As a theme, death is a good litmus test for a poet's ethics. The "in memoriam" genre is frequently used to exercise self-pity or for metaphysical trips that denote the subconscious superiority of survivor over victim, of majority (of the alive) over minority (of the dead). Akhmatova would have none of that. She particularizes her fallen instead of generalizing about them, since she writes for a minority with which it's easier for her to identify in any case. She simply continues to treat them as individuals whom she knew and who, she senses, wouldn't like to be used as the point of departure for no matter how spectacular a destination.
Naturally enough, poems of this sort couldn't be published, nor could they even be written down or retyped. They could only be memorized by the author and by some seven other people, since she didn't trust her own memory. From time to time, she'd meet a person privately and would ask him or her to recite quietly this or that selection as a means of inventory. This precaution was far from being excessive: people would disappear forever for smaller things than a piece of paper with a few lines on it. Besides, she feared not so much for her own life as for that of her son, who was in a camp and whose release she desperately tried to obtain for eighteen years. A little piece of paper with a few lines on it could cost a lot, and more to him than to her, who could lose only hope and, perhaps, mind.
The days of both, however, would have been numbered had the authorities found her Requiem, a cycle of poems describing the ordeal of a woman whose son is arrested and who waits under prison walls with a parcel for him and scurries about the thresholds of state offices to find out about his fate. Now, this time around she was autobiographical indeed, yet the power of Requiem lies in the fact that Akhmatova's biography was all too common. This requiem mourns the mourners: mothers losing sons, wives turning widows, sometimes both, as was the author's case. This is a tragedy where the chorus perishes before the hero.
The degree of compassion with which the various voices of Requiem are rendered can be explained only by the author's Orthodox faith; the degree of understanding and forgiveness which accounts for this work's piercing, almost unbearable lyricism, only by the uniqueness of her heart, her self, and this self's sense of time. No creed would help to understand, much less forgive, let alone survive this double widowhood at the hands of the regime, this fate of her son, these forty years of being silenced and ostracized. No Anna Gorenko would be able to take it. Anna Akhmatova did, and it's as though she knew what was in store when she took this pen name.
At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise couldn't be retained by the mind. In that sense, the whole nation took up the pen name of Akhmatova—which explains her popularity and which, more importantly, enabled her to speak for the nation as well as to tell it something it didn't know. She was, essentially, a poet of human ties: cherished, strained, severed. She showed these evolutions first through the prism of the individual heart, then through the prism of history, such as it was. This is about as much as one gets in the way of optics anyway.
These two perspectives were brought into sharp focus through prosody, which is simply a repository of time within language. Hence, by the way, her ability to forgive —because forgiveness is not a virtue postulated by creed but a property of time in both its mundane and metaphysical senses. This is also why her verses are to survive whether published or not: because of the prosody, because they are charged with time in both those senses. They will survive because language is older than state and because prosody always s^^ves history. In fact, it hardly needs history; all it needs is a poet, and Akhmatova was just that.
1982
Pendulum's Song
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Constantine Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1863, and died there seventy years later of throat cancer. The uneventfulness of his life would have made the strictest of New Critics happy. Cavafy was the ninth child of a well- to-do mercantile family, whose prosperity went into rapid decline with the death of his father. At the age of nine the future poet went to England, where Cavafy and Sons had its branches, and he returned to Alexandria at sixteen. He was brought up in the Greek Orthodox religion. For a while he attended the Hermes Lyceum, a business school in Alexandria, and some sources tell us that while there he was more interested in classical and historical studies than in the art of commerce. But this may be merely a cliche in the biography of a poet.
In 1882, when Cavafy was nineteen, an anti-European outbreak took place in Alexandria which caused a great deal of bloodshed (at least according to that century's standards), and the British retaliated with a naval bombardment of the city. Since Cavafy and his mother had left for Constantinople not long before, he missed his chance to witness perhaps the only historic event to take place in Alexandria during his lifetime. He spent three subsequent years in Constantinople—important years for his development. It was in Constantinople that the historical diary, which he had been keeping for several years, stopped—at the entry marked "Alexander." Here also he allegedly had his first homosexual experience. At twenty- eight Cavafy got his first job, as a temporary clerk at the Department of Irrigation in the Ministry of Public Works. This provisional position turned out to be fairly permanent: he held it for the next thirty years, occasionally making some extra money as a broker on the Alexandrian Stock Exchange.
Cavafy knew ancient and modern Greek, Latin, Arabic, French; he read Dante in Italian and he wrote his first poems in English. But if there were any literary influences —and in Cavafy's Alexandria Edmund Keeley sees some of the English Romantics—they ought to be confined to that stage of Cavafy's poetic development which the poet himself dismissed from the "canon" of his work, as Keeley defines it. As for the later period, Cavafy's treatment of what were known during Hellenic times as mime-jambs (or simply "mime") and his use of the epitaph are so much his own that Keeley is correct in sparing us the haze of the Palatine Anthology.
The uneventfulness of Cavafy's life extends to his never having published a book of his poems. He lived in Alexandria, wrote poems (occasionally printing them in feuilles volantes, as pamphlets or broadsheets in a severely limited edition), talked in cafes to local or visiting literati, played cards, bet on horses, visited homosexual brothels, and sometimes attended church.
I believe that there arc at least five editions of Cavafy's poetry in English. The most successful renderings are those by Rae Dalven · and Messrs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. t The hardcover version of the latter is bilingual. Since there is little or no cooperation in the world of translation, translators sometimes duplicate others' efforts without knowing it. But a reader may benefit from such duplication and, in a way, the poet may benefit too. In this case, at least, he does, although there is a great deal of similarity between the two books in the goal they set themselves of straightforward rendering. Judged by this goal, Keeley and Sherrard's versions are certainly superior. It is lucky though that less than half of Cavafy's work is rhymed, and it is mostly his early poems.