Constantine P. Cavafy [kuh-VAH-fee, the middle syllable with the same vowel sound as "hat"] is the most anthologized and translated Greek poet of the early 20th century. Understandably, his work often engages, revises, and modernizes the deep history and mythology of his homeland. Here, in "Ithaka," Cavafy revists the Odyssey myth, especially the driving force of its narrative and affective logic. The island kingdom of Ithaka, Odysseus’s homeland, functions throughout The Odyssey as the ultimate goal, the journey’s end. For ten years Odysseus toils on the shores of Troy and for ten more he toils in meandering adventures across the sea. The Odyssey presents Odysseus’s return to Ithaka as triumphant: the final consummation of narrative desire imagined literally as a great orgy of violence in which Odysseus reasserts his patriarchal ownership of domestic and civic entities. In the Tennysonian tradition of questioning the satisfaction of Odysseus’s return, “Ithaka” advises its second-person addressee to “hope your road is a long one,” for, we’re told, we will not encounter the hardships of Odysseus as long as we do not bring them within us. Cavafy thus clearly presents Ithaka as a figurative, perhaps even allegorical or symbolic destination that we must have in order to go on the journey in the first place, but that the journey exhausts by the time we reach it. Anticipating the disappointment of return, Cavafy’s speaker concludes: “if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. / Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, / you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

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Ithaka
C.P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

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