> I'm intrigued by those midline spaced caesurae, Rebecca. Are they in
> the Greek originals? What did that person find wrong with thte earlier
> English translations?
A number of Cavafy's poems are written in hemistichs, with the strong midline
caesura indicated as blank space. Typically, the number of syllables in each
hemistich is constant but subject to occasional, always metrically
significant, variation of one or two syllables, making the form a kind of
syllabic verse, though unlike most syllabic verse it also always has a marked
meter in the traditional sense. Usually such lines are rhymed -- not just
end-rhymes, but rhymes of the end of the hemistichs, and sometimes also
between the first and last hemistich -- elaborately but so subtly that you can
read a poem for years before you suddenly realize that it's fully rhymed. The
placing and variation of the normal speech accent against the pattern of the
hemistichs is done with musical precision. The effect is of anything but
"free verse" -- it's more like verse as elaborately formally patterned as
Arnaut Daniel's, yet done with such concealed art that you could take it for
casual conversation. This is one of the great, and untranslatable, things
about Cavafy.
There's a book by Peter Bien, Three Generations of Greek Writers: Cavafy,
Kazantzakis, and Ritsos, which has a good essay on Cavafy. My copy was
published in Greece, but there may be a British or American edition available.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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