“Waiting for the Barbarians”—Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

Yes, I am able to read and translate from Greek as well as Japanese, although I’m much rustier (and really limited to translating relatively short poems, whereas in Japanese I simply prefer to do so).

Cavafy is one of the great gay poets of modern times but this particular poem, one of his most famous, has little of the erotic in it. It is rather one of the most accomplished, lapidary, and devastating portrayals in our poetry of a civilization in self-involved decline—rather like Verlaine’s Empire à la fin de la décadence, only regarding les grands Barbares blancs as, quite deliberately and self-consciously, an excuse. I think that Cavafy’s poem contains messages for our current age, unfortunately.

I’ve indulged in a couple of colloquialisms that most people who translate this poem don’t. It’s supposed to represent phrasings that I find especially snide or sardonic in other ways in the original.