What pipes and timbrels?
Cavafy, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Horace & MacNeice on the vagaries of fortune
Well last week’s piece caused a bit more of a stir than I anticipated. If you are one of my small flood of new subscribers, you are very welcome. And if you’re part of the old guard, and read last week’s piece in the original email form, you might be interested in looking at some of comments it has attracted, many of which are very thoughtful and well informed. A lot of people disagreed with the review, and a lot of people agreed with parts or all of it: the only responses I found silly were those which suggested the exercise itself was improper. Overall, and leaving some lame ad feminam tub-thumping in the murkier reaches of the internet aside, it is encouraging to see that lots of people care about poetry and care about what’s in the UK’s major poetry magazine. At some point I will edit the piece to add to it a summary of all the magazines readers mentioned, either in comments or in private correspondence, as ones they particularly recommended.
Last week’s piece was by a wide margin my most popular one so far, but before that the most popular — by an equally wide margin at the time — was my January essay on why I thought the collection that won this year’s T. S. Eliot prize wasn’t that good. There’s a trend here, and it’s interesting that people seem so excited to read fairly straightforward but somewhat critical poetry reviews, but it’s not one I really want to lean into. I write about poetry and translation here because these are two of the things I enjoy thinking about the most. I hope, I suppose, to celebrate and inform, myself as well as others: expressing doubts and reservations is, I think, a proper part of that, since taste depends on acts of discernment, and we acquire it by practicing it and by listening to others doing so. For the most part, though, I want to share my enthusiasm, so if you’ve signed up in the hope of weekly take-downs I’m afraid you’ll be a bit disappointed.
This week I was very struck by the extraordinary poem by Cavafy the title of which is usually translated as ‘The god abandons Antony’. Cavafy’s poem describes — strictly speaking — the very opposite of ‘enthusiasm’. The Greek verb ἐνθουσιάζω means to be inspired by a god, to be in ecstasy, taken out of yourself. But this poem is about the moment of disenchantment, the loss of the god, the inevitability of defeat; when luck runs out, the following wind turns, and we are cast back on our own resources alone:
When suddenly at midnight, there comes the sound
of an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music playing, with voices raised—
your good fortune, which now gives way; all your efforts'
ill-starred outcome; the plans you made for life,
which turned out wrong: don't mourn them uselessly.
Like one who's long prepared, like someone brave,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
Above all do not fool yourself, don't say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don't stoop to futile hopes like these.
Like one who's long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who's been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.
The translation here is by Daniel Mendelsohn. I liked it best of the ones I looked at, but there are many translations of this poem and it’s worth comparing a few.1 (Do comment if you have a favourite; I don’t know much about translations of Cavafy.) If you have some Greek, you can read the original poem here, while this page also has a recording and quite a detailed commentary. It’s worth listening to, I think, since most of the translations I have found focus on representing the meaning and the rhetorical patterning of the poem, but do not entirely reflect the patterns of its sound. I even found it set to music:
The poem is based on an anecdote from Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony: Plutarch relates how, besieged in Alexandria in 30 BC and with Octavian’s forces on the threshold, sounds of music and revelry are heard proceeding through the city in the middle of the night, climaxing and then ceasing at the gate outside which Octavian’s forces awaited the battle. This is understood to be the sound of Bacchus, with whom Antony had been particularly associated, leaving him and departing from the city. The next day his ships and troops abandon him, and, following a botched attempt at suicide, he finally dies in the arms of Cleopatra.2
The Greek title of the poem ‘ἀπολείπειν ὁ θεὸς Ἀντώνιον’ ‘[and it seemed to those who were interpreting this omen that] the god was abandoning Antony’ is a direct quotation from Plutarch, left in a incomplete grammatical form that signals it is a quotation. Several other words in the poem are found in Plutarch as well. The penultimate line, for instance, urges the addressee to listen to τά ἐξαίσια ὄργανα τοῦ μυστικοῦ θιάσου, ‘the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew’, and the word θιάσος is also found in the second line of the poem (where Mendelsohn translates it as ‘procession’). I’m not sure whether θιάσος retains the same associations in modern Greek, but in ancient Greek it is often used to refer specifically to the followers of Bacchus, and that is clearly the implication of the term in Plutarch.
Shakespeare of course also knew Plutarch’s Antony and drew on it extensively for his Antony & Cleopatra. The climax of the play focuses on the dramatic final scene between the two — this is where Antony twice says his famous line ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying’ — rather than this earlier moment in which Antony realises that this luck has run out and must determine how best to face his end.3 In Shakespeare’s version, as in Plutarch, we don’t in fact know whether Antony hears the mysterious music and, if so, how he reacts to it. In Plutarch the story of the music is recounted impersonally and with a hint of scepticism or at least proper historiographical distance (“it is said”). In Shakespeare it is Antony’s soldiers — and therefore also we, the audience — who hear it, not Antony himself, and Shakespeare has the soldiers interpret the music differently from the interpreters reported by Plutarch:
Music of the hautboys is under the stage.
SECOND SOLDIER Peace. What noise?
FIRST SOLDIER List, list!
SECOND SOLDIER Hark!
FIRST SOLDIER Music i’ th’ air.
THIRD SOLDIER Under the earth.
FOURTH SOLDIER It signs well, does it not?
THIRD SOLDIER No.
FIRST SOLDIER Peace, I say. What should this mean?
SECOND SOLDIER
’Tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved,
Now leaves him.
(Act 4, scene 3)
In Shakespeare, there is no indication that the sound resembles a religious procession with multiple instruments — merely that, magically, it seems to come from both ‘in the air’ and ‘under the earth’ (in fact, from beneath the stage). This might be a pragmatic point on Shakespeare’s part, since presumably there’s a practical and cost limit on how many instruments you can put under a stage. But the soldiers also offer different interpretations: one thinks or at least hopes it must be a good sign (‘It signs well, does it not?’), a second tacitly disagrees with the interpretation reported by Plutarch and attributes the music to Hercules, not Bacchus. (This is probably to fit with a pattern in the play by which other characters repeatedly link Antony and Hercules.) In the end — just beyond the extract quoted above — they agree on the impossibility of interpretation: ‘'Tis strange’.
Cavafy’s poem is based on an episode in Plutarch’s life of Antony, but the poem itself is powerfully general in at least two ways. Some single events which could go either way — such as battles or elections — do seem to mark a momentous shift, a real change in the tide of fate or fortune for a whole people. Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian, who became the first Roman emperor, Augustus. As Horace puts it at the end of Odes 1.34:
valet ima summis
mutare et insignem attenuat deus
obscura promens; hinc apicem rapax:
Fortuna cum stridore acuto
sustulit, hic posuisse gaudet.
In a memorable translation written and published immediately after September 11th 2001, which I discussed in a bit more detail last year, Seamus Heaney renders these lines:
Anything can happen, the tallest towers
Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Cavafy’s poem acknowledges the grandeur and reality of such turning-points and links this to personal courage in the face of disaster. His poem urges his addressee to an absolute dignity of which Antony in the end is deprived — in Plutarch (as in Shakespeare), after botching his suicide, he is hauled up by ropes to Cleopatra as he is bleeding to death. In Shakespeare, there’s a rough kind of comedy to the scene alongside its pathos: ‘Here’s sport indeed. How heavy weighs my lord!’, says Cleopatra, as she strains on the ropes. Cavafy imagines, instead, someone who has ‘long prepared’ for the moment of reckoning, an exhibition of stoic self-control more reminiscent of Horace’s Regulus (from Odes 3.5) than of Shakespeare’s Antony.
Antony’s disaster is momentous both personally and politically. But ‘The Alexandria whom you are losing’ may stand, too, for any status or pleasure or power the loss of which we must (as individuals) face up to courageously. Louis McNeice did something similar when he took Antony’s famous repeated line, ‘I am dying, Egypt, dying’, from the death scene in Shakespeare’s play and placed it unexpectedly into a lyric that is both a love poem (‘glad to have sat under / Thunder and rain with you’) and a reminder to us all (‘We cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold; / When all is told / We cannot beg for pardon’). Here is his poem, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, first published in 1936, as the clouds of war began to gather:
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dyingAnd not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
This page conveniently gives three — the Mendelsohn one as well as translations by Rae Dalven and Theoharis C. Theoharis. W. H. Auden apparently made the very interesting observation: “I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could have written it. Reading any poem of his reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.” This is a rather fascinating articulation of a kind of signature style which survives translation particularly effectively, though I’m afraid I have to admit that my source for this observation is this tweet by Paul Holdengraber.
Plutarch says he initially planned to lead out his troops and die in battle, as the more glorious death; but changed his mind on realising that to do so would be act purely for his own sake.
For what it’s worth, Leonard Cohen too picks up from Cavafy how “‘The Alexandria whom you are losing’ may stand, too, for any status or pleasure or power the loss of which we must (as individuals) face up to courageously” — this transposed into the key of love and loss in his song “Alexandra leaving.”
Oh, this is what literary criticism should be! Thank you.