{"id":34920,"date":"2025-11-17T09:17:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:17:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34920"},"modified":"2025-11-17T09:17:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T14:17:14","slug":"the-city-by-cavafy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=34920","title":{"rendered":"The City, by Cavafy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Constantine Cavafy wrote “The City<\/a>” in 1894. This poem doesn’t speak for me or articulate feelings that I happen to hold. But it is a famous work that is difficult to render in other languages, particularly because the original is densely rhymed. I gave it a try:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You said: I will get out of here, I will leave.
Some other place will be better than here.
Here everything I write comes back as a jeer, 
And here my heart feels buried like a corpse.
Can my mind still bear what withers and warps?
Wherever I look, where I turn my eye,
I see black ruins from my life gone by.
Here, where time has dragged on without reprieve.<\/em>

You will find no new places, no other coasts.
This city will follow you. You will return
To the same streets and quarters in turn.
In the same neighborhood, you will grow old.
You will turn white in this very household.
You will always arrive back at this station.
Stop hoping for any other destination.
There is no ship for you, there is no road.
Just as you ruined your life in this abode,
So you have ruined all the world\u2019s outposts.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Last summer, I read a most of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine<\/em>, which is an homage to Cavafy and his city (Alexandria) and concludes with Durrell’s loose translation of this poem. However, I quit before the end because I didn’t like the characters and found the novel’s evocation of Alexandria fervent yet vague. I thought this remark by a character (not the narrator) rang too true: “Justine and her city are alike in that they both have a strong flavour without having any real character” (p. 125).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
See also: \u201cComplaint,\u201d by Hannah Arendt<\/a>, which begins “Oh, the days they pass by uselessly …”; and Istanbul melancholy<\/a>. (Pamuk loves Cavafy’s “The City.”)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Constantine Cavafy wrote “The City” in 1894. This poem doesn’t speak for me or articulate feelings that I happen to hold. But it is a famous work that is difficult to render in other languages, particularly because the original is densely rhymed. I gave it a try: You said: I will get out of here, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-verse-and-worse"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34920"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34920\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34942,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34920\/revisions\/34942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}