Maatstaf. Jaargang 32

[p. 121]

K.P. Kavafis Ars Poetica

Kavafis is als dichter laat tot ontwikkeling gekomen. Tussen 1903 en 1911 gaat hij zich blijkens vele aantekeningen op eigen werk bezinnen. Hij is volgens een aantekening van 1.10.'06 blij zo weinig gepubliceerd te hebben. Veel van die gedichten ‘would disgrace me now’. Hij wil wèl slagen als dichter. Op 29.11.'03 noteerde hij: ‘Yesterday I vaguely considered, it crossed my thoughts, the possibility of literary failure, & I felt suddenly as if all charm would have left my life, I felt an acute pang at the very idea. I at once imagined my having the enjoyment of love - as I understand & want it - & even this seemed - & very clearly seemed - as if it would not have been sufficient to console me of the great deception.

This proves the verity of “De Satrapie”^1..’

Een gedicht dat zijn nieuwe ontwikkeling inluidt is ‘Sterker maken’, waarschijnlijk uit 1903 daterend.

Wie verlangt zijn geest sterker te maken
moet zich bevrijden van respect en gehoorzaamheid.
Van de wetten zal hij er enkele in acht nemen,
maar meestal zal hij zowel wetten als zeden
overtreden en van het gangbare,
onbevredigende fatsoen zal hij zich bevrijden.
Van het genot zal hij veel leren.
Voor de vernielende daad zal hij niet terugdeinzen:
het halve huis moet worden neergehaald.
Zo zal hij zich behoorlijk ontwikkelen tot inzicht.

De symbolistische invloed van weleer is nog merkbaar. Maar ook dat wat men zijn eigen geluid zou kunnen noemen dient zich aan.

In 1903 maakte hij een reis naar Athene. Hij begon er te schrijven aan het document dat hierna volgt. Het wordt meestal - nogal misleidend - de ‘Ars Poetica’ van Kavafis genoemd.

Michael Peridis publiceerde de tekst in de uitgave ‘Onuitgegeven Proza Teksten van K.P. Kavafis’ in 1963. Kavafis schreef het document in Engels kortschrift. Zie de illustratie op pagina 103.

Op enkele plaatsen wijkt de hier gegeven reconstructie af van die van Peridis, die hier en daar tot toevoegen overging. Om niet te ver van het origineel af te raken, besloten wij niet tot vertaling over te gaan. In het Grieks geschreven dichtregels en titels uit deze tekst werden wel in het Nederlands omgezet.

Een enkele toelichting. Het gedeelte geschreven op 25.11.'03 heeft betrekking op de gedichten ‘September 1903’ en ‘December 1903’; Kavafis ziet in deze verzen terug op zijn reis naar Athene, waar hij verliefd is geworden op Alexandros Mavroudis. Mavroudis schreef ook gedichten. Later is hij onder de naam Alex Madis in het Frans gaan publiceren.

Laat ik mezelf tenminste nu bedriegen met illusies,
opdat ik niet de leegte van mijn leven merk.

Zovele keren ben ik zo nabij geweest.
En hoe verlamd, hoe schuchter, was ik,
waarom hield ik mijn lippen op elkaar
terwijl mijn lege leven in mij weende
en mijn begeerte zwarte kleren droeg.

Zovele keren zo dicht bij te zijn geweest,
bij de ogen, bij de zinnelijke lippen,
bij het gedroomde, geliefde lichaam.
Zovele keren zo dicht bij te zijn geweest.

1. De hier geciteerde aantekeningen zijn gepubliceerd in: K.P. Kavafis: Onuitgegeven Aantekeningen over Poëtica en Ethica 1902-1911, ed. G.P. Savidis, Athene, 1983.

[p. 122]

December 1903

 

En als ik over mijn liefde niet kan spreken -

 

als ik niet praat over je haar, je lippen, je ogen,

 

geven toch jouw gezicht dat ik bewaar in mijn ziel,

 

de klank van je stem die ik bewaar in mijn geest,

 

de dagen van september die opdoemen in mijn dromen,

 

vorm en kleur aan mijn woorden en mijn zinnen,

 

op welk onderwerp ik ook inga, over welk

 

denkbeeld ik ook spreek.

Het tweede gedeelte van de ‘Ars Poetica’ heeft betrekking op het gedicht ‘De Pion’. Zo luidt dat vers in de vertaling van Mario Molegraaf en Hans Warren:

Dikwijls wanneer ik toekijk bij het schaken
volgt mijn oog een Pion
die langzaam, langzaam zijn weg vindt
tot hij op de laatste rij aankomt.
Zo bereidwillig gaat hij naar het einde
dat je zou denken dat daar stellig zijn
genietingen en zijn beloningen beginnen.
Veel tegenslagen vindt hij op zijn weg.
Met speren stoten hem schuinslings de lopers;
de torens treffen hem met hun brede banen;
binnen hun twee velden proberen
snelle paarden met list
hem de pas af te snijden;
en hier en daar komt dreigend van opzij
een pion op zijn weg,
uit het kamp van de vijand gezonden.

Maar hij redt zich uit alle gevaren
en komt aan op de laatste rij.

Hoe triomfantelijk komt hij daar aan
op deze vreselijke uiterste rij,
hoe bereidwillig nadert hij de dood!

Want hier moet de Pion sterven,
zijn inspanningen hadden enkel dit tot doel.
Om de koningin, die ons zal redden,
om haar te doen opstaan uit haar graf
stortte hij zich in de hades van het schaakspel.

O dappere, dappere Pion
die zonder aarzeling en met moed
speelt en je offert omdat het zo behoort.

Zo vereist het verheven streven.

In 1894 is Kavafis aan dit gedicht begonnen te werken. Eerst op 23.3. 1911 gaf hij het op. Hij tekende over dit gedicht op die datum aan: ‘Not for publication. But may remain here.’ Natuurlijk was in 1903 - zoals Kavafis wel meende in deze Ars Poetica - het ‘Tekstverbeterende Werk’ nog niet geregeld. Desondanks geeft het document inzicht in zijn wijze van werken en zijn opvattingen betreffende de poëtica.

Ars Poetica
[Eerste deel]

After the already settled Emendatory Work, a philosophical scrutiny of my poems should be made.

Flagrant inconsistencies, illogical possibilities, ridiculous exaggeration should certainly be corrected in the poems, and where the corrections cannot be made the poems should be sacrificed, retaining only any verses of such sacrificed poems as might prove useful later on in the making of new work.

Still the spirit in which the Scrutiny is to be conducted should not be too fanatical.

The profit of personal experience is undoubtedly a sound one; but were it strictly observed it would limit tremendously literary production and even philosophical production. If one ought to wait for old age to risk a word about it, if one ought to wait for the experience of a violent disease in order to mention it, if one ought to experience every sorrow or perturbed state of mind in order to speak of it - one would find that what is left to write of is very little, and indeed many things might not be written at all obviously as

[p. 123]

the person who experienced them might not be the person talented to analyse and express them. Guess work therefore is not to be avoided by any means in a wholesale manner; but of course it must be used cautiously. Guess work indeed - when intelligently directed - loses much of its riskiness, if the user transforms it into a sort of hypothetical experience. This is easier in [the] description of a battle, of a state of society, of a scenery. By the imagination (and by the help of incidents experienced and remotely or nearly connected) the user can transport himself into the midst of the circumstances and can thus create an experience. The same remark holds good - though it presents more difficulty - in matters of feeling.

I should remark that all philosophers necessarily work largely on guess work - guess work illustrated and elaborated by careful thought and weighing of causes and effects, and by inference, I mean knowledge of other reliable experience. Moreover the poet in writing of states of mind can also have the sort of experience furnished by his knowledge of himself and has therefore very reliable gauging of what he would feel were he placed in the imagined conditions.

Also care should be taken not to lose from sight that a state of feeling is true and false, possible and impossible at the same time, or rather by turns. And the poet - who, even when he works the most philosophically, remains an artist - gives one side: which does not mean that he denies the obverse, or even - though perhaps this is stretching the point - that he wishes to imply that the side he treats is the truest, or the one oftener true. He merely describes a possible and an occurring state of feeling - sometimes very transient, sometimes of some duration.

Very often the poet's work has but a vague meaning: it is a suggestion: the thoughts are to be enlarged by future generations or by his immediate readers. Plato said that poets utter great meanings without realising them themselves.

I have said above the poet always remains an artist. As an artist he should avoid - without denying - the highest philosophy - it is not quite proved that it is the highest - of the absolute worthlessness of effort and of the inherent contradiction in every human utterance. If he denies it: he must work. If he accepts it: he must work still, though with the consciousness of his work being but finally toys, - at best toys capable of being utilised for some worthier or better purpose, or the very handling of which prepares for some worthier or better work.

Moreover let us consider the vanity of human things, for this is a clearer way of expressing what I have called ‘the worthlessness of effort and the inherent contradiction in every human utterance’. For few natures, for very few, is it possible to - after accepting it - act accordingly, that is refrain from every action except such as subsistence demands. The majority must act; and though producing vain things their impulse to act and their obedience to it are not vain, because it is a following of nature. Their actions produce works, which can be divided into two categories, works of immediate utility and works of beauty. The poet does the Jatter. As human nature had got a craving for beauty manifested in different forms - love, order in his surroundings, scenery, - he purveys to a need. Some work done in vain and the shortness of human life may declare all this vain; but seeing that we do not know the connection between the after life and this life, perhaps even this may be contested. But the mistake lies chiefly in this individualization. The work is not vain when we leave the individual and we consider the man. Here there is no death, at least no sure death: the result may perhaps be immense; there is no shortness of life, but an immense duration of it. So the absolute vanity disappears: at best only a comparative vanity may remain for the individual, but when the individual separates himself from his work and considers only the pleasure or the profit it has given him for a few years and then its vast importance for centuries and centuries even this comparative vanity disappears or vastly lessens.

My method of procedure for this Philosophical Scrutiny may be either by taking up the poems one by one and settling them at once, - following the lists and ticking each on the list as it is fin-

[p. 124]

ished, oreffacing it if vowed to destruction; or by considering them first attentively, reporting on them, making a batch of the reports, and afterwards working at them on the basis and in the sequence of the batch: that is the method of procedure of the Emendatory Work.

It may also very well happen that the guess work or rather the intellectual insight into the feelings of others may result in the delineating of more interesting intellectual facts or conditions, than the mere relation of the personal experience of one individual. Moreover - though this is a delicate matter - is not such study of others and penetration of others part of what I call ‘personal experience’? Does not this penetration - successful or not - influence the individual thought and create states of mind?

Besides, one lives, one hears, and one understands; and the poems one writes, though not true to one's actual life, are true to other lives. (‘Hun eerste licht’, ‘Muren’, ‘De ramen’, ‘Thermopylae’) - not generally of course, but specially - and the reader to whose life the poem fits admits and feels the poem: which is proved by Xenopoulos' liking (‘Muren’, ‘Kaarsen’) and Pap.'s (‘Kaarsen’). And when one lives, hears, and searches intelligently and tries to write wisely his work is bound, one may say, to fit some life.

Perhaps Shakespeare had never been jealous in his life, so he ought not to have written ‘Othello’; perhaps he was never seriously melancholic, so he ought not to have written ‘Hamlet’; he never murdered, so he ought not to have written ‘Macbeth’!!!

On Sunday (16 August 1903) I wrote some lines beginning ‘Wanneer een dag of een uur komt’. I was absolutely sincere at the time. In fact the lines as they now stand are not good, because they have not been worked: it was throwing on paper an impression. In the evening of the very same day I was ill, and the lines seemed to me flat. Yet they were sincere: they had the necessary truthfulness for art. So is every sincerity to be laid aside, on account of the short duration of the feeling which prompts its expression. But then art is at a standstill; and speech is condemned - because what is always lasting? And things cannot and should not be lasting, for man would then be ‘all of a piece’ and stagnate in sentimental inactivity, in want of change.

If a thought has been really true for a day, its becoming false the next day does not deprive it of its claim to verity. It may have been only a passing or a short lived truth, but if intense and serious it is worthy to be received, both artistically and philosophically.

[25 November 1903]

Here is another example. No poems were sincerer than the ‘2 Ms’, written during and immediately after the great crisis of libidinousness succeeding on my departure from Athens. Now, say that in time Ale. Mav. comes to be indifferent to me, like Sul. (I was very much in love with him before my departure for Athens) or Bra.; will the poems - so true when they were made - become false? Certainly, certainly not. They will remain true in the past, and, though not applicable any more in my life, seeing that they may remind of a day and perhaps different impression, they will be applicable to feelings of other lives.

The same therefore must apply to other works - really felt at the time. If even for one day, or one hour I felt like the man within ‘Muren’, or like the man of ‘Ramen’ the poem is based on a truth, a short-lived truth, but which, for the very reason of its having once existed, may repeat itself in another life, perhaps with as short duration, perhaps with longer. If ‘Thermopylae’ fits but one life, it is true; and it may, indeed the probabilities are that it must.

[Tweede deel]

Zo eindigt het verheven streven

Zo wordt vervuld het grote streven

[p. 125]

My only doubt is whether I have not qualified too much; and yet one might say that the statement ‘Zo eindigt het verheven streven’ is not exaggerated. The poem deals mainly with the domain of theory translated into action. If a great artist or philosopher is not brought to quite the same sacrifice, it may be said however that he also undergoes sacrifice in another way by his never being appreciated as is his meed during his lifetime, by even after his death a great part of his struggles and his toil being underrated or ignored, and by his making discoveries and laying foundations which, necessarily imperfect in his case, do not and cannot perhaps bring him honour or profit, but being perfected and brought to fruition by others bring those others - whose ‘streven’ has been but small - honour and profit. But, again, the poem deals with theory translated into action. It deals with the pioneer, with the act, with the man - like in ‘Thermopylae’ - of abnegation. An objection might be the way in which the word ‘verheven’ seems to specify the superiority of this ‘streven’, which deals, as I have stated, with practical effort; but is not this being too minute? And am I not contradicting myself now? Seeing that I have stated that the theoretical life, the life of the artist and the philosopher, have also their sacrifice, bitter and unjust.

And also what if the translation into action is to be paid for in this way? Its results are good. And the glory and the merit remain to the theorist that is he who mastered out and who planned and thought out the salutary system, the ideal demeanour, which works for good even though in its carrying it out it demands sacrifices (fruitful in final consequence and happy) in the actor; it demands to be applied by a hero.

Without the teaching, the sacrifice (from which so much good will result, so much happiness) would never take place; the hero, brave but unable to think, would be useless, no asset of profit to the world.

And is not the pawn's fate, and the sense of the two last verses, merely symbolical of the pain exacted from every great effort for its lofty aims - sometimes in one form, sometimes in another: sometimes greater, sometimes less: but always to be paid: in sufferings, in humiliations, in surrender. ‘Speelt en je offert’ I say. ‘Offers’ are of different varieties.

And then the ‘pawn’ applies the thought and does the player's action, because he can. He is the ‘pawn’. He is fit. The theorist is fit for other work. He pays his pain in other fashions. He is no ‘pawn’; he acts as he can and as he must.

The theorist is of course the great benefactor.

The millions that will be saved by the retreat of the ‘queen’ owe their happiness to them. To the hero thanks are due too; he by his sacrifice realises or rather hastens the good planned. But even without him the good planned would have been realised. Only it would take a longer time, it would have to traverse paths toilsome and troublesome. His sacrifice is honourable to him in the first degree; it is profitable to the community; but the theorist is a great and honourable benefactor still.

In fact, the theorist is rather not considered in this poem. We are praising the heroic action which carries theory into effect. Great or different, the theorist is to be considered apart.

Great were the legislators of Sparta who made out the System out of which Leonidas' sacrifice came.

* But what about great theory translated into action and bringing reward, that is, the complete happiness and success to which a human being can aspire. The leaders of the American and the Greek rebellions, Pasteur, Garibaldi, and a few other instances.

All the objections former to that * marked are I find groundless.

* is the only logical one.

It may not be unsurmountable but as I had to pass to other work, and had already spent almost a month on considering the poem, I decided to leave out the puzzling two lines and to insert in their place the line ‘Zo vereist het mooie streven’ and to ‘renvoyer’ the whole thing for consideration when the ‘The Scrutiny’ is taken up.