Interesting to compare the poem we've been discussing here with another of his
poems:
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Picture of a 23-year-old Painted by his Friend of the same Age, an Amateur
He finished the picture yesterday noon.
Now he looks at it detail by detail.
He's painted him wearing an unbuttoned grey jacket,
no vest, tieless,
with a rose-coloured shirt,
open, allowing a glimpse
of his beautiful chest and neck.
The right side of his forehead is almost covered by hair,
his lovely hair
(done in the style he's recently adopted).
He's managed to capture perfectly
the sensual note he wanted
when he did the eyes, the lips...
that mouth of his, those lips
so ready to satisfy a special kind of erotic pleasure.
-- tr. Keely/Sherrard
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In this poem the picture is not old, but so fresh the paint is barely dry. I
think also in this latter poem it's clearer that the poem and the picture
merge into the same thing, which has to do with Cavafy's recurrent them that
art is something captured from the past -- it can not be an imitation of
present experience. This is ultimately a Platonic idea -- beauty can be made
immortal only by raising it out of time; what we love is not the beauty of the
person, but the immortal divine beauty reflected by the person, and that
beauty to be revealed has to be captured by the mind of the artist, not by our
bodily senses. This latter poem is also a general metaphor for the work of
the artist -- you might say it's a reworking of the Pygmalion myth:
ironically, the young artist is gazing on his creation with a more absorbing
passion than he would gaze on the physical presence of his beloved. No doubt
this is also a representation of the passion with which Cavafy contemplated
the recreated love affairs in in own poems. It's also interesting to reflect
that both these poems are strictly in the ancient genre of ecphrasis. These
are some of the ways in which underlying Greek traditions everywhere underlie
his work, often in tricky and surprising ways.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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