W.H.

Auden

Introduction to Cavafy´s poems

Ever since I was first introduced to his poetry by the late Professor R.M. Dawkins over thirty
years ago, C.P. Cavafy has remained an influence on my own writing; that is to say, I can think
of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or
perhaps not written at all. Yet I do not know a word of Modern Greek, so that my only access
to Cavafy’s poetry has been through English and French translations.
This perplexes and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry, I
have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be
translated into another tongue but poetry cannot.
But if it is possible to be poetically influenced by work which one can read only in
translation, this belief must be qualified.
There must be some elements in poetry which are separable from their original verbal
expression and some which are inseparable. It is obvious, for example, that any association of
ideas created by homophones is restricted to the language in which these homophones occur.
Only in German does Welt rhyme with Geld , and only in English is Hilaire Belloc’s pun
possible.
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read’.
When, as in pure lyric, a poet “sings” rather than “speaks”, he is rarely, if ever, translatable.
The “meaning” of a song by Campion is inseparable from the sound and the rhythmical values
of the actual words he employs. It is conceivable that a genuine bilingual poet might write
what, to him, was the same lyric in two languages, but if someone else were then to make a
literal translation of each version into the language of the other, no reader would be able to
recognize their connection.
On the other hand, the technical conventions and devices of verse can be grasped in
abstraction from the verse itself. I do no have to know Welsh to become excited about the
possibility of applying to English verse the internal rhymes and alliterations in which Welsh
verse is so rich. I may very well find that they cannot be copied exactly in English, yet discover
by modifying them new and interesting effects.
Another element in poetry which often survives translation is the imagery of similes and
metaphors, for these are derived, not from local verbal habits, but from sensory experiences
common to all men.
I do not have to read Pindar in Greek in order to appreciate the beauty and aptness with
which he praises the island of Delos.
…motionless miracle of the
wide earth, which mortals call Delos, but the
blessed on Olympus, the far-shining star of
dark-blue earth.
When difficulties in translating images do arise, this is usually because the verbal resources of
the new language cannot make the meaning clear without using so many words that the force
of the original is lost. Thus Shakespeare’s line
The hearts that spanielled me at heels
cannot be translated into French without turning the metaphor into a less effective simile.
None of the translatable elements in poetry which I have mentioned so far applies, however,
to Cavafy. With the free relaxed iambic verse he generally uses, we are already familiar. The
most original aspect of his style, the mixture, both in his vocabulary and his syntax, of demotic
and purist Greek, is untranslatable. In English there is nothing comparable to the rivalry
between demotic and purist, a rivalry that has excited high passions, both literary and political.
We have only Standard English on the one side and regional dialects on the other, and it is
impossible for a translator to reproduce this stylistic effect or for an English poet to profit from
it.
Nor can one speak of Cavafy´s imagery, for simile and metaphor are devices he never uses;
whether he is speaking of a scene, an event, or an emotion, every line of his is plain factual
description without any ornamentation whatsoever.
What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can
only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of
Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as
a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel:
“This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.” That the speech of self-
disclosure should be translatable seems to me very odd, but I am convinced that it is. The
conclusion I draw is that the only quality which all human beings without exception possess is
uniqueness: any characteristic, on the other hand, which one individual can be recognized as
having in common with another, like red hair or the English language, implies the existence of
other individual qualities which this classification excludes. To the degree, therefore, that a
poem is the product of a certain culture, it is difficult to translate it into the terms of another
culture, but to the degree that it is the expression of a unique human being, it is as easy, or as
difficult, for a person from an alien culture to appreciate as for one of the cultural group to
which the poet happens to belong.
But if the importance of Cavafy’s poetry is his unique tone of voice, there is nothing for a
critic to say, for criticism can only make comparisons. A unique tone of voice cannot be
described; it can only be imitated, that is to say, either parodied or quoted.

Š Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York

From: The Complete Poems of Cavafy, 1961
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., New York