“impossible things”: editing and translating c. p. cavafy’s … · 2010. 8. 11. ·...

“Impossible Things”: Editing and Translating C. P. Cavafy’sUnfinished Poems1

KAREN EMMERICH

No doubt it would have delighted C. P.Cavafy,” writes Eric Ormsby in his New Criterion review ofDaniel Mendelsohn’s translations, “to know that some sixtyyears after his death on April 29, 1933, the two dozen or sopoems he left unfinished would emerge into the light, lov-ingly assembled from scattered drafts through the painstak-ing efforts of his editors.”2 Ormsby is referring toMendelsohn’s Unfinished Poems,* a slim companion volumeto the much heftier Collected Poems. Around 1961, G. P. Sa-vidis—then just beginning a dissertation on Cavafy’s hand-made editions of his poems, but later to become one of themost influential scholars and editors of Cavafy as well asmany other modern Greek poets—found these drafts in whathas come to be known as the Cavafy Archive.3 Savidis subse-quently purchased and photographed the Archive, and pub-lished some of these unfinished poems piecemeal in essaysand journal articles over the following decades. They werefirst published as a group in 1994, in a scholarly edition pre-pared by Renata Lavagnini. Mendelsohn’s volume is the firstauthorized publication in English of these thirty poems andfour fragments.4

This “delight,” as Ormsby imagines it, is rooted in whatwe might call Cavafy’s poetics of the lost and found, which

arion 17.3 winter 2010

*C. P. Cavafy, The Unfinished Poems: The first English translation,with introduction and commentary, Daniel Mendelsohn, ed. andtrans. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). xviii + 121 pages. $30.

pervades not only his poems of remembered love, but thoseinvolving the recovery of neglected eras or historical figures,or, most pertinently, effaced texts. But Ormsby’s playful tonealso suggests that Cavafy might have been pleased at thedecades of scholarly contortions prompted by the drafts heleft behind: “This is just the sort of long-drawn-out saga . . .which the poet himself might have teased into wry elegiacs.(‘Waiting for the Grammarians’ perhaps?)” Ormsby may behaving his own bit of wry fun at all this scholarship. It seemsto amuse him that the notes in Mendelsohn’s volume “occupytwice as many pages as the poems,” and that Lavagnini’s edi-tion—that “marvel of precise and ingenious scholarship”—has roughly a ten-to-one ratio of notes and transcriptions perpoem. Meanwhile, though Ormsby claims to have comparedMendelsohn’s translations to the texts Lavagnini presents, heseems to misunderstand the significance of Lavagnini’s edito-rial approach, her meticulous registering of the textual condi-tion of these writings: “It isn’t always obvious,” he writes,“why Cavafy considered these poems unfinished.”

This reaction isn’t unique: Publishers’ Weekly was the firstto note that, “Most of these pieces seem as finished as any-thing in the Collected Poems.”5 And for the reader with accessonly to the English, the classification “unfinished” might in-deed seem strange: apart from a line in the poem “Zenobia,”where an illegible word is marked by two square crosses,Mendelsohn’s translations offer no hint that these verse draftscontain multiple variants for which no priority can be estab-lished. By contrast, Lavagnini’s edition, cited on Mendelsohn’stitle page as the basis for his own, makes this immediately ap-parent. Here is Mendelsohn’s version of the poem Cavafy pro-visionally entitled “O patriavrch~” (“Patriarch”):

The insolent, the ungrateful John,who owed the fact that he was Patriarchto the kindness that was shown to himby Lord John Cantacuzenus(the worthy man whom our race then possessed,

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wise, forbearing, patriotic, brave, adroit),played the wise man, the unscrupulouspatriarch did, and said he would take carethat the injustice done long ago to John Lascariswould never be repeated (not realizing,silly man, what a tremendous outragehis words were to the rule of the Paleologues).Of course he knew, deplorable man, that fromthe honorable, the faithful, the unselfishLord John Cantacuzenus,Lord Andronicus’s boy was in no danger whatsoever.He knew it, deplorable, disgraceful man, but soughtin every way to pander to the mob.

Mendelsohn’s notes to this poem at the back of the volumeare extensive: he briefly describes the seven sheets contained inthe dossier for the poem, then offers several pages of commen-tary on the poem, and on Cavafy’s abiding interest in the fig-ure of John Cantacuzenus; he even refers us to several furtherpages of commentary on the subject in the notes to the Col-lected Poems. He also translates one variant passage of ninelines. But compare this, particularly the clean visual aspect ofthe poem quoted above, to Lavagnini—five pages of diplo-matic transcription (of which I show only one, fig. 1); sevenpages of commentary, including her unpacking of the processof composition; and finally an edited “last text,” a clear read-ing copy with footnote markers referring the reader to a num-ber of variants below (fig. 2).6 These “last texts” are intendedto represent the “last form . . . that the poet had given” to eachof these poems.7 As we will see, however, they are arrived atthrough editorial decisions that make them, in Lavagnini’sview, inseparable from the preceding transcriptions.

Ormsby’s most pointed criticism of Mendelsohn’s volumeis that “the absence of the Greek seems downright inexcus-able . . . it wouldn’t have added much to production costs toprovide the thirty or so pages of Cavafy’s original texts. Itwould have been a service to scholarship, let alone a benefitto those who love the poet enough to puzzle out what he

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wrote in the actual words he used.” Yet this too betrays amisunderstanding of Lavagnini’s “last texts” and their rela-tion to the critical apparatus that surrounds them. In her edi-tion, the presentation of the poems takes up nearly threehundred pages. This “thirty or so pages of Cavafy’s originaltexts” clearly refers to the edited texts that served as the ba-sis for Mendelsohn’s translations. But to what extent can wereally call these editorial constructs “Cavafy’s originaltexts”? Can we divorce the clear reading text at the top of thepage from the footnoted variants below? To what extent arethe edited texts, variants and all, separable from the preced-ing pages of diplomatic transcription, which allow the readerto track Lavagnini’s decisions and interventions? How muchof this material ought the translator transmit, and in whateditorial form should that transmission take place?

Let me first give a basic account of what Lavagnini doesand her reasons for choosing the particular methodology shedoes. Then, I will show how Mendelsohn relies on but devi-ates from her work. Finally, I will briefly touch on a specificexample, the poem “Samivou Epitavfion” (“Epitaph of aSamian”), an earlier version of which was included in Sa-vidis’ editions Anevkdota poihvmata (Unpublished Poems,1968) and Krummevna poihvmata (Hidden Poems, 1993). Thisexample may begin to trouble the boundary between “unfin-ished” and “unpublished,” and introduce a healthy dose ofskepticism to any encounter with those earlier editions. In-deed, an understanding of the textual instability of the “un-finished” poems enriches our sense of the editors’ roles inshaping other Cavafy poems and volumes—texts we tend tothink of as unproblematically Cavafy’s own.8

sitting side by side on a shelf, Mendelsohn’s and Lava -gnini’s Unfinished Poems are something of a Laurel andHardy pair (for all that these works, particularly Lava -gnini’s, are sober and painstakingly deliberate)—Mendel-sohn’s slender volume of a hundred twenty pages besideLavagnini’s of over three hundred fifty. Generally, Cavafy


kept the materials for these works—scraps of paper, at timesrecycled from printings of earlier poems, with crossings-out,corrections, additions, and alternate lines—together in fold-ers or packets, with each poem’s title (often marked “tem-porary”) on a cover or first page. Lavagnini rearranges thedrafts in each folder according to probable order of compo-sition, and provides diplomatic transcriptions of the draftstogether with bibliographic notes on writing materials, pa-per size, quality and condition, and so on. She also providesa lengthy commentary for each poem, including a recon-struction of the likely stages of the drafting process, pro-duced in accordance with the methodology of geneticcriticism.9 At the end of each section she provides an edito-rially constructed “last text.”

In her general introduction, where she discusses the specificproblems presented by Cavafy’s idiosyncratic habits of writ-ing and publishing, Lavagnini warns against the separationof her “last texts” from the preceding diplomatic transcrip-tions: “From the moment that there is no definitive text, anedition cannot be authoritative that would privilege the lasttext that the poet left, and collect in a critical apparatus . . .all the variants that he rejected in turn.” That would entailour imposing on the work “a hierarchy that is absent fromthe manuscripts”(25).10 There is no way of telling, she insists,what final form the poet would have given to these works: hemay well have made new changes, or resurrected bits andpieces from versions he had earlier rejected. She is thereforeadamant that “in the case of an unfinished text, the diplo-matic transcription is the only legitimate editorial method”(26). It is, then, with a fair amount of at least rhetorical hes-itation that Lavagnini offers her “last texts.” After all, in do-ing so, she is (as she recognizes) being entirely “inconsistent”(29) with the basic methodology and theoretical underpin-nings of her edition.

Whether or not these “last texts” are compatible with hergenetic tracing of the composition history of these works,Lavagnini is also actively participating, to a much greater de-

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gree than she acknowledges, in their editorial construction:the “last form[s]” of these poems are “given” not just by thepoet but also, in part, by Lavagnini herself. This is most im-mediately apparent with regard to the titles. Of the thirty po-ems presented, seven have more than one possible title, whilesix have titles that Cavafy explicitly marked as “provisional”or “temporary.”11 Yet in Lavagnini’s edited texts, the provi-sional nature of certain titles is not marked, and the existenceof alternate titles is never noted in the list of variants at thebottom of the page; Lavagnini simply chooses one—invari-ably the one on the outer leaf of the dossier, even in caseswhere Cavafy seems to have preferred another.12

As for variants in the main body of a poem, Lavagnini’srole in creating a clear reading text is also not to be underes-timated. She objects, as I noted, to an edition in which “lasttexts” would be privileged over rejected variants—and yether edition not only does just that, it also imposes a hierarchyon variants Cavafy did not reject. While she downplays thefrequency of such instances—“Cavafy almost always crossesout the parts of the text he wants to replace, with the resultthat there are few alternate variants that the poet wrotedown without deciding which he preferred” (25)—even acursory glance at the “last texts” reveals that, on the con-trary, few of the poems are altogether without alternateforms, while some have variants that would, taken together,replace nearly half the poem. “Sthn prokumaiva” (“On theJetty”), for instance, has variants for four of its eleven lines,and “H fwtografiva” (“The Photograph”) for six of its ten(see fig. 3); even more extreme is the case of “Tou evktou hv touevbdomou aiwvno~” (“Of the Sixth or Seventh Century”), ofwhich Cavafy entirely rewrote two units, the first three andlast four lines of this twelve-line poem. To be sure, Lavagninimeticulously catalogues these variants, and her introductionstresses the interpretive nature of her interventions. Yet theform of her “last texts” creates a definite visual precedence:the “poem” at the top of the page over the variants below—a hierarchy so marked as to allow readers of all kinds (in-


cluding other editors and translators) to treat the clear read-ing text as the poem itself, and to pass over the surroundingcritical apparatus.13

At times, moreover, it’s not clear from the diplomatic tran-scriptions that Lavagnini’s choice of one variant over an-other, of whether a particular passage comprises a variant oran addition, or even of where to break a stanza is the only orobvious one. She also makes a number of what she calls“necessary interventions . . . regarding punctuation, the correc-tion of obvious oversights, and spelling” in the clear readingtexts themselves (56). These interventions are unmarked—and while the careful (and extremely patient) reader can,Lavagnini insists, identify those changes “through the com-parison of that text with the text of the preceding diplomaticedition” (56), this is hardly a straightforward process, norare the interventions always as necessary or as free from sub-jective judgment as she would have it seem. To the twenty-four-line poem “Suntrofiav apov tevssare~” (“Company ofFour”)—whose holograph copy (which Cavafy clearly identi-fied at the top of the page as his “latest form”)14 offers novariants and bears just a single correction (“kaneiv~” for“kanevna~,” both of which translate as “no one”)—she addseight punctuation marks, all at the ends of lines or half-lines,where Cavafy often let the break function as a form ofrhetorical punctuation. Why, in a poem that seems so pol-ished, and by a poet so meticulous in his use of punctuation,would Lavagnini feel the need to add what looks like redun-dant punctuation? And if such additions really had to bemade, how did she decide between commas, semicolons, anddashes—all commonly used by Cavafy in similar situations?

For the most part, though, Lavagnini’s edition seems de-signed to prod the reader with constant reminders that thetexts, as she notes in her introductory “instructions,” are tobe considered “temporary, uneven, and incomplete” (29).Moreover, by including color photoduplications of selectedmanuscripts (fig. 4), she makes it possible for the reader tocheck not only her “last texts,” but her diplomatic transcrip-

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tions as well. In contrast, Mendelsohn’s new translation ofthe Unfinished Poems takes a quite different approach, goingfar beyond what Lavagnini argues should never be done forworks with “no definitive text”: Mendelsohn doesn’t justprivilege the “last text” over earlier drafts, but for the mostpart presents only the last text—and then just the clear read-ing text, with selected variants (those he judges “most signif-icant”) relegated to the notes at the back of the book, ratherthan footnoted or presented on the same page. Just comparethe first impression given by one of Lavagnini’s “last texts”(fig. 3) and by Mendelsohn’s version of the same poem (fig.5), for which the two variants considered “noteworthy” (fig.6) are a good fifty pages away.

Before discussing one especially problematic poem, I wouldlike to look at Mendelsohn’s introduction, where he frames hiseditorial procedure by praising Lavagnini’s careful philologicalwork at the same time that he dismisses her approach as irrel-evant for his own readers, and implies that her critical appara-tus is separable from the poems themselves. Lavagnini’sedition, Mendelsohn notes, is “a work meant for scholars andfor Greek-speaking devotees of Cavafy,” whereas his own is“geared to the needs of the English-speaking reader with nospecialized interests”; he has, therefore, chosen to translateneither the “discussions of intricate issues related to textualcriticism” in her volume nor the diplomatic transcriptions(xvi). But Lavagnini’s pre-emptive objection to this last re-moval is not to be taken lightly: by treating the clear readingportions of her “last texts” as independent entities, Mendel-sohn allows the reader to mistake these edited texts for defini-tive ones. Indeed, Ormsby’s accepting them as “Cavafy’s actualwords” is something Mendelsohn might inadvertently encour-age when he declares in his introduction that “the fruits ofProfessor Lavagnini’s labor . . . gives this important body ofpoetic work to the world in a definitive form” (ix).

And it is quite clear that Mendelsohn considers that “defin-itive form” to include neither the diplomatic transcriptionsnor even the variants Lavagnini so scrupulously registers.


When Mendelsohn states that “in no case have I chosen topresent as part of the translation a variant that has been re-jected by Professor Lavagnini” (xviii), he both invokes the su-perior authority of the scholarly work that went into thecreation of the texts and misrepresents the nature of thatwork: while the content of earlier drafts may not be registeredin Lavagnini’s footnotes, and while one variant may be privi-leged over another because of its position on the page, truevariants are never “rejected.” “As a specialist in textual criti-cism,” Mendelsohn writes, “Professor Lavagnini was particu-larly well equipped to tackle the technical problems associatedwith editing a mass of manuscript drafts into coherent texts—although, as she herself would be the first to emphasize, thesetexts must always remain, at best, hypothetical; something thereader must bear in mind” (viii). Yet, as we have seen, theform of his edition by no means encourages the reader to doso. On the contrary, the relegation of (only selected) variantsto the back of the book allows the reader to encounter the po-ems as if they were translations of stable, singular originals.

these questions regarding the proper presentation ofCavafy’s unfinished texts are brought most sharply into focusby Mendelsohn’s translation of “Samivou Epitavfion” (“Epi-taph of a Samian”), the one instance in which he acknowl-edges having deviated from Lavagnini’s “printed text.”15

This is indeed something of an exceptional case: an earlierversion of the poem, entitled “Epitavfion” (“Epitaph”), waspublished by Savidis in his 1968 scholarly edition of the Un-published Poems and in his 1993 Hidden Poems, a readingedition of what are largely the same texts; Mendelsohn in-cludes a translation of this earlier version in his Collected Po-ems. The bibliographic facts concerning the manuscripts areas follows.16 According to Savidis’ account of the photo-graphs he took in 1963, there are six sheets of paper con-taining manuscript material for the poem, in three separatelocations in the Cavafy Archive: F10, F20, and F42. F10 (i.e.,the tenth film of Savidis’ original images) records two rela-

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tively clean copies of the earlier version. F20 records threesheets of paper containing: 1. a title and date (October1925); 2. recto, a fairly clean copy of the earlier text with nu-merous corrections, with several variants on the verso; and 3.a scrap containing a short note, written in English, reading(in Lavagnini’s reconstruction) “A ve[ry] old po[em] / cannots[o]m[e]th[ing] be / ma[de] of it?” Finally, F42 records a sin-gle sheet of what are presumably later variants. Savidis baseshis text primarily on the version from F20. Lavagnini’s ge-netic unpacking of the poem makes reference to the manu-scripts from F10, but she transcribes only the material fromF20 and F42; her “last text” provides a clear copy of the firstsheet from F20, with variant forms from the verso and fromF42; she includes below as a “prosqhvkh” (“addition”) sevenlines found on that latter sheet (fig. 7 shows this final, editedtext, including the variants and “addition”).

Mendelsohn’s note on the manuscripts is rather misleading:he describes a dossier that “contains four sheets in all,”though the fourth is actually located in quite a different placein the archive. This fourth sheet, Mendelsohn says, contains,“in addition to further revisions to the original sonnet, newmaterial meant to comprise a historical frame for the originalepitaph” (87). Of the extensive variants footnoted byLavagnini (for ten of the poem’s fourteen lines, and oftenmore than one per line), Mendelsohn again notes only the“most significant,” a replacement of the second stanza—which, he says, is “worth noting not least because it adds aline that is then quoted in the new ‘framing’ verses the poetwanted to add to the original poem” (88). But since thereader of the English translation can access this variant onlyby flipping to the notes at the back of the volume, Mendel-sohn’s decision to include the two-stanza “addition” in histext of the poem is an odd one:17

Stranger, by the Ganges here I lie, a manwho lived a life of lamentation, toil, and pain;a Samian, I ended in this thrice-barbaric land.


This grave close by the riverbank contains

many woes. Undiluted lust for gold drove me into this accursed trade.Shipwrecked on the Indian coast, I was soldas a slave. Well into old age

I wore myself out, worked until I breathed no more—deprived of Greek voices, and far from the shoreof Samos. What I suffer now is not, therefore,

fearful; and I voyage down to Hades without grief.There among compatriots shall I be.And forever after I shall speak in Greek.

The lines above are taken from the poems,referring to a time before the Persian Wars,that Cleonymus the son of Timandrus wrotein Seleucia, a poet who was patronizedby King Antiochus Epiphanes.

He took a clever pleasure in the jarring phrase: “Without ever hearing or speaking Greek.” (24)

The first four stanzas of this translation are almost identicalto the version in Mendelsohn’s Collected Poems, apart from asentence in lines 6–7 (“I was shipwrecked on the Indian coastand sold as a slave”)18 which, oddly, are two lines that in theGreek remain consistent throughout all the versions Savidisand Lavagnini present. What Mendelsohn offers here, in theUnpublished Poems, is essentially an eclectic text—and theimpression it gives, to borrow a word from the final stanza ofhis translation, is rather “jarring,” since the quoted phrase inthe last line, nowhere to be found in the body of the poemabove, makes little sense in its present context.

Mendelsohn is, perhaps, damned if he does and damned ifhe doesn’t: to follow Lavagnini’s scholarly assessment andeditorial treatment of these texts in all detail is to risk effac-

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ing the boundary between her work and Cavafy’s own, whileengaging in independent editorial decisions opens him up tothe critique of mismanaging materials Lavagnini spent yearsdeciphering, transcribing, ordering, and interpreting. AndMendelsohn shouldn’t be criticized too harshly for certainflaws in the edition that bears his name, since the presenta-tion of the poems may have had something to do with re-strictions imposed by his publisher—Knopf is, after all, amajor trade publisher for which any kind of critical appara-tus is usually anathema, and it’s wonderful that the volumehas the extensive notes it does. Furthermore, as many of thedifferences between variants—variations in word order, syn-onyms that translate similarly into English—may not evensurvive in translation, it’s hard to imagine an English-lan-guage edition that could present the full range of materialsLavagnini is able to offer in Greek. It could well be that thereis no really felicitous solution to the editorial challenges thesetexts present to the would-be translator. But a conscientiousedition of these poems, whether in Greek or in translation,seems obliged to emphasize the complexity of their textualcondition, and it is fairly easy to imagine additions toMendelsohn’s volume—a few facsimiles, for instance, orsame-page footnotes regarding variants—that would allow itto represent more adequately the provisional nature of thesepoems.

One of the more troubling aspects of Mendelsohn’s volumeis the impression that the poems, so neat and tidy on thepage, give of being finished. For despite Mendelsohn’s asser-tion that they are, indeed, works in progress, both the formof the edition and much of the language in his introductionreinforce this sense of completion: “The addition of these po-ems to the canon of Cavafy’s published poetry allows us tosay, three-quarters of a century after he died on his seventiethbirthday—a perfect concentricity, a polished completion—that his work has, at last, been truly finished” (xvi). The de-sire to present Cavafy’s slippery body of work as a coherent,cohesive canon has plagued scholars and editors for decades,


starting with the first (posthumous) edition of his “acknowl-edged” poems in 1935. Yet an examination of the editorialchallenges involved in making these unfinished poems publicmay invite us to reject that coherence, and to ask searchingquestions about the status of poems and even volumes thatwe may heretofore have considered more finished, more sta-ble, than they really are.

notes

1. My title borrows from Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of a poemCavafy wrote in 1897 (Collected Poems [New York 2009], 294). The title ofthe poem, which was first published in G. P. Savidis’ edition of the Anevkdotapoihvmata (Unpublished Poems [Athens 1968], 97), was assigned by Savidishimself, and printed in brackets in that edition; his version of the poem inthe subsequent Krummevna poihvmata (Hidden Poems [Athens 1993], 67) re-moves the brackets but includes a note concerning the untitled nature of themanuscript; Mendelsohn makes no mention of this in his notes. While thecontent of that particular poem is not relevant to the subject of my paper, itstitle is: I am interested in the material presence of these unfinished poems,and how that presence is registered in the editions under consideration.

2. Eric Ormsby, “Waiting for the Grammarians,” The New Criterion,April 2009 (27.8), 4.

3. See the Cavafy Archive’s official website, http://www.cavafy.com.

4. This is not, however, the first appearance of any of these poems in Eng-lish: seven were published in John Davis’ translation in Conjunctions 31(Fall 1998). Another issue that I don’t propose to discuss here is the questionof what distinguishes the unfinished poems from these four “sketches”—which, apart from the absence of even provisional titles, seem to be in a sim-ilar state of variant-ridden semi-completion.

5. Publishers’ Weekly Reviews, March 16, 2009, 44.

6. Lavagnini also identifies two “variants of uncertain position.” In hisextensive notes on the poem, Mendelsohn purports to translate all the vari-ants, but in fact presents only these last two, combining them as well as re-moving two lines (81).

7. From Lavagnini’s introduction to Cavafy’s Atelhv poihvmata (UnfinishedPoems [Athens 1994], 29). All translations from Lavagnini’s text are myown, though I have followed Mendelsohn’s translations for the titles of thepoems themselves.

8. In my dissertation chapter on Savidis’ editions of Cavafy, “‘As HeWanted Them’: Editing C. P. Cavafy,” I explore some of the editorial chal-lenges presented by Cavafy’s idiosyncratic methods of circulating his poems,

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and show how the editions Savidis produced have largely defined the shapeand perimeters of this shifting body of work, and have made possible certainkinds of readerly and scholarly encounters while preventing or discouragingothers. It’s worth noting here that Cavafy never allowed a collection of hiswork to be commercially published during his lifetime; instead, he distrib-uted his poems to friends and acquaintances, in volumes he himself collatedand bound from poems he had printed on single sheets. The first commercialedition was prepared by Rika Sengopoulou, then wife of Cavafy’s heirAlekos Sengopoulos, and was published in Alexandria in 1935.

9. A good overview of the theory and methodology of genetic criticismcan be found in Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Grodon, GeneticCriticism: Texts and Avant-textes (Philadelphia 2004).

10. Lavagnani (note 6), 25: her discussion here draws on the example ofLinos Politis’ facsimile and diplomatic edition of the manuscripts of Dionys-ios Solomos; a parallel discussion has been taking place for years regardingthe case of Solomos, and a joint consideration of the two cases would un-doubtedly prove fruitful.

11. The poems with alternate titles are: “Antiochus the Cyzicene,”“Bishop Pegasius,” “Birth of a Poem,” “The Dynasty,” “Among the Grovesof the Promenades,” “Epitaph of a Samian,” and “Hunc Deorum Templis.”The poems with temporary titles are: “It Must Have Been the Spirits,” “Af-ter the Swim,” “The Photograph,” “Patriarch,” “Remorse,” and “Companyof Four.”

12. The folder labeled “Gevnesi~ poihvmato~” (“Birth of a Poem”), for in-stance, contains only one sheet of paper, at the top of which are written boththis title and a second, “Eivdwma dikov th~” (“A Vision All its Own”); the sec-ond is underlined (123). Lavagnini notes this variant in her genetic unpack-ing of the composition of the poem, but her “last text” reads completelyclearly, with only the title “Gevnesi~ poihvmato~” (“Birth of a Poem”) (126).

13. Mendelsohn is certainly not alone in taking the “last texts” as rela-tively stable originals and dispensing with much of the critical apparatus: So-nia Ilinskaya’s Greek-language edition of the Collected Poems ( JApanta tapoihvmata, [Athens 2003]) offers, even more surprisingly, only the clear read-ing portions of the edited texts, without any notes or variants whatsoever.

14. 285. This is the only poem of the thirty for which such a note exists.The polished nature of this poem gives further evidence that the division be-tween the “unfinished” and the “unpublished” might be less than absolute.

15. There is actually another instance in which he does so: his translationof “Tigranovkerta” (“Tigranocerta”) chooses a variant over the clear readingtext provided at the top of Lavagnini’s page. Line three of the poem reads“(tou piqanou; patrov~ mou eivnai adelfhv)” / “(she is the sister of my likely fa-ther)” and has two variants noted below: “eivn’ exadevlfh” / “(she is cousin)”and “eivn’ exadevlfh, levgei” / “(she is cousin, she says)”; Mendelsohn choosesthe last of these three in translating the line as “(my alleged father’s cousin:says she)—” (the colon and em dash are his own). The translation also con-tains a careless error: “qa meivnw evna duov mhvne~” (“I’ll stay for a month ortwo,” with a variant below reading “qa meivnw pevnte mhvne~—” [“I’ll stay five


months—”]) is translated as “I’ll stay two or three months” (31).

16. In order to reconstruct these details, I have consulted both Savidis’notes to the Unpublished Poems and Lavagnini’s notes to the Unfinished Po-ems; even then we are still in the dark, as Savidis gestures toward the exis-tence of additional materials which he does not describe. As is often the casewith notes concerning the Archive, we are given no information concerningthe surrounding materials; it is hard to say why the sheet from F42 is notkept together with the materials from F20 or F10. The photographs of theArchive have never been made readily accessible to the general public,though the website of the Cavafy Archive would be an ideal place for that tohappen; in fact, images of some of the manuscripts have already been madeavailable there.

17. He is not, however, the first to do so: in her edition of the CollectedPoems, Sonia Ilinskaya includes the poem only once, in the clean version ofLavagnini’s edited text, plus the “addition” (410). Thus the text Mendelsohnhas chosen to translate is the one Ilinskaya also presents in her edition.

18. C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, Mendelsohn (note 1), 272.

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Figure 1. Lavagnini, 196: second page of transcript of “Opatriavrch~.”

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Figure 3. Lavagnini, 176: last text of “H fwtografiva.”

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Figure 5. Mendelsohn, 18: “The Photograph.”

Karen Emmerich 131

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re 7. Lavagnini, 225–26:edited text of “S

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