Por Constantine P Cavafy
Kenneth Clark is his famous TV series Civilisation argued that boredom is one of the reasons for empires to fall. But boredom, presently, is not on the menu now that Donald Trump’s exhausting and kleptomaniac political circus has started. That’s why perhaps we ought to stop for a moment and read a short poem published at the beginning of last century by one of the most widely read European bards which, 120 years later, seems as prescient as ever
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded 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,
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 turn up 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 bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Constantine P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press, 1975
Other Articles
El arte en los tiempos del capital
Cuentos de perro
No Comment! Be the first one.