‘Come back and lay your hands on me, / the sensuous feelings that I love’ – C. P. Cavafy

Poem of the week

‘Come Back’

Valentine’s Day: ‘Come back and lay your hands on me, / the sensuous feelings that I love’ – C. P. Cavafy

IN THIS REVIEW

A poem by C. P. Cavafy, translated by Ian Parks; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

“Idid a little to spread his fame. It was about the best thing I ever did”, wrote E. M. Forster about the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) whom he met in Alexandria in 1915 when he was working for the Red Cross and whose refreshing rejection of the tyranny of Hellenic classicism helped liberate Forster from the idealized Greece he had been fed at Victorian public school. Cavafy showed him it was possible to integrate sexual drives into a larger world-view and, after the war, Forster embarked on an energetic campaign to secure his friend a readership beyond Greece. In 1923 he included Cavafy’s poem “The God Abandons Antony” in his book Pharos and Pharillon (in his TLS review, John Middleton Murry notes that Forster “first gained the courage of his own vision” in Cavafy’s Alexandria), and he worked hard both to persuade Cavafy to allow his poems to be translated and to place them in British journals: “Come Back” – a poem from 1912 – was one of four that appeared in Oxford Outlook in February 1924. But a combination of Cavafy’s own ambivalence about publication (he circulated his poems in pamphlet form privately among friends) and the difficulty of getting Cavafy’s favoured translator, George Valassopoulo, to produce English versions quickly enough meant that no collection in English appeared in the poet’s lifetime. Not until 1935, after the entire Cavafy canon had been posthumously published in Greek, did John Mavrogordato translate it into English, and even this did not appear until 1951.

Forster was understandably reticent about both his own and Cavafy’s homosexuality (it would be another decade after Mavrogordato’s edition before W. H. Auden could say, in his introduction to Rae Dalven’s translation of The Complete Poems, “the erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs”). But it is a reticence perhaps matched by the poet’s language. For Cavafy, an immediate impression is not enough for a poem: it “must age, must fade itself, with time”. In this poem, for example, it seems that the speaker, beyond the specific sexual experience that “lips and flesh remember”, is creating a memorial to the shaping power of love.

Come Back

Come back and lay your hands on me,the sensuous feelings that I love. Come backwhen the body is receptive and on edge –

when yearning travels through the bloodas lips and flesh remember,when hands reach out to touch.

Come soon and often, the feeling that I love.Come back and hold me through the nightwhen lips and flesh remember.  

C. P. CAVAFY
Translated by Ian Parks (2015)