In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a reasonable interpretation, given that it contains an emperor, senators, and orators, though Cavafy himself said that none of them are necessarily Roman. The universality of the situation the poem describes, in which a state’s elite turn out in their finery despite having nothing to do but await the titular barbarian invasion, certainly hasn’t been lost on its interpreters. J. M. Coetzee, for example, set his novel Waiting for the Barbarians on the edge of an unnamed “Empire.”
Anderson also mentions thinking, while considering the poem’s evocation of government deadlock, “Hang on, this sounds familiar” — and none can deny that comparisons between the United States and the declining Roman Empire have been in the air lately. That, in part, inspired the performance that follows, in which Anderson and a veritable Greek chorus interpret both “Waiting for the Barbarians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Ithaca” (which you can also hear read by Sean Connery with a Vangelis score) from seven years later. “Ithaca” is Cavafy’s best-known work, thanks not least to its being read at the funeral of former first lady of the United States Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
It was, in fact, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, established by Aristotle Onassis in the name of his late son, that sponsored this event, which took place in New York City’s Saint Thomas Church in November of 2023. The occasion was the opening of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, on whose website classicist Gregory Jusdanis declares that the poet’s “greatness lies in his talent to predict our own world one hundred years ago.” Cavafy might well have understood that some political conditions are inevitable, but he couldn’t have known how Anderson’s performance of his words, in English translation with the right instrumental and electronic backing, would sound like something right out of her Big Science era.
via Metafilter
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Sean Connery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Ithaca,” Set to the Music of Vangelis
Is America Declining Like Ancient Rome?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
