In the video above, Lau­rie Ander­son describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” as being “set in historic Rome.” That’s a rea­son­in a position inter­pre­ta­tion, giv­en that it con­tains an emper­or, sen­a­tors, and ora­tors, although Cavafy him­self mentioned that none of them are nec­es­sar­i­ly Roman. The uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion the poem describes, through which a state’s elite prove of their fin­ery regardless of hav­ing noth­ing to do however await the tit­u­lar bar­bar­ian inva­sion, cer­tain­ly has­n’t been misplaced on its inter­preters. J. M. Coet­zee, for examination­ple, set his nov­el Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians on the sting of an unnamed “Empire.”

Ander­son additionally males­tions assume­ing, whereas con­sid­er­ing the poem’s evo­ca­tion of gov­ern­ment lifeless­lock, “Dangle on, this sounds famil­iar” — and none can deny that com­par­isons between the Unit­ed States and the declin­ing Roman Empire have been within the air late­ly. That, partially, impressed the per­for­mance that fol­lows, through which Ander­son and a ver­i­ta­ble Greek cho­rus inter­pret each “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Itha­ca” (which it’s also possible to hear read by Sean Con­nery with a Van­ge­lis rating) from sev­en years lat­er. “Itha­ca” is Cavafy’s best-known work, thanks not least to its being learn on the funer­al of for­mer first woman of the Unit­ed States Jacque­line Kennedy Onas­sis.

It was, actually, the Alexan­der S. Onas­sis Foun­da­tion, estab­lished by Aris­to­tle Onas­sis within the title of his late son, that spon­sored this occasion, which happened in New York Metropolis’s Saint Thomas Church in Novem­ber of 2023. The occa­sion was the open­ing of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, on whose internet­website clas­si­cist Gre­go­ry Jus­da­nis declares that the poet­’s “nice­ness lies in his tal­ent to pre­dict our personal world one hun­dred years in the past.” Cavafy may nicely have underneath­stood that some polit­i­cal con­di­tions are inevitable, however he might­n’t have recognized how Ander­son­’s per­for­mance of his phrases, in Eng­lish trans­la­tion with the precise instru­males­tal and elec­tron­ic again­ing, would sound like some­factor proper out of her Massive Sci­ence period.

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Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Watch Lau­rie Anderson’s Hyp­not­ic Har­vard Lec­ture Series on Poet­ry, Med­i­ta­tion, Death, New York & More

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

Sean Con­nery (RIP) Reads C.P. Cavafy’s Epic Poem “Itha­ca,” Set to the Music of Van­ge­lis

Is Amer­i­ca Declin­ing Like Ancient Rome?

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.