Quote of the Day

From a NYT review of new translations of the work of C.P. Cavafy, an Egypian poet:

I ask myself whether in antique times
glorious Alexandria possessed a
youth more beauteous,
a kid more perfect than he.

This poem, “Days of 1909, ’10, and ’11,” extols the beauty of a working-class boy who sells his body to buy expensive clothes. The tensions between high and low are registered in the diction. Following a line dominated by Latinate words (glorious, possessed, beauteous), the Germanic and colloquial monosyllable in the third line carries an unexpected poignancy: a kid.

This shift in diction lets us hear something crucial about Cavafy’s tone (a directness that is never not elegant), but it also lets Mendelsohn’s translation exist fully as an English poem. Because of the polyglot nature of the English language, the sound of great English poetry is the sound of monosyllabic Germanic words chiming against multisyllabic Latinate words (Shakespeare’s “seas incarnadine” or Tennyson’s “immemorial elms”). Echoing such effects, Mendelsohn makes me wonder if it wasn’t the deliciously mongrel nature of English, which Cavafy spoke and wrote perfectly, that first provoked him to forge his own hybridized idiom. The fact that the few poems Cavafy wrote in English contain phrases like “penetrating eye” and “transcendent star” (the Latinate word wedged against the Germanic) suggests that the poet’s ear for English was at least as acute as his translator’s.