There are more fools in the world than there are people. -- Heinrich Heine
This morning, while browsing the Internet for information on a poet who wrote about society and its government, I discovered several pertinent quotations and writings in byways I hadn't previously considered.
The poet surprises. And just as Shakespeare is relevant today, many, many poets have considered the human race and skewered its follies.
U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic wrote an article in the London Review of Books last year, ...
... in which he delves into the work of Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933).
"Some Sort of Solution"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/...
This was prompted by the release of a book on Cavafy by Evangelos Sachperoglou. I mention the author because his translation of a Cavafy poem was much preferred by Simic and is included in his review, but freely available (on more than one Web site) is another translation.
The poem, according to Simic, was written in November 1898 but not printed until 1904.
A true teaching monument, it is fragrant with freshness today
Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/...
In his review, Simic offers us a bit of history and relevance:
Cavafy read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire between 1893 and 1899. He left notes of his disagreements with the historian, who to his displeasure had a low opinion of Byzantium and Christianity. At the same time, as has been pointed out, Gibbon’s ironic view of history became Cavafy’s own. Irony cured him of both Romantic historiography and Symbolist mysticism and made him a modern poet. In ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, which is still an apt description of any state that needs enemies, real or imaginary, as a perpetual excuse, the defenders capitulate morally even before the enemy shows up. ‘I am a poietes historikos,’ a historical poet or poet-historian, Cavafy said of himself. What the poet notices – and the historian averts his eyes to – is the degree to which folly, that child of absolute power, rules events; in other words, a world in which a fatal self-delusion that is both comic and tragic is always with us.
Now, which senator has donned an embroidered scarlet toga, bracelets of amythest and rings of emeralds?
And which is the poet?