Posts featuring Cavafy

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Constantine Cavafy

O memory, I pleaded / for you to assist me / to recreate the image / of the one whom I loved / the young face as it was.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday we present two newly translated poems from one of the most influential figures in modern Greek poetry, Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Though known primarily through English translations of his work (championed by Anglophone writers such as E.M. Forster), Cavafy has enjoyed increased attention as a formal innovator of Greek poetics. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Greek parents, and later educated in Britain, Cavafy would spend the bulk of his life in Alexandria writing poems for private circulation among friends, family, and local periodicals, eschewing the trappings of potential literary fame. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the poetry community of mainland Greece eventually embraced Cavafy’s bold new poetics, launching a modernist revival of Greek verse. Scholar and translator Alex de Voogt shares some of his insights on Cavafy’s formal stylings:

Cavafy built on the traditional Dekapentasyllavo or Greek folk song but allowed a flexible number of syllables, six or seven for either hemistich, together with a clear caesura. In later years, Cavafy would break the integrity of the meaningful phrase in each hemistich but never violated his own rules of syllabics . . . Syllabics look, feel and sound different when they are applied in translation. They are a hidden structure with historical antecedents. Cavafy used his hemistiches for an increasingly complex enjambment across line breaks as well as across the caesura.

“In the month of Athyr”

I am struggling to read                         an Ancient stone inscription
that says “Lo[r]d Jesus Christ.”            A “So[u]l” may be distinguished.
“In the month of Athyr”                        “Lefkio[s] w[ent] to rest”
With reference to his age                     “He lived this many years”
the Kappa Zeta shows                           he was laid to rest still young.
I see in the corrupted text                    “Hi[m] . . . Alexandrian”
And then there are three lines            especially disfigured
but some words can be made out      such as “our t[ea]rs,” “suffering”
then once again the “tears”                  and “his [f]riends are mourning [h]im”
It seems that Lefkios                             must have been greatly loved.
In the month of Athyr                            Lefkios was laid to rest.

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Summer 2011: Our First Great Issue

Asymptote issues offer much serendipity and often puzzling amounts of connections, and the Summer 2011 one is no exception.

The Summer 2011 issue is, to my mind anyway, Asymptote’s first great issue—not least because of the sheer embarrassment of riches showcased therein. (To this day, I still regret not being able to find a spot in our list of featured names on the cover for: AdonisPéter EsterházyBrother Anthony of TaizéSagawa ChikaHai-Dang PhanAraya RasdjarmrearnsookAzra Raza & Sara Suleri GoodyearJonas Hassen Khemiri, and, last but certainly not least, Tomaž Šalamun, who enclosed English translations of his poetry in a letter sent to my Singaporean address. A savvier editor would probably have chosen to promote local opposition politician and household name Chen Show Mao; indeed, after he shared it on his Facebook page, my exclusive interview with Chen drew thousands of hits from Singaporean readers, causing an unprecedented spike in traffic.) No, it was our first great issue because despite the adverse conditions under which it was produced—a key editor dropped out, taking Asymptote funds along with him; our guest artist resigned three weeks before the issue launch—we still delivered on time, working into the wee hours of the morning. On a lighter note: Sven Birkerts, whose essay on Roberto Bolaño I solicited, once handed me a crisp five-dollar bill after betting in class that no one would be able to identify an unattributed passage from Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. Who says you can’t make money from world literature? Here to introduce this issue (and the Hungarian Fiction Feature that I edited in honor of my Hungarian friend Nora, whose wedding I couldn’t attend because of the journal) is Diána Vonnák, editor-at-large for Hungary since October 2017.

I started writing about Hungarian literature in translation in 2012, right after I moved away from Budapest. In a way, this was a coping mechanism, a strategy to handle the sudden absence of both shared references and the immediacy of lived language. It was a half-serious attempt  to not only recreate the context I had been immersed in back home but also weave it into the much larger and more diverse literary world I encountered in a UK university full of students from overseas.

These new encounters fascinated me, and I found myself immersed in world literature more than ever before. But I realized that if I wanted to write about it, I needed to explore Hungarian literature in English translation and the platforms where it could be found. This journey soon led me to what was then a rather young journal: Asymptote. In 2013, I stumbled upon the journal’s third issue, from July 2011, and was astonished to find the special feature on Hungarian fiction. Yet as I read through the rest of the issue I was mesmerised by the many hidden links between the other pieces, particularly the subtle hints to Odysseus and his many literary heirs as well as modernism in its divergent traditions. If there had been a Greek god overseeing the birth of this issue, it would have certainly been Hermes. READ MORE…