CAVAFY & DAISIES

“What shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” -
Constantine Cavafy

The field daisy, Bellis perennis, is today’s birthday flower. It is the symbol of purity and virginity, adoration and innocence. In the language of flowers, the daisy speaks the words: “I share your sentiments”. It is under the dominion of Venus and in the past bruised leaves were applied to the testes to reduce swellings there! It used to be said, that Spring had not truly arrived until one could step over 12 daisy blooms under one foot on a lawn where they were growing.

Constantine Cavafy was a Greek Alexandrian poet who was born on this day in 1863. His family was one of the oldest and most renowned of the Greek diaspora. He lived in Alexandria, Constantinople and London, and just as he was coming to the end of adolescence, his family’s fortunes changed and his poetry is tinged with the colours of decadence and remembrances of past glories. His intense eroticism and “art for art’s sake” puts him on a parallel course with Oscar Wilde. Although embracing the European decadence he never denies his Hellenism and often his poems mine deeply into the past in order to gain inspiration and comment cuttingly on the present and future.

His poetry influenced not only his compatriots but through his involvement with the English made him one of the better known of the modern Greek poets. The recurrent theme of eros as viewed by the ancient Greeks often revolves around his own homosexuality and with implicit and tacit understanding transcends the fleshly eros as described and attempts to capture the spiritualism of love. He died on the 29th of April 1933, of throat cancer.

Ithaka
By Constantine Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and 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 and 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 the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen 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 gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

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

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left 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 will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

diaspora |dīˈaspərə|noun (often the Diaspora)
Jews living outside Israel.
• the dispersion of the Jews beyond Israel.
• the dispersion of any people from their original homeland: The diaspora of boat people from Asia.
• the people so dispersed: The Greek diaspora in Egypt flocked back to Greece in the ‘60s.

The main Jewsih diaspora began in the 8th–6th centuries BC, and even before the sack of Jerusalem in AD 70, the number of Jews dispersed by the diaspora was greater than that living in Israel. Thereafter Jews were dispersed even more widely throughout the Roman world and beyond.
ORIGIN Greek, from diaspeirein ‘disperse,’ from dia ‘across’ + speirein ‘scatter.’ The term originated in the Septuagint (Deuteronomy 28:25) in the phrase esē diaspora en pasais basileias tēs gēs ‘thou shalt be a dispersion in all kingdoms of the earth.’