One of Cavafy’s earlier poems, Waiting for the Barbarians is also one of his best known internationally, second perhaps only to Ithaka. With its diachronic subject of how a society relates to those it designates as the barbaric others, the poem has been interpreted as having specific geographic and historical referents (as several critics have suggested, who read the poem as a comment on the Roman and the Byzantine Empires or on sociopolitical upheavals taking place in different polities across the eastern Mediterranean during Cavafy’s time). But the poem can be read as an equally complex and provocative composition without having to make specific connections to history.
Waiting for the Barbarians takes the form of an impassive dialogue between two anonymous subjects of an anonymous emperor who are observing and commenting on their city’s preparations for the arrival of barbarians. Unlike Cavafy’s “allegorical” or “suggestive” verse, this poem relies on the two figures’ depersonalized questions and answers to offer an objective rendering of the scene and its meaning, thus dramatizing the ennui of the decadent empire and its longing for submission to the barbarian incursion without overt didacticism.
As the poem unfolds, the reader discovers that the empire has come to a standstill, not in fear of being overrun by the barbarians, but in hopeful anticipation of their arrival: the senators willingly give up legislating as they expect the barbarians to begin legislating once they arrive in the city; the emperor eagerly prepares to flatter the barbarians and to offer them titles and honors; the emperor’s subjects dress up and wear their most dazzling jewelry, while the rhetoricians keep a low profile because they know that barbarians are impressed by a show of wealth and beauty but dislike oratory.
The empire’s puzzling desire to welcome the barbarians to its city center is clarified only in the last line of the poem, after it becomes evident that the barbarians will not be arriving after all (“… 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.”
The poem’s intriguing reversal of the barbarians from “threat” to “solution” casts into relief the dead end of a decadent society, whose over-refinement and progress have brought about more despair and futility than fulfillment.
Written in 1898, the poem appears to belong to a European modernist tradition that critically reflected on the promises of progress associated with the philosophy of Enlightenment. Founded on the idea of reason and civilized humanism, this philosophy both exalted its own cultural inheritance while simultaneously idealizing the vitality of the non-reflective noble savage. In Cavafy’s poem, this tension is dramatized without resolution.
Bibliography
Keeley, Edmund. Cavafy’s Alexandria: A Study of a Myth in Progress. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Liddell, Robert. Cavafy: A Biography. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
Cavafy, C. P. Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sheppard, edited by George Savidis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975; London: Hogarth Press, 1975.
Categories: Literature, World Literature
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