Thanks for this, Jon, and I like what you say here. It's interesting that there's a
third in this poem, the implied speaker, who is looking at the "he" the amateur
painter looking at "him" the one painted. There are several distances here,
several removals of gaze. "In an antique book" or "In an old book," the speaker
looks at him, the one painted, and it's the painter that's missing. So these
ellipses or elisons of being, the one missing, evoke a sense of distance and loss;
interestingly, it's only the beloved whose image remains and the gaze that gazes
is the phantom of that image, which is why I think these poems seems so
haunting, haunted, and also why at the end, they seem to sink within some
inarticulate feeling that is almost unbearably close.
Best,
Rebecca
---- Original message ----
>Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:11:35 -0800
>From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Another Cavafy picture poem
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Interesting to compare the poem we've been discussing here with another of
his
>poems:
>
>=====
>
>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
>
>======
>
> 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.
>
>
>=====================================
>Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
>
> www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
>=====================================
>
>
>____________________________________________________________________
>
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