"As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one"

C.P. Cavafy is widely considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where his Greek parents had settled in the mid-1850s. Cavafy’s father was an importer-exporter whose business responsibilities frequently led him to the port city of Liverpool, England. Cavafy’s father died in 1870, and the business he left in Alexandria proved insufficiently profitable for Cavafy’s mother and eight siblings. The family consequently moved to Liverpool, where the eldest sons assumed control of the family’s business operations.

Cavafy lived in England for much of his adolescence, and developed both a command of the English language and a preference for the writings of William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. During his lifetime Cavafy was an obscure poet, living in relative seclusion and publishing little of his work. This lack of concern for publication was due, perhaps, to the highly personal nature of many poems. Cavafy, who was gay, wrote many sexually explicit poems. Cavafy was also an avid student of history, particularly ancient civilizations, and in a great number of poems he subjectively rendered life during the Greek and Roman empires. Some of these poems treating ancient times eventually reached English novelist E.M. Forster, who was sufficiently impressed to write an essay entitled “The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy” (later published in Pharos and Pharillon).

In “Ithaca,” one of Cavafy’s highly regarded works, the poet evokes Homer’s Odyssey in stressing the importance of the journey over the destination. I'd like to share it with you today as it's a beautiful work of art with a wonderful theme of hope, which we can all use in these trying times.

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and 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 and 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.

[Translated by Edmund Keeley]