POETS Day! Send in the Cavafy

I’m breaking a soft rule this week in that I’m featuring a poem not written in English. I generally hate being at the mercy of the translator and have to be left wondering who peaked or peeked or piqued my interest. Was it the poet or the translator? Are the words I read the proper expression of the work or a leap forward due to a language barrier razed? Who’s the real hero here?

That’s an aside and we’ll deal with it later. The real business of the day is satisfying the acronymical POETS Day; Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Let’s get you out of work.

This is low percentage, but hear me out. Weathermen who don’t wear suspenders and roll their sleeves up while telling you to go to your place of safety are right about once a week. TSA tests show that unless you are a screaming idiot with a fuse hanging off the heel of your loafers you can fly the skies fantastic unmolested until you decide to do your worst. Baseball players that whiff on the ball all but less than one third of the time get enshrined in the hall of fame.

Failure is more than likely in this week’s scheme, but fortune lends itself to the bold. I know this won’t be easy, but you need to make up a religious holiday.

Per the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which bills itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conduction independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy” 23% percent of people are religiously unaffiliated and another 2% roam around as unwilling to give a goddamn. Given that there was no “lapsed Catholic” category or the Methodist/Unitarian/Muslim equivalent option you can assume that there are a few claiming religious leanings that haven’t parked in a tow-free on Sunday or Saturday zone in some time. Maybe add 3% to the a-religious? Even the Baptized and Confirmed compete with a decent NFC South matchup for fealty.

There is a third baseman’s chance at a 3-2 ball that turns into a single down the right field line as there is for you to walk into to your boss’s office and claim that Ganesh requires you to venerate The Virgin on Spring Equinox Rosh Hashanah and get out of work. You can do this.

Service at three.

You are admittedly likely to go down in flames, but all it takes is a ground ball with legs and you are out, but not in the baseball sense of being out, which is bad. I mean the other sense, in which you don’t have to work and get to frolic like a childish adult when you should be working.

Things are stacked terribly against you here. Your boss is an odds-on favorite to know that you are painting castles in the sand but realize the success that can come of failure. For a Hall of Fame baseball position player the batting average is .303. Imagine you were a short order cook and had to throw away seven of every ten eggs. But .303 is Hall of Fame stuff in baseball. The average for all players last year was .244. Less than a quarter. Gleyber Torres made 4 million dollars last year not getting hits three quarters of the time.

Try it. What do you have to lose? Maybe you get one early afternoon a month assuming the boss is busy doing bossy things and a complaint against him is going to make him do paperwork stuff and he gets cross when he has to do paperwork stuff near east facing time. By Zeus! That’s Hall of Fame Numbers, just don’t bet on whether or not you get free because that introduces a type of Pete Rose trouble you don’t want.

All kidding aside, there’s a good chance that the keeping you at work establishment is more terrified of refuting your religious rights in a meeting room than they are of just letting you out to kill a bunny for salvation and the purifying bliss conveyed by its blood or whatever.

You win.

As I mentioned above, translations give me troubles. They changed the Mass a few years ago to properly reflect an international translation of the Latin script of the prayer. We are in all things subject to modernizing, eternal not excepted.

Post the Lord’s Prayer we now say:

“Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil,
graciously grant peace in our days,
that, by the help of your mercy,
we may be always free from sin
and safe from all distress,
as we await the blessed hope
and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.”

There is clarity there, but it misses the poetry of the Mass I grew up with. We used to pray

“Deliver us Lord, from every evil
and grant us peace in our days,
and in your mercy keep us free from sin and all anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our savior Jesus Christ.”

It’s weird to call a prayer pithy, but here I am. The latter version was a song to me. It didn’t matter to my ten- or twelve-year-old acolyte ears who said the liturgy. Father Marino, Donahue, or Muscalino. There was a beat at “all anxiety.” There was a flow that the modern has left behind.

So when I say I am uneasy decerning if a translated work is worthy of praise based on its merits or based on the talents of the one who made it discernible to me, I mean it on a grand scale. Here is the Mass, divinely inspired in a language I can’t even help my ninth grader negotiate via homework assignments and a revisioned translation into English approved by the Vatican and I’m still bitching. I can’t, in a translation situation, figure out who the sacred cow is.

That brings me — us, or we or whatever — to Constantine Peter Cavafy. He’s Greek so I or us or you are told.

This is odd to me. In my lightly historically littered mind there was the Battle of Yarmuk, and Byzantium ran back to Constantinople and the former Roman dominance of the Mediterranean was over. al-Walid ran off the infidels from the Levant and associated forces had their way from the eventual Suez canal to the wine fields of Andalusia.

I thought the Hellenic Mediterranean died some time shortly after Augustine, but here we have a poet identified as Greek despite not living in actual Greece and he didn’t die until the less interesting Roosevelt took office.

This guy Cavarfy was born in Alexandria and should have been, by modern standards, called an Egyptian, but he avoided that by moving at a young age to Liverpool. It was a Beatle-less place at the time and the Premier League was a slice of a splinter in the side of someone’s grandfather’s errant daydream or whatever so at the time Liverpool was just honorific-less Liverpool. His family realized that and didn’t want to be there and everywhere was a bit of a chaotic leap so they went back to Alexandria.

I never would have called an Egyptian-born man of his time a Greek, but that is how he’s considered. Hellenic was more contemporary than I imagined.

E.M. Forester wrote of him that he stood “at a slight angle to the universe.” I love that. Auden loved him too, but was much less quotable in his praise than Forester so it’s 1-0 in Forester’s favor v Auden.

This particular poem is haunting in the literal sense.

I’ll not comment on structure because the Greek is Greek to me and I have no idea what liberties Edmund Keeley took in translating, but his results in English are pleasing.

It’s haunting because it relies on a shared experience that so many of us have. A consummated relationship is just that, but a possibility never acted on lingers for the rest of your days. What if I had leaned in and kissed her, or in Cavafy’s case, what if he had leaned in and kisssed him? We all have had such moments. But we didn’t take the chance. The never knowing. Ghosts of what didn’t happen.

Half an Hour
Constantine Peter Cavafy (1863-1933)

I never had you, nor I suppose
will I ever have you. A few words, an approach,
as in the bar the other day – nothing more.
It’s sad. I admit. But we who serve Art,
sometimes with the mind’s intensity,
can create – but of course only for a short time –
pleasure that seems almost physical.
That’s how in the bar the other day –
mercifully helped by alcohol –
I had half an hour that was totally erotic.
And I think you understood this
and stayed slightly longer on purpose.
That was very necessary. Because
with all the imagination, with all the magic alcohol,
I needed to see your lips as well,
needed your body near me.

As a side thought, his Wikipedia photo looks like Eugene Levy.

Enjoy the weekend.