Poetry is honey for the soul (11) - ML Kappa

         Poetry is honey for the soul

Marina gives us regularly news from Greece in her blog:

https://athensletters.com/

I follow it with the utmost assiduity: politics, economy, society, refugees, literature, Ancient Greece, Grecian Islands, myths, history, traditions -her blog is always full of information. Its full name is "Letters from Athens - A blog about life and times in Greece".
Today, she invites us to read or re-read a poem by Constantin Cavafy, which sounds oddly relevant to our times.

Constantin Cavafy

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the twentieth century. He was born in 1863 in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s. 

During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted with new verse a few years later, but that was the extent of his published poetry. Instead, Cavafy chose to circulate his verse among friends. 

Cavafy was an avid student of history, particularly ancient civilizations, and in a great number of poems he subjectively rendered life during the Greek and Roman empires.

Among his most acclaimed poems is “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in which leaders in ancient Greece prepare to yield their land to barbarians only to discover that the barbarians, so necessary to political and social change, no longer exist.

Greek and Persian soldiers in a duel

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?             The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating?             Because the barbarians are coming today.             What laws can the senators make now?             Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?             Because the barbarians are coming today             and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.             He has even prepared a scroll to give him,             replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold?             Because the barbarians are coming today             and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say?             Because the barbarians are coming today             and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home so lost in thought?             Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.             And some who have just returned from the border say             there are no barbarians any longer. And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992) A street of Alexandria where Cavafy was born An example of his handwriting while writing poetry