Polutropos's Polyphony, Part Ptwo

As a great believer in alliteration, I could not leave well enough alone. In addition to pterodactyls and ptarmigans I now insist on the inherent need for "ptwo".

My previous thread had reached over 200 and therefore had to be left behind. Some intrepid insistent friends are suggesting that I return to posting my thoughts. Thank you!

My previous thread can be found here

http://www.librarything.com/topic/51003

I have done little serious reading in the last two months; personal upheavals have led to extremely short attention spans and the need to wallow in genre literature for escape.

I will start holidays on Tuesday and over the next five days record my ruminations on books small and large.

Books read recently which I will comment on over the next few days include

Song of a Lark
Beowulf
Unreasonable Hours
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
Earthlight
Heat
Godmother: the Secret Cinderella Story
Road Dogs
Gone Tomorrow
Bleachers
No Man's Land
Blown Away
Words in a French Life
Wild Dogs
House of Day, House of Night
Bad Girl
Dog Years
Fire to Fire
Radetzky March
20 Canadian Poets Take on the World
Jahniatko a grandi

I'm looking forward to your comments!

how can you go wrong w/ 20 canadian poets take on the world? Looks like they took on some of the greats of modern poetry to translate! Nice to see Canadians be a bit less self-effacing.

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on the Radetsky March.

Sorry to hear of personal upheavals, although hopefully they are all good, just time-consuming. Glad to see you back to posting!

What do you think of The Song of the Lark? Did you like it?

The Song of the Lark is probably my number #1 read of the last 12, maybe even 24 months. Thanks go to the great urania for pushing me to read it. Most highly recommended.

Andrushka speaks ;-)

I read it a while ago and just loved it. But then, I am a great fan of Willa Cather's.

A beautiful poem. I know nothing about translating, but that last stanza looks like it might have been pretty challenging.

A very beautiful poem indeed and a very well done translation. Thankyou.

I must make a list of czech authors and poets from your library.

Very nice; thanks for sharing it with us.

Very good, Andrew, lovely poem. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Andrushka,

Will you run away with me and translate Czech poetry for me every night?

Excellent stuff.

I know nothing of this poet. How shameful. Have you translated any more of him? I would love to read more.

Fascinating (and a little embarrassing) to not know of so much great poetry. You ought to write a section in Wikipedia on Czech poetry - there's a listing one can get of "Czech poets" - i think i recognized only 3 or 4 out of 70+ names (and Holub wasn't on that list - although he's noted elsewhere in Wikipedia. And i knew a bit about Bondy only because of the Plastic People of the Universe and Polnuc - two related Czech rock bands, used some of his material for lyrics)

how beautiful.

Gorgeous, gorgeous ;-)

Andrew, thanks for posting. I think I need the kind of mind that can take in a lot of things at once to fully appreciate this. I tried breaking it down into little pieces and it started to make some sense to me, it was pretty nice, but the poem as a whole eludes me.

Prof. Urania,

the floor is yours. Can you please explicate?

OK,

I will point at a few details I see as significant:

The title of course sets the tone: we have death, the underlying "you are dust and unto dust you shall return." The primary setting is a cemetery. But the cemetery is not seen as a place of horror, or horrific dance; it is a resting place where one meets with friends. The wardrobe also gives hope. The beautiful suit, never worn, (its pepper and salt reminding us of the ashes) can be seen as representing opportunity not yet taken. But the narrator is not regretting. He turns to it amicably, shaking its hands. Life has been full. Much love. Many love songs. Many girls, swallows and roses. And some songs have not been sung. They will only be with him when his moment to become ashes comes. But though there is a tinge of sadness in that recognition, the overall tone is that of hope.

That is MY take on it, and no doubt there can be many others.

Urania? Murr? Bob? Anyone?

Ok, I did get a variation of that. I thought it was a reflection of lost...not opportunities exactly, but lost possibilities, as well as on some painful memories (the sobbing clock). But, also with the realization that life was still full. I thought the suit was, unworn, a missed opportunity of sorts, in the sense that it probably should have worn by now, maybe not.

But those bees are very confusing to me...

Again, just one take, but it is not a single bee, it is a hive, hanging off an angel pointing heaven-ward. I see the hive as a life force. The angel hand is pointing the life force. That is the direction in which the life is supposed to be heading. The painter Tichy does not allow anyone to disturb him when he is playing. The hive does not allow anyone to disturb it; it just roars silently as the bees go about their call, their vocation, which they fulfill to its fullest. For the narrator they represent what should be. And in the end he does not see a life wasted. I agree with your take on the suit as well as the sobbing clock, that perhaps there could have been more but I still, in the end, see a person reconciled with his life and what has been.

I may not be getting enough thrills out of translating poetry. I think I have decided to take up something else:

That was very, very beautiful. Thank you! (wild applause)

Bravo! and be careful hang gliding.

OMG *Murr faints*

You two,

after you are done under couches, and with proctologists, can you express some critical thinking about the interpretation of Ash Wednesday, please?

I think you got it about right in 24, P. To me it says:

tempis fugit, vita brevis. The suit never worn reminds me of Yeats old age as a tattered coat upon a stick.

and I think Dan also is right in 25. The Bees? Necessity. Although our time is short, we must of necessity build hives (society) and culture: it is our nature.

or just an image of buzzing and tumultuous life in a place of death.

I have to say, on frequent rereading, it's marvellously translated by that A. Stancek guy.

Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent, a time for reflecting on life's full course. It is bracketed by Mardi Gras, a celebration of life, and Easter, a hope for a life following death. Eliot wrote his Ash Wednesday after religious conversion and in it offers this hope of peace:

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks

Seifert wrote Ash Wednesday shortly before his death, going by the date of this poem. He also offers a hope of peace, a peace seemingly without “His will.”

Whoever has known our cemetery . . . returns at peace.

He finds peace with those friends who have already found the cemetery and the adjacent garden—Zeyer, Tichy and others unnamed.

Symbols evoke a world of meaning to those who know, but pose a barrier to those who don't. Bees have evoked the hope of rebirth for much of man's history, becoming dormant in the fall, reawakening in the spring. They also have a dance of death, a necessary and necessarily fatal act of procreation. Is it this that Seifert has in mind, or la danse macabre? Whichever, Seifert says, what of it? “What dance of death?”

So we see hope, but perhaps not the hope of rebirth. After all, even Eliot precedes his plea for peace with:

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

I took a brief loop along the Tichy byway after reading Seifert's poem. Tichy reportedly was influenced by the art of Seurat, who is the subject of the musical play, Sunday in the Park with George, which I saw while passing through Niagara-on-the-Lake this past . . . Sunday. The production was not memorable, but Sondheim's lyrics are. A Zen moment from the song Move On as George's lover speaks of him to their heir across multiple generations:

Look at what you want,
Not at where you are,
Not at what you'll be.
Look at all the things you've done for me:
Opened up my eyes
Taught me how to see
Notice every tree!
Understand the light!
Concentrate on now!
I want to move on . . .

Having this, you can bid a “wistful farewell to all,” with no regrets. "Non, je ne regrette rien."

Thank you, Andrew.

Thank YOU, Wilf.

I very much appreciate your additional insights. Eliot's Ash Wednesday I am of course familiar with, but have not connected Tichy, Seurat and (!) Sondheim.

I am, incidentally, heading to Niagara-on-the-Lake myself tomorrow, seeing not Sondheim but the Garson Kanin which my wife is attracted to by the reviews, and the play I want to see, A Moon for the Misbegotten. I know the text is worthy of thought; I hope the production will do it justice.

I will report upon my return.

i'll think on it..but i'm up at 4:40 am, had a large shot of Jim Beam in a desperate attempt to encourage sleep before work. But the poem is lovely.

Wilf, thanks for that post.

Oh, this is like a BONUS thread - lovely poetry to read! Thanks Andrew.

Thanks Andrew. Just beautiful. Pondering "and love, in shopworn lace/dawdled on the coblestones."

Absolutely beautiful. Thank you.

Of course you knew my heart would melt at the last three verses.

Any more? P?

knowing nothing about translation, esp. of poetry which requires nuance in (at least) two tongues. Do you first translate as literally/accurately as possible and then seek to replicate the style as accurately you can w/ in the limits of available choices? Or try to go for form and meaning simultaneously?
curiously and thanks!
bob

Well, Bob,

I am new at this. I am going to be reading Gregory Rabassa's book on translating very soon, basically to see how he has been proceeding in his highly acclaimed translations. I know that Pevear and Volokhonsky have talked about a totally word-for-word literal translation as the first stage, and they then work on refining for beauty in the second language in later drafts.

What has worked for me is a little less rigid than P&V. I go through for meaning but sometimes a phrase or idiom in English comes to me even as I am doing the first draft. Sometimes I put down something awkward or pedestrian, knowing I will get rid of it later. I intersperse with asterisks and question marks. It will often be a phrase that I struggle with. In the most recent one, for example, in the Czech he says "a bylo mi uzko". Well. The literal translation is "I was anxious." Or "I was tense." "I was uneasy." Upset, worried, trepidatious.... That is the kind of original which a hundred translators will translate a hundred different ways. I eventually settled for "Filled with anguish." Works for me. But someone else might argue vociferously that I missed the boat. I think you have to get a certain arrogance and conviction that you understand the writer and his original intention. And sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. And of course you have to create something beautiful in the second language as well. For that you sometimes depart from the original, and you have to believe that your departure is justified and the author would approve. Occasionally authors work with translators, explaining, arguing, preventing butchering. Nabokov comes to mind. Josef Skvorecky has done some cooperative work. I am currently doing some work with a living Slovak writer, and asked her some questions and sometimes she has ideas and sometimes she leaves the decision with me. Rufus's widow has given me carte blanche to do anything I like any way I like, but that is at least partly because she does not speak English.

It is a constant struggle balancing being true to the original and creating something living and breathing in the second language. It is also profoundly satisfying.

39. A very beautiful and moving poem. Your translation is very fine. Bravo sir and thankyou!

P, I am fascinated by your description of your working method. You may be sure that you are succeeding in creating beauty in the second language. All your translation I have read are simply exquisite poetry in English. I cannot speak for the accuracy of translation, coz I don't know Czech, obviously.

I wanted to ask you about the poem above. the English version is blank verse with no rhyme scheme. Is the original like that too?

How do you translate heavily rhymed poetry? This must be hellish, I would have thought. Like Russian poetry, or instance, which relies most heavily on its rhyme scheme for its effect. Or Rilke.

Any thoughts?

Hi Murr,

I am thrilled by the positive response to my translations, almost to the point of it not being a good thing, since I am neglecting the large translations I should be doing as well as my own writing, and I am instead translating shorter poems for posting here. (But please do not let that prevent you from sharing further praise LOL).

Powder Tower, posted above, is blank verse with no rhyme scheme in Czech as well.

The answer to heavily rhymed poetry is "I don't". For exactly the reasons you set out. I am somewhat frustrated by the fact that probably 90% of Seifert's poetic output is in fact rhymed. I have very intentionally been avoiding it. I know there are spectacular rhymed translations into English from classical Greek, which are amazing English poetry. From Slavic languages (and perhaps someone out there will stone me for saying this, or at least correct me), I am not aware of any. Seifert's rhymes SING. They bring tears to your eyes. I have dared to touch his unrhymed poems, and feel that I have not done them injustice. At the moment I do not feel that I could translate his rhymed poems into rhymed English which also sings, and am not sure that it would be right to wreak havoc with his rhymes and rhythms by translating them as unrhymed, unrhythmical in English. Perhaps once I get more practiced, more self-assured, I may go there. But in the meantime I need to get LARGE texts translated and published. I need the approval of editors out there and their acceptance. I need time and discipline.

I am no expert. But I do read a lot of poetry in translation. Your translations are exquisitely fine I think. Thank you for another beautiful poem Sir.

I recently read of someone hereabouts on the Web who planned to learn Spanish, the better to appreciate the works of some Spanish author. I fear that to appreciate a master, one needs some mastery of the language. A neophyte to English will have a hard time with Shakespeare. Not long ago a commentator said that Condi Rice read Tolstoy in the Russian as she played the concert piano--badly.

That is why we need translators so, to bring the flavor of the original to us as we cannot. In his Translator's Preface to Faust, Martin Greenberg quotes, Goethe called translators "busy go-betweens praising as adorable a beauty only glimpsed through veils; they provoke an irresistable desire in us for the original." He goes on to describe the difficulty in translating Faust into English, to provide those delectable glimpses: its great variety of meter and rhyme. . .its variety of tone and style: dramatic, lyrical, reflective; farcical, ironical, pathetic; vernacular-simple and vernacular-coarse; colloquial and soaring. And though [it] sounds so many different notes. . .it is all lyrical, one great song.

Greenberg's approach was to avoid the unreal language of tortured rhymes and tortured syntax, instead to translate into our English as it rings in life, our living American speech. . .[using] a free-ranging diction, meters looser, often, than those Goethe uses, and a much looser rhyming made up of half rhymes, assonance, and consonance; of course full rhymes, too, when they come naturally.

Andrew, thank you again for bringing Seifert to us, "into our English as it rings in life." Your description of his poems puts me in mind of Goethe. I hope you go on to Seifert's rhymed poems, perhaps less daunting with Greenberg's approach in mind, though taking your own path.

>51 WilfGehlen:: One of the most frustrating experiences for me is reading a book that has been translated from a language that I know moderately well or better. Time and time again I start translating the text in my mind back to the original, and I may think of ways that could have improved the situation. Unless the book (or the translation) is very good, this phenomenon may distract me so much that I don't enjoy the book at all.

#52 - defn. not a problem that i suffer from!~ thank god for small blessings.

It's taken a long time to find my way back here, but a treasury of fine poems awaited me! Thank you for making and posting these translations, Andrew - I'm sure the originals have many merits, but these are fine poems in their own right.

I have just seen a most delightful visual and verbal feast of a play, Bartholomew Fair. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Relevant to this particular thread is a wonderful line:

I begin shrewdly to suspect...the young man of a terrible taint, poetry! with which idle disease if he be infected, there's no hope of him.

Ben Jonson

Not Fair!!! Not Fair!!! He translates beautifully and gets to see Bartholomew Fair. I would like to point out that 17th-century literature is my area and not yours, so triple not fair.

as always, thanks.

apples courtesy of THE snake in the garden?

sooner or later i'll finish a book and at least say SOMETHING!~.

Andrew, it's beautiful and thanks for posting.

Again I don't fully get it (as you might have noticed, typical with me and poetry), and I'm hesitant to say too much and, well, look bad I guess. Anyway, My first thought was this was some reflection from a long life, except Seifert was about 25 when he wrote (or published?) it. So reading it again, he's clearly talking to someone (the one in "And under the tree sits the one"), but I'm not sure who he's talking to or what he's trying to tell him/her/it... well, probably a him, maybe himself.

Bravo and thankyou for another lovely poem.

Redundant but sincere praise of the poetry from Seifert. And that hang gliding! Whoa! Do you bungee jump too by any chance?

You mentioned Earthlight early on and that you had ventured into genre recently as an escape. So I was wondering if that's the Earthlight by A.C. Clarke? What a fabulous escape if it is.

Pleasure making your acquaintance!

I'm getting a little thick around the waist from you tubing. My doctor says I need the exercise so I'll be more than glad to tag along. I can carry a little water and sweep up after the Dionysiac frenzies. I think that I may be able to manage the responsibilities.

oh it's just fantastic. WEll done that Andrew Stancek guy again!

Love it! This group has some very talented writers (urania, Murr, Andrew, etc.)

*blush* to be included among such August company.

*urania also blushes at the compliment*

Andrushka,

I finished Josef Škvorecký’s Emöke and The Bass Saxophone last night (and wept over the latter until 3:00 this morning). For some reason, “Apple Tree with Cobweb Strings” reminds me of the narrator of The Bass Saxophone and his passion for jazz, a passion that reflects all the wounds of the world and offers brief moments of ecstasy. Do you know any good composers of jazz? I keep hearing in my head faint threads of a beautiful, bluesy melody. Someone needs to compose a jazz tune – Variation on Jaroslav Seifert’s “Apple Tree with Cobweb Strings.” I wonder where Medellia is. I bet she knows someone who could do this. I want to be able to write as well and profoundly as you do. I am afraid I may be too flippant. My college professors all warned me about this character flaw when I young.

#66

Mary,

as you know I do know Skvorecky personally and have visited him at his house fairly recently. Unfortunately he is in poor health, home quite infrequently (usually in the hospital) and visits to the hospital are not welcome by him and his wife. There is a part of me which would like to let him know that an august personage such as yourself was so touched by that book and you are thinking of commissioning a composition, but I am being told that just about nothing gives him pleasure now, and contacts are viewed as intrusions. (He will be turning 85 later this year.) It is very hard to judge in this kind of a situation. In any case, I am pleased that it pleased you as much as it did. That particular book is my favourite in his large oeuvre.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." Goethe

How true, Andrew!

Goethe will just leave me feeling guilty, he must not have had young children.

Yes, Goethe left out "experience the world though the eyes of a young child" from the list. That should count for at least two or three of the others.

It is the speaking of a few reasonable words that I think is the toughest part of that list :-)

Dan, I have recently joined NPR's Writer's Almanac. Garrison Keillor does a little five minute musing, including a poem of the day. Not quite at Goethe's level, but a nudge in the right direction, quite amusing. I recommend it as a brief respite from the child-rearing.

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Andrushka,

I am not quite sure what to say to you at the moment. I found this poor child in an opium den tonight, which I had entered for Christian and charitable purposes (of course).

#72 - yes, I totally agree. As for Keillor - I'm mixed. He reads every poem the exact same way - for me they all just sort of blend into a slow moving unintelligible surrealness - even Shakespeare. I catch writer's almanac on occasion, but it's not a draw for me.

So, Mary,

are you saying that we need to wait for a few words, preferably reasonable ones, from the child in the opium den?

Are we dismissing Goethe as incomplete? Didactic? Wrong-headed?

Or are we nodding, in at least partial agreement?

I am just wondering who induced that poor child into the opium den in the first place? I fear some monstrous person walks amongst us. It is all most mysterious. As for Goethe, perhaps he has risen from the dead. A lot of dead/ undead/zombies seem to be wandering around book world.

I detect the malificent influence of Swedenborg. There is a whif of herring in the air.

However, I do agree with the Goethe quote, and marvel again the simplicity and honesty of the great Age of Enlightenment sages such as Goethe. He is saying that rather than the daily round structured along church lines: (Matins, lauds, evensong, etc, or bowing to Mecca five times a day), we should spend the same kind of reverential devotion on the fruits of humanity. If we all tried it, perhaps it would really make a difference.

No?

Auden (Goethe's English translator) used to say that he (WHA) encouraged prayer, not for religious reasons, but for its capacity to develop the faculty of quiet sustained concentration. I see great parallels between this and his attitude to poetry. And it all stems from Goethe.

I think the child was smuggled from this opium den in Hong Kong, Urania. You might have hit upon an international etching ring of child slavery.

http://www.chinese-outpost.com/history/thomas-allom-china-illustrated/images/chi...

. . . but this don't hurt me, not to speak of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.'

Goethe was deeply interested in Hermeticism and wished to unify eastern and western occult traditions in a humanistic context. Swedenborg sought rather to reform christianity, which he thought had lost it's way, in eastern religion's image and he was of course schizophrenic. Kant tried to have him committed to an Asylum.

Camus quotes from Goethe's motto, Time is my wealth, time is my field to plough in The Myth of Sisyphus, which is, at heart, about living in the moment. In following up, I found this in google books:

Invitation
Flee not from the day's distress:
For the day to which you've hurried
Is no better than today;
But if you stay here unworried,
Where I push the world away
So that I more World possess,
I at once will give you cover:
This day's now, tomorrow's other,
What's to follow and what's past
Neither pulls nor holds us fast.
Stay, my dearest of all that can be;
That's the gift you bring to me.

Have a look at

http://www.belletrista.com/2009/issue1/features_3.html

The profile and translation are by yours truly.

A very lovely article and translation. Thankyou. I am adding Jaroslava Blažková and Josef Škvorecký to my must read list.

When do you plan to come out of exile?

I have been exiled for all eternity.

Only the spirit of Napoleon can bring me back.

Spirit of Napoleon here at your request. What countries might you need conquering? I come, I see, I conquer (and then I come again).

The Engineer of Human Souls and The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky are near the top of my all time favorites. Nobody can beat Skvorecky's bitter sweet humor. Ever read The Bride of Texas? (It's one of the few I haven't read.) Looking forward to Ordinary Lives.
Some other Czech favorites; Ivan Klima, Leo Perutz. Gustave Meyrink, Paul Leppin and, of course, Milan Kundera. The Czech's seem to have more than their fair share of great writers.
Must be something in the water.

Question

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

May Swenson

A very lovely poem.

86. Perutz and Leppin are favorites. Klima is in my tbr pile. Meyrink, my magus, was Austrian I believe, but lived and wrote in Prague for most of his life. I have not read any Skvorecky yet. After all this glowing praise from such venerable personages as polutropos and tros, I'll be rushing to order some of his novels ASAP.

Andrushka, have you ever considered starting and leading a Homer group and/or a Czech lit group?

there's nowhere to hide.

88 David

Thanks for the suggestion on both the groups, David, but I am swamped with books, (and no time, and spending too much time on LT) and did not in the end even manage to read and participate in the Master and Margarita, let alone lead something.

There IS a Homer group out there, which I joined a long time ago and never even check on.

And when avaland did the voting thing for 2010 countries on ClubRead, Czech/Slovak literature got I think seven votes, so the interest out there is less than overwhelming.

Sometime down the road, perhaps.

I understand. I too have many books I want to read and precious little time to read them in. I'm taking a break from group reads for a while in order to catch up on my tbr pile. I'll definitely be reading more of this great Czech/Slovak lit.

>90 polutropos: Hey, don't write us all off too quickly, Andrew - there might well be a great fan of Czech/Slovak lit lurking within me if only you'd come up with those recommendations you keep promising me ;) (I'm only teasing you - like you I've got way more than enough to be getting on with and the last thing I need is more ideas, but I've noted your offer and some day in the distant future I'll take you up on it!)

Andrew, I have finished The Luminous Depths the second novella in David Herter's trilogy starring the Capek brothers and Pavel Haas. It's a riveting dark fantasy... My comments are here: http://www.librarything.com/work/5214418 or on my thread here in Club Read.

mmmm. I was hoping for a new translation on this thread.....haven't had my fix of Czech poetry for a while......

No Czech poetry. The well has run dry.

But an outstanding poem by the one and only Cavafy:

The City
by C. P. Cavafy

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems

I relate to this SO much.

COME IN

As I came to the edge of the woods
Thrush music - hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went -
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost
A Witness Tree
1942

95> Andrew, thanks for that! Cavafy is easily my favorite poet of all time, and that is easily my favorite poem of is. So bleak, so pessimistic and despairing, and yet so beautiful. Perfect rhythm, perfect tone, perfect word selection. Could there be a more perfect poet in all the world than Cavafy?