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Cavafy’s Barbarians and their Western Genealogy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Dimitris Tziovas
Dimitris Tziovas*
Affiliation:
Centre for Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek, University of Birmingham
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Extract

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is probably the most discussed of Cavafy’s poems after ‘The God abandons Antony’. Its sources, its date of composition and its diachronic symbolism, along with Cavafy’s unfathomable intentions, have generated a large number of interpretations and debates. Reading the poem today one cannot escape from these layers of interpretation, a kind of metadiscourse which regulates the new approaches either compliant or defiant to those already existent. It seems that the accumulated interpretations of a literary text sometimes discomfort those who seek stable and obvious meanings rather than a multiplicity of opinions and conflicting approaches. The very bulk of scholarship related to a certain poem or poet discourages a new reading and makes the critic hesitant and apprehensive. Nevertheless the diversity of interpretive approaches helps us both to realize their relativity and to ascribe them entirely to the various interpreters.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 10 , 1986 , pp. 161 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1986

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References

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Les philosophes: Le monde n’a pas d’âge. L’humanité se déplace, simplement. Vous êtes en Occident, mais libre d’habiter dans votre Orient, quelque ancient qu’il vous le faille, — et d’y habiter bien. Ne soyez pas un vaincu. Philosophes, vous êtes de votre Occident.” (p. 113)

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34. See Emile Durkheim’s Le Suicide (1897) and his thesis De la division du travail social (1893).