King of a Hundred Horsemen by Marie Étienne, Marilyn Hacker

Abstract

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII trained in classical history as well as ancient and modern Greek. The magnitude of his achievement in these two volumes is dazzling. In addition toproviding richlydetailed notes to support the reader's under standing of the often obscure his torical contexts of the poems, he also sets the bar for authenticity in translatingunusually high. Mendelsohn demythologizes the popular notion that Cavafy's characteristically plain lines? which are freeof similes and meta phors?are actually a kind of prose masquerading as lyric poetry. He emphasizes the complex, intricately woven texture of the poet's lan guage, which combines the classic forms of vocabulary and grammar known as "Katharevousa" with demotic Greek. Unlike previous translators of Cavafy, not only do Mendelsohn's translations convey the mingling of archaic and modern Greek in the original, but they also restore the rhythm and visual for mat ofCavafy's metrically inventive "tango" poems, inwhich each line contains two fragmented half-lines of threebeats divided by an expanse of white space. To these substan tial innovations, Mendelsohn adds a faithful adherence to the poet's pattern ofwriting lines thatare often enjambed or end-rhymed, compen sating forthe latter with slant rhyme or assonance. The remarkable results give us the closest English equiva lence todate of theelegant Cavafian diction, tone, and music. As a young man of letters writ ing during the 1880s and 1890s, Cavafy was more active as a scholar thana poet, although hewas already writing and publishing poems. Then at some time early in the twentieth century, as his fellow poet George Seferis commented, "something extraordinary happens." Cavafy's MMIIIIIII 11 IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIII Mill Illlllllllllll passion for history, invigorated by reading the eighteenth-century Enlightenment historian Gibbons and the nineteenth-century Roman tic historian Paparrigopoulos, merged with the poet's homosex ual passion. A lover of secrets and mysteries, Cavafy began to fusehis focus on marginal figures forgotten in thecracks ofpost-Hellenic history with his own secret homoerotic life conducted inAlexandria's less repu tablequarters.Now Cavafy's poems took on their hauntingly nostalgic tone?the voice of an advice-giver who isworld-weary yetdeeply sym pathetic to human weakness. The principal players in these poems are not the vulnerable his toric figures themselves but time and memory. Although Cavafy's speakers rue the passing of time, theyexalt in theway itperfects and revivifies desire. The older speaker of the exquisitely translated unfin ished poem "It Must Have Been theSpirits" feels a surge of freedom recalling a night of sensual plea sure: "My soul was released; the poor thing,it's / always constrained by the weight of years." Another iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiii aging lover savors anew his origi nal euphoric intensity in the act of remembering and poeticizing it: "as I write, after so many years have passed!, / in my solitaryhouse, I am drunk again." Yet memory doesn't simply evoke the force of love? it clarifies present experience. The pagan speaker in "Mires:Alexandria in 340 a.D." mourns the loss of his companion inpassional pursuits yet suddenly realizes in the midst of his friend's Christian funeral rites that Mires was less an intimate than a strangerwho had followed an alien god; he flees "before their Christian ity/ could get hold of, could alter, the memory ofMires." Although accomplished trans lations of Cavafy's collected poems already exist?notably those of Rae Dalven and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard?Mendelsohn has given us the firstEnglish transla tions of thepoet's thirty unfinished poems, which he continually refined during his lifetimebut never con sidered ready forpublication. While the poems are gracefully rendered, the reason why the poet consid ered them incomplete seems clear: they are essentially narrative and descriptive and, with the exception of "ItMust Have Been the Spirits," they lack the spark of philosophic transformationthattypifies Cavafy's most memorable verse. Rita Signorelli-Pappas Princeton, New Jersey Marie Etienne.King of a Hundred Horsemen. Marilyn Hacker, tr. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008. xvii + 203 pages. $25. isbn978-0-374 Marilyn Hacker received the first Robert Fagles Translation Prize, established by theNational Poetry Series in 2007, for her translation 1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 i^^^H 701World Literature Today , of Roi des cent cavaliers, by Marie 1 Etienne, the...