Late antiquity and the Hellenistic era were two of Constantine Cavafy’s favorite historical periods, and he set a considerable number of his poems in them. Situated sometime during the first three centuries of Christianity, In the Month of Athyr (Εν τω μηνί Aθύρ) complements other poems about young male believers in the new and growing faith.

It is also one of a series of epitaphic poems commemorating the premature death of young men—in this case of Lefkios, about whom so little is known since all that is left as evidence of his existence is a worn headstone. As in other historical poems on this theme, Cavafy is fascinated by past—real or imagined—subjectivities, and in this poem he attempts to rescue Lefkios’s identity from oblivion by resorting to a reconstruction of the minute traces still legible on the stone and their half-erased indications that a life (cut short in the prime of young, “Alexandrian” manhood) was mourned with Christian “tea[r]s” by loving “[f]riends.”

But the reading of history, or of other subjectivities for that matter, is neither an easy nor a straightforward affair for Cavafy. It often requires focused attention and, more often than not, imaginative engagement and reconstruction. At times it calls for direct empathy.

The challenge here is a fragmentary text; a body of gaps and breaks, fissures and fissions, parts and members; a text devoid of the rules of the page, lacking the comforting predictability of syntax, of verb, conjugation, and copula. As a textual body it cannot hold together; it can neither conjugate nor copulate. In short, it is a glimpse of a lost totality, of the absence of Lefkios.

Athyr (or Hathor) is the name of an Egyptian goddess for whom a month was named that corresponds to September or October of our calendar—and, for the Mediterranean annual cycle, to the beginning of autumn. The word literally means “house of Horus,” the domain where the Sun rises and sets. Athyr is the goddess of tombs and of mortuary rituals, as well as the supreme goddess of sexual love. She is also the protector of the body from harm and is connected with healing and childbirth.

Although the month’s name in the poem’s title may be perceived initially as a convention of temporal specificity, so common in Cavafy, Athyr personifies some of the most significant themes of the poem, which include death, decay, love, circularity, and revitalization, or rather resuscitation (through poetry and in particular through the act of reading).

As the goddess of love and death, healing, and solar rejuvenation, Athyr foreshadows not only Lefkios’s death and decay but also his redemption and purification. His name is after all Lefkios—“white” and by extension “pure.” The circularity that Athyr symbolizes is paralleled by the reconstruction of the inscription’s fragmented second line at the end of the poem, signifying Lefkios’s death in flesh and his rebirth into language: “In the month of Athyr Lefkios went to sleep.”

The circularity is reinforced by the inscription’s reference to yet another, later religious system of eschatological salvation, manifested in the resurrected body of Jesus Christ (mentioned in line 2), the logos par excellence.

The poem achieves the restitution of Lefkios’s memory by intervening in the process of gradual erasure, the perishable materiality of the gravestone, a materiality just as vulnerable to decay as Lefkios’s body. Lefkios’s redemption is admittedly as tenuous as it is virtual—virtual to the extent that it lasts as long as the reading event itself. What ensures his immortality is the tenacity of readers. The assurance is that as long as the poem (or its antecedent stone) is read, and read aloud, Lefkios will be remembered; his memory will resound in the last two lines where language once again becomes articulate, fluent, and lucid.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, World Literature

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