Cavafy’s Barbarians and their Western Genealogy

Abstract

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is probably the most discussed of Cavafy’s poems after ‘The God abandons Antony’. Its sources, its date of composition and its diachronic symbolism, along with Cavafy’s unfathomable intentions, have generated a large number of interpretations and debates. Reading the poem today one cannot escape from these layers of interpretation, a kind of metadiscourse which regulates the new approaches either compliant or defiant to those already existent. It seems that the accumulated interpretations of a literary text sometimes discomfort those who seek stable and obvious meanings rather than a multiplicity of opinions and conflicting approaches. The very bulk of scholarship related to a certain poem or poet discourages a new reading and makes the critic hesitant and apprehensive. Nevertheless the diversity of interpretive approaches helps us both to realize their relativity and to ascribe them entirely to the various interpreters.