The afterlives of C.P. Cavafy's unfinished poems

Abstract

This article draws on recent developments in translation studies and textual scholarship to consider how the translator, like the editor, grapples with the instability of literary works, which almost always exist in multiple versions and varying textual conditions. It treats the process of translation as a series of overlapping interpretive acts, including not only lexical translation but the selection or construction of the original itself, and the creation of an edition in translation. It takes as its case study a group of poems whose instability begins with the “originals”: the unfinished poems of C.P. Cavafy. The unsettled nature of Cavafy's unfinished poems raises questions regarding how such works can be presented both in foreign-language translations and in the language of their original composition. The article discusses two English translations, by John Davis and Daniel Mendelsohn, as well as Renata Lavagnini's 1994 Greek-language scholarly edition.

Keywords:

• translation and source text
• textual scholarship
• editorial theory
• unfinished works
• C.P. Cavafy

Notes

1. See Chapters 4 and 6 of Austin Warren and René Wellek's Theory of Literature, first published in 1949.

2. One exception, to whose work I return below, is Peter Shillingsburg, who has pointed at least in passing to the problem of translation as something textual scholars need to consider: “I have often wondered why textual theorists have not explored the relation of translated texts to their originals with the same dedication that they have explored the relation of a transmitted text to its originals” (1993, 43). Shillingsburg suggests that the real reason for this may lie “in a fear of the results of such an investigation”, since the ability of the work to survive what many have described as the “violence” of translation makes the scholarly editor's obsession with clearing textual corruptions seem rather absurd: “If we find that the work of art lives in the translation, how can we defend the idea that a novel with changed punctuation or a few altered words, where ninety-nine percent of the text is the same, is a ruined, corrupted wreck?” (ibid., 43).

3. Unless otherwise marked, all translations from the Greek are my own.

4. This not uncontested division of the poems was in fact cemented both by Savidis's critical works and by the forms of the editions he produced; the categories have by now entered our critical vocabulary as givens rather than editorial constructions. Daniel Mendelsohn, in the introductions to his 2009 translations Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems, even capitalizes them, though he does object to the “speculative psychological overtones” of the term “hidden”, and also avoids the use of the term “canon”, which he thinks would have caused Cavafy “to raise an eyebrow” (Mendelsohn 2009a, lvi).

5. This is, of course, not an authorial “authorization”; permission was granted by the joint copyright holders for the texts, Lavagnini and Manolis Savidis.

6. See Hirst's “Note on the Greek Text” (Cavafy 2007, xxxiv–xxxix).

7. I am extremely grateful to John Davis for sharing his translations with me, and for generously allowing me to present and discuss his version of “The Photograph” in this essay.

8. As neither Davis nor Mendelsohn offers translations of this set of variants, I do so here:

¹of a youth fashioned in Beauty

²the photograph had

a date thirty years before

or

thirty years before

³melancholy overcame him

⁴or to pollute

⁵the “degenerate youths”

⁶their sexual/erotic elegance/taste