Titles

Let me tell you about a C.P. Cavafy poem. Its Greek title “Επιθυμίες” translates into various words — “longings”, “yearnings”, “wishes”, “cravings” — but the poem has been anointed with the English title of “Desires.” Read it. Then re-read it. Each time you do, replace its title with a different candidate, and ask yourself if it changes the poem’s tenor for you. Perhaps it won’t change massively. Likely not. Still, I’m sure it will shift or drift. I’m guilty, as I suspect you are too, of reflexively skipping to the first stanza. Not all poems hold a title — Emily Dickinson’s rarely do, for example. To enjoy a poem in its entirety, we ought to equally consider presence and absence. If a poem is untitled, why no title? And if it is titled, why that title?

Anyways, without further ado:

Depending on the title, the poem’s object mutates around the edges, yet its essence remains the same: desire unrealized. Substitute here if you want longing, yearning, unfulfilled wish, unsatiated craving. There’s something rather beautiful about how the object is rendered, not as a melodramatic tragedy, but instead as a fantastical relic. Unrealized desire doesn’t spoil into bitter regret. Instead, it develops into an artifact of solemn beauty, that can be kept, regarded, cherished.

The version of Cavafy’s poem that I’ve shared with you Rae Dalven’s translation. Let me also share the version, translated by Michael Longley, published in 1993 by The New Yorker in its October issue. It’s rather different.

The titles are no different. Yet the words, the rhythm, the flow, all has changed. Easy to overlook, notice that the second translation capitalizes the first word of each line, and that the first translation only capitalizes the first word. Dalven’s translation has a celestial touch to it, a mood of softhearted reflection, a soliloquy’s rhythm, whereas Longley’s translation feels rather carnal, morbid, emphatic bordering on aggressive. Dalven opts for “beautiful bodies” over “corpses.” Longley makes the actor explicit, naming “the undertaker,” while Dalven offers no more than a vague “they,” choosing a passive voice where Longley chooses an active voice — one focusing on the act of being acted upon, the other on the act of acting upon. The effect is that Dalven sets the object as the protagonist, while Longley, intentionally or not, elevates the actor over the object, the undertaker over desire unrealized. Well, I don’t think I’m being subtle about favorites. Maybe it’s simply since I read Dalven’s translation first that I prefer it. Still, I’d like to think I articulated serious reasons for my preference.

Anyways, I’ll wrap it up here. Hopefully, the end of this post doesn’t spell the end of your time with Cavafy’s poem and its potential titles and its translations.