The young poet Evmenis complained one day to Theocritos: “I have been writing for two years now and I have composed just one idyll. It’s my only completed work. I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry is tall, extremely tall; and from this first step I now stand on I will never climb any higher.” Theocritos replied: “Words like that are improper, blasphemous. Just to be on the first step should make you happy and proud. To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done is a glorious thing. Even this first step is a long way above the ordinary world. To stand on this step you must be in your own right a member of the city of ideas. And it is a hard, unusual thing to be enrolled as a citizen of that city. Its councils are full of Legislators no charlatan can fool. To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done already is a glorious thing.”
Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis. Translation copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Princeton University Press. For reuse of these translations, please contact Princeton University Press.
The Canon