One summer many years ago, when I was prone to fall in love and act upon it, I fell in love with a man with whom I was determined not to act, for various reasons. For various reasons, be was also determined not to act upon his feelings for me, of which we were both aware and indeed spoke, if only in veiled form through recommendations for reading. When the summer of our proximity was almost over and it was time for me to return to my usual life, I sent him as a farewell a Cavafy poem, “Longings,” in the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. To me it expressed the bittersweet pleasure of un-fulfilled love, saying that some desires were better left unnacted upon, preserved in their purity:
Like the beautiful bodies of those Who died before growing old,
sadly shut away in a sumptuous mausoleum,
roses by the bead, jasmine at the feet–
so appear the longings that have passed
without being satisfied, not one of them granted
a single night of pleasure, or one of its radiant mornings.
The image of unfulfilled longing–youthful, unaging, surrounded by flowers in a “sumptuous” mausoleum– was so beautiful that it seemed to me to constitute an argument for leaving longings unfulfilled. Yes, it was a picture of death, but deaths so lovely it challenged the messiness of life. Admittedly the appeal of “a single night of pleasure” was immense, and even more so “one of its radiant mornings,” but the emphasis was on how quickly they passed. And not the least of what got me, for I was young, was the sophistication, the worldliness of the poem’s melancholy outlook. I found renunciation sexy.
But “Longings” had exactly the opposite effect on my friend from the one I expected it to have. It inflamed him. It made him unable to accept our parting. Something in Cavafy’s lines made him want to throw all caution to the winds. I read the poem over and over trying to see what. The threat of dying without satisfaction? In any event, the poem I read as an argument for chastity worked upon him as seduction and he became determined that we have our one night of pleasure. He claimed that my sending him the poem had constituted a kind of promise. How could I say no?
RecentJy I came across “Cavafy’s Desires” by Michael Longley. “Beautiful bodies of those who died before growing old” becomes “corpses the undertaker makes beautiful.” ‘”Longings that have passed away without being satisfied” become desires that “have passed away unconsummated.” Any seductive undercurrent is erased. The “radiant morning” of Keeley and Sherrard becomes “a morning when the moon stays in the sky.” It made me wonder if Michael Longley had “Longings” sent to him as a farewell, I read it as an invitation, and wanted to make sure no one ever fell into the trap of its gorgeous and confusing necrophilia again.
— © Poetry Foundation, February 2007, by Phyllis Rose