The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy. Daniel Mendelsohn

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Young Men of Sidon (400 A.D.)

      The actor whom they’d brought to entertain them

      declaimed, as well, a few choice epigrams.

      The salon opened onto the garden;

      and had a delicate fragrance of blooms

      that was mingled together with the perfumes

      of the five sweetly scented Sidonian youths.

      Meleager, and Crinagoras, and Rhianus were read.

      But when the actor had declaimed

      “Here lies Euphorion’s son, Aeschylus, an Athenian—”

      (stressing, perhaps, more than was necessary

      the “valour far-renowned,” the “Marathonian lea”),

      at once a spirited boy sprang up,

      mad for literature, and cried out:

      “Oh, I don’t like that quatrain, not at all.

      Expressions like that somehow seem like cowardice.

      Give—so I proclaim—all your strength to your work,

      all your care, and remember your work once more

      in times of trial, or when your hour finally comes.

      That’s what I expect from you, and what I demand.

      And don’t dismiss completely from your mind

      the brilliant Discourse of Tragedy—

      that Agamemnon, that marvelous Prometheus,

      those representations of Orestes and Cassandra,

      that Seven Against Thebes—and leave, as your memorial,

      only that you, among the ranks of soldiers, the masses—

      that you too battled Datis and Artaphernes.”

      [1920; 1920]