version—same number of lines as Cavafy’s seminal text, but with rhymes and (not Hellenic, but still poetical) iambic pentameter. I have attempted to convey the spirit of the original…with what success I cannot say:

The City

“I’ll find another land, another shore,
A city better far than this,” you said.
“Fate thwarts me here at every turn. My poor
Heart, it lies buried as if something dead.
How long can my soul molder in this place?
The black ruins of my life confront me here;
Where’er I turn, it stares me in the face:
The dark destruction of my squandered years.”

You’ll never find another land or shore.
There’s no escape. The city is a cage—
A cage you bring along. Forevermore,
You’ll walk these streets, condemned. Any voyage
Will lead nowhere; the city’s where you’ll be.
There’s no hope for another fate. The void,
The waste, the buried heart: you can’t break free.
What you ruined here is everywhere destroyed.

The poem contains a conversation: the first half is an argument, the second, a rebuttal. Is this Cavafy addressing a lover reluctant to accept his sexual orientation? A friend who cannot come to grips with his mistakes? Himself at a different moment in his life? Is the end of “The City” his own epiphany?

Part of this poem is a spin on the old adage: You can take the boy out of Alexandria, but you can’t take Alexandria out of the boy. But there’s more to it that that. Cavafy channels the numerous Greek myths that teach us that we cannot run from our fate. We are what we are, and we have to find ways to live with our fuck-ups, our shortcomings, our self-inflicted wounds—our true warts-and-all selves.

What can we take from this admittedly dour, fatalistic message? What Cavafy doesn’t say is that the situation is hopeless; only that running away from it won’t change what’s already been done. Implicit in this is the command to stay put and deal with whatever troubles arise from our bad life choices. The poet may as well be addressing the current population of the United States. We cannot flee to Canada or Europe. We cannot run away from the mess we’ve made here. We must deal with the black ruins—head on. And by “black ruins,” we mean “orange Hitler.”

What really struck me about “The City” is the hyperbolic language: molder, something dead, black ruins, waste, destroyed. The first speaker is having himself a pity party, and the second uses the same extreme vocabulary in response—perhaps suggesting to his confidante how these sentiments are blown out of proportion, that things aren’t as bad as they seem (although they certainly seem pretty bad here in the U.S. this morning).

The title, too, is significant. Alexandria endured the earthquake that destroyed its lighthouse, the Roman invasion that burned its library and slaughtered its young men, Arab takeover, the loss of prominence in trade after the discovery of sea routes to India, battles involving Napoleon, but it remains, for all of that, intact, almost two and a half millennia later.

The city is a cage, and the city is us, and the city is inescapable—but at the same time the city, the “beloved Alexandria” as Durrell puts it, is not a place from which we should ever truly want to escape.

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ICYMI

My friend, the very talented Jimmy Kennedy, was kind enough to have me back on his podcast. Here is the recording:

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The Five 8

Our guest was Patrick Strickland, journalist and author of the (excellent) new book, YOU CAN KILL EACH OTHER AFTER I LEAVE:

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Photo credit: Louis-François Cassas, map of Alexandria. From “Voyage pittoresque de la Syrie, de la Phoenicie, de la Palaestine et de la Basse Aegypte: ouvrage divisé en trois volumes contenant environ trois cent trente planches,” 1700s.

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Gatsby

One hundred years of the Jazz Age classic! You can buy our edition here.