The United Nations Organisation has set 23 April as World Book Day  to promote reading and immersion to world literature. In the United Kingdom, the day is instead recognised on the first Thursday in March.

The day was selected because it is the anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Josep Pla, and the birth of Maurice Druon, Manuel Mejía Vallejo and Halldór Laxness, some of the most influential writers in the world literature.

English Language Day at the UN is also celebrated on 23 April, the birthday date  of William Shakespeare, as a day of honour for one of the two working languages of the United Nations Secretariat (the other one being French).

Prompted by this day, I would like to present  two poems of one of the most important Greek poets, C.P.Cavafy. The Greek EFL learners will have a chance to experience what our language and literature feels like in English, while the rest of my kind guests here will get to know or recollect these great poems.

I selected the particular poems for various reasons; “Ithaca”  is probably the most renowned of the poet’s work, while “The City” happens to be among my favourite ones. Then it is the poet himself;  first C.P.Cavafy spoke English and had actually spent some years in Britain and secondly he died on April 29, 1933, a date quite close to the World Book Day.

For me, all of Cavafy’s poetry stands out thanks to the constant subtle presence of irony, the word used with its ancient meaning, that of  tragic  irony, and his clean-cut language that astonishes with its fullness and candour. “Ithaca” resumes into an unexpectedly tranquil feeling of reconciliation with one’s life, while “The City” conveys the exact opposite. From the very first moment I had read this poem back in my teenage years, I deeply felt the profound, irreversible realisation of the bold truth that the poet and every man some time in their life grasp: it is not the city, the country or the place that moulds our lives, but our choices and the way we have ruined them.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon – you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind –
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

from C.P. Cavafy’s Collected Poems (Hogarth Press, 1975),
trs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Ithaca by C.P.Cavafy (with Sean Connery & Vangelis)

The City

poem from

Cavafy’s Alexandria

Edmund Keeley

Princeton University Press, 1976

found at http://books.google.gr/  page 15

Recitation by Dimitris Horn, music by Evanthia Reboutsika

 For further reading of Cavafy’s major works and other relevant material visit  The Cavafy Archive