The poem
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear an invisible procession going by with exquisite music, voices, don't mourn your luck that's failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive -- don't mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Above all, don't fool yourself, don't say it was a dream, your ears deceived you: don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, as is right for you who were given this kind of city, go firmly to the window And listen with deep emotion, but not with whining, the pleas of a coward; listen -- your final delectation -- to the voices, to the exquisite music of that strange procession, and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Lawrence Durrel has a translation, presumably his own, in the first of his Alexandria Quartet. His version is the most lyrical I have read. I cannot help but think this is due to the years Lawrence spent in Alexandria where he sat out World War II. The city seems to take over the lives of the writers who spend time there. Cavafy wrote in his poem, The City, his lament for the lost years spent in the city and dreams…
Read the whole commentLawrence Durrel has a translation, presumably his own, in the first of his Alexandria Quartet. His version is the most lyrical I have read. I cannot help but think this is due to the years Lawrence spent in Alexandria where he sat out World War II. The city seems to take over the lives of the writers who spend time there.
Cavafy wrote in his poem, The City, his lament for the lost years spent in the city and dreams of escape but concludes that even upon fleeing the city for another better place, "There's no new land, my friend, no new sea; for the city will follow you, in the same streets you'll wander endlessly..."
This fate, suffered by Durrel gave him an insight to the fate of Antony, abandoned by his God. Antony, too, could never escape the city, the place where the Ptolomys played out their last gambets before the Roman's ended the line. Antony, as great a man as he was, lacked the heroic stature to escape.
Antony, like so many after him was ensnared in the city, the bit of Europe, an outpost of Greek thought on a continent whose winds swept accross the city, the heat of the Sahara bringing the lassitude of the continent, changing the ionic charge of the very air, brining with it madness, making escape impossible.
Antony is asked to put aside all illusions, all reasons to be used to obscure the truth. If he is to leave he must refrain from the excuses, he must pick up the Roman training, the Roman clarity in face of the fates his own actions have created.
Yes, the mystical city with its rapture has suspended reason, Antony can only look down and drink in the black rapture of this land of illusion. And then say, farewell Alexandria, say goodbye to Alexandria leaving.
Cavafy, a Greek, also ensnared in the black rapture of this city recognizes that it is too easy to excuse his life by blaming the city's power to hold him. Here he challenges the citizens of Alexandria to face their hand in their own ensnarement and like Cavafy, face the truth, abandoning unreason.
The God Abandons Antony
There are two contexts of this poem: one historical, one literary. The historical context is the abrupt turnaround in the fortunes of Mark Antony. After 10 years ruling the eastern third of Rome’s lands from the city of Alexandria, the Second Triumvirate came to an end and Octavian turned on him and his consort, Cleopatra. The literary context is Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of this moment in his Anthony and…
Read the whole commentThere are two contexts of this poem: one historical, one literary.
The historical context is the abrupt turnaround in the fortunes of Mark Antony. After 10 years ruling the eastern third of Rome’s lands from the city of Alexandria, the Second Triumvirate came to an end and Octavian turned on him and his consort, Cleopatra.
The literary context is Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of this moment in his Anthony and Cleopatra (Act IV, Scene III). In a characteristically oblique commentary on the main action, a group of soldiers guarding the walls of Alexandria hear music “as of hautboys [oboes] under the stage”, according to Shakespeare’s stage direction.
To the soldiers the music is “i’ the air” or “under the earth”. They agree it is a bad omen:
"’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony lov’d,
Now leaves him.”
Cavafy takes the scene one stage further, imagining that Antony himself hears the “superb” music and voices of an invisible troupe of musicians.
The subject of the poem is the attitude which the poet advises Antony to adopt to confront the experience. He must not fruitlessly lament his luck, his deeds, or his plans that have come to nothing. He should not deceive himself by telling himself it is a dream or a trick of his hearing. These are “vain hopes”.
Instead as someone “ready for the moment”, and “a courageous man”, he should step forward to the window and meet his fate face on, without whining or entreaties. He should savour a final enjoyment of the sounds, and “say goodbye to her, to Alexandria who is leaving”.
The philosophic attitude the poet is commending to his subject (and by extension to readers confronting ill fortune of their own) would have been only too familiar to Antony himself. It is Stoicism, the dominant philosophic system of Hellenistic Greece and, by adoption, of Rome prior to Christianity, known to us today principally from the writings of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
In one respect, Cavafy departs from Shakespeare’s conception, and indeed from the title of the poem. There is no mention of a god or Hercules. It is the city of Alexandria itself that is abandoning Antony. This personification of the city is an innovation of Cavafy’s: his home city haunts much of his other work.
It also leads us to a third context for the poem, if a poem can be put in context by a subsequent work: Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.
Cavafy himself never appears in the pages of the Quartet – he died shortly before the years in which the first three books are set - but his influence on the characters as the “Old Man of the City” is evident. One of the characters, Balthazar, is said to have been his friend (and possibly his lover). Darley, the narrator, meets Justine at a lecture he is giving on Cavafy. Durrell even provides his own, excellent translations of "The City" and "The God Abandons Antony" in an appendix to Justine.
Durrell’s real debt to Cavafy however is to follow his personification of Alexandria, his sense of the city as a character – perhaps the dominant character - in the Alexandria Quartet. Darley’s rhapsodic description of the city in the opening pages of Justine is, in a sense, the epilogue to Cavafy’s poem:
"I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora – precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!"