BONUS NUMBER 94: "BUT DO NOT HURRY THE JOURNEY AT ALL"

(Did You Sleep With the Models?)

At the funeral of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis in 1994, Maurice Tempelsman, her longtime companion, read a passage, as she had requested, from Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka.” In the poem, the Greek island of Ithaka is the symbol of life’s end…the final destination of all:

Cavafy as a young man, as drawn by David Hockney, and on a Greek postage stamp

Three translations of the poems: by Rae Dalven, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, and Daniel Mendelsohn

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On Youtube you can hear Sean Connery read Cavafy’s “Ithaca,” which Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis requested for her funeral. At first, Connery’s heavy Scottish accent seems at odds with Cavafy’s poem. A few lines into the work, however, you are likely to feel the power of this interpretation.

Her longtime companion read from Cavafy’s “Ithaca” at her funeral in 1994

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Cavafy is an easy poet to read, at least in English translation. I have read all three of the collections pictured above, seldom coming across an obscure line. Many of his poems read like miniature short stories: brief glimpses into lives cut short by fate, erotic desire, the longing for young male flesh in all its transitory beauty, as for example “In the Theatre,” translated by Daniel Mendelsohn:

In another poem, this one also translated by Mendelsohn (but quoted above by Leigh W. Rutledge in an earlier translation), you can almost smell the semen, the boy’s and his lover’s, that still isn’t dry as he “ambles down the street” in a post-erotic stupor:

Mendelsohn translation

Let’s look again at the Keeley-Sherrard translation. Isn’t it the more fluent and straightforward one? No doubt Mendelsohn’s job was made more difficult by the competition; how does a translator improve on a previous one that does all it should?

Keeley-Sherrard translation

The earlier translations by Rae Dalven surely offered Mendelsohn no competition, since they date from the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, when gay-themed poems were unwelcome by establishment publishers and reviewers. That’s one reason her renditions seem stilted, almost grandmotherly. And how can a female grasp full-throttle gay male desire? Nor was English her first language, though she was brought to the U.S. from the Ottoman Empire as a young child. Her final two lines of this poem, which she titled “On the Street,” refer to “the deviate sensual delight.” Did she realize that the delight was fucking? Her final phrase is this: “the so deviate sensual delight he has enjoyed.” A naive reader might think the naughty boy had consumed two banana splits instead of a single ice cream cone.

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Even the Cavafy poems that imply a certain joy are nevertheless tinged with melancholia: the passing of time, the loss of beauty, the thwarting of desire, longing for absent loved ones, death. And many are pure elegies, as for instance the following two as translated by Keeley and Sherrard:

Tenian refers to Tenos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea

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P.S. Did you know that Kathleen Turner is a great fan of Cavafy?

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