Accueil > Poetry > "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) by Constantin Cavafy
"Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) by Constantin Cavafy
jeudi 24 juin 2021, par
Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) , who lived all his life in the ancient Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most important poets of modern times.
His legacy has been celebrated by writers and poets around the world, notably by Laurence Durell in his monumental Alexandria Quartet (1960) and by the Nobel Prize for Literature laureat J.M. Coetzee with his eponymous novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980).
This distinguished translation of Waiting for the Barbarians (1904), one of Cavafy’s best-known works, by Edmune Keeley and Philip Sherrard, was first published in "C.P. Cavafy : Collected Poems" in 1975.
It has been posted here with the kind permission of Princeton University Press.
The cover shown below is an etching of the author by David Hockney.
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum ?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate ?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating ?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now ?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown ?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas ?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds ?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold ?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say ?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion ?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought ?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians ?
Those people were a kind of solution.