In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as being “set in historic Rome.” That’s a reasonready interpretation, given that it contains an emperor, senators, and orators, although Cavafy himself mentioned that none of them are necessarily Roman. The universality of the situation the poem describes, during which a state’s elite prove of their finery regardless of having nothing to do however await the titular barbarian invasion, certainly hasn’t been misplaced on its interpreters. J. M. Coetzee, for examinationple, set his novel Waiting for the Barbarians on the sting of an unnamed “Empire.”
Anderson additionally malestions supposeing, whereas considering the poem’s evocation of government uselesslock, “Grasp on, this sounds familiar” — and none can deny that comparisons between the United States and the declining Roman Empire have been within the air lately. That, partially, impressed the performance that follows, during which Anderson and a veritable Greek chorus interpret each “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Ithaca” (which you may as well hear learn by Sean Connery with a Vangelis rating) from seven years later. “Ithaca” is Cavafy’s best-known work, thanks not least to its being learn on the funeral of former first girl of the United States Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
It was, in truth, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, established by Aristotle Onassis within the identify of his late son, that sponsored this occasion, which passed off in New York Metropolis’s Saint Thomas Church in November of 2023. The occasion was the opening of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, on whose netweb site classicist Gregory Jusdanis declares that the poet’s “niceness lies in his talent to predict our personal world one hundred years in the past.” Cavafy would possibly nicely have belowstood that some political conditions are inevitable, however he mightn’t have recognized how Anderson’s performance of his phrases, in English translation with the suitable instrumalestal and electronic againing, would sound like somefactor proper out of her Massive Science period.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly generally known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
