The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

Somewhere all these old sticks of furniture

Must still be knocking about …

And beside the window, yes, that bed.

The afternoon sun climbed half way up it.

We parted at four o’clock one afternoon,

Just for a week, on just such an afternoon.

I would have never

Believed those seven days could last forever.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 681

FAR AWAY

This fugitive memory … I should so much

Like to record it, but it’s dwindled …

Hardly a print of it remaining …

It lies so far back, back in my earliest youth,

Before my gifts had kindled.

A skin made of jasmine-petals on a night …

An August evening … but was it August?

I can barely reach it now, barely remember …

Those eyes, the magnificent eyes …

Or was it perhaps in September … in the dog days …

Irrevocably blue, yes, bluer than

A sapphire’s mineral gaze.

free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 704

ONE OF THEIR GODS

Moving through the market-place of Seleukeia

Towards the hour of dusk there came one,

A tall, rare and perfectly fashioned youth

With the rapt joy of absolute incorruptibility

Written in his glance; and whose dark

Perfumed head of hair uncombed attracted

The curious glances of the passers-by.

They paused to ask each other who he was,

A Greek of Syria perhaps or some other stranger?

But a few who saw a little deeper drew aside,

Thoughtfully, to follow him with their eyes,

To watch him gliding through the dark arcades,

Through the shadow-light of evening silently

Going towards those quarters of the town

Which only wake at night in shameless orgies

And pitiless debaucheries of flesh and mind.

And these few who knew wondered which of Them he was,

And for what terrible sensualities he hunted

Through the crooked streets of Seleukeia,

A shadow-visitant from those divine and hallowed

Mansions where They dwell.

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* Page 761

CHE FECE … IL GRAN RIFIUTO

To some among us comes that implacable day

Demanding that we stand our ground and utter

By choice of will the great Yea or Nay.

And whosoever has in him the affirming word

Will straightway then be heard.

The pathways of his life will clear at once

And all rewards will crown his way.

But he, the other who denies,

No-one can say he lies; he would repeat

His Nay in louder tones if pressed again.

It is his right — yet by such little trifles,

A ‘No’ instead of ‘Yes’ his whole life sinks and stifles.

                                 free translation from C. P. Cavafy

* Page 812

The incidents recorded in Capodistria’s letter have been borrowed and expanded from a footnote in Franz Hartmann’s Life of Paracelsus.

About the Author

LAWRENCE DURRELL was born in 1912 in India, where his father was an English civil engineer. As a boy he attended the Jesuit College at Darjeeling, and he was later sent to St Edmund’s School, Canterbury. His first authentic literary work was The Black Book, which appeared in Paris in 1938 under the aegis of Henry Miller and Anais Nin. ‘In the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice …’ he later wrote. The novel was praised by T. S. Eliot, who published his first collection of poems A Private Country in 1943. The first of the island books, Prospero’s Cell, a guide to Corfu, appeared in 1945. It was followed by Reflections on a Marine Venus, about Rhodes. Bitter Lemons, his account of life in Cyprus, won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize in 1957. Subsequently he drew on his years in Greece for The Greek Islands.

Durrell’s wartime sojourn in Egypt led to his masterpiece The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) which he completed in southern France, where he settled permanently in 1957. Between the Quartet and The Avignon Quintet (Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastianand Quinx),he wrote the two-decker Tune and Nunquam,now united as The Revolt of Aphrodite. His oeuvre includes plays, a book of criticism, translations, travel writings (Spirit of Place),Collected Poems,a thriller, White Eagles OverSerbia,and humorous stories about the diplomatic corps. His correspondence with his lifelong friend Henry Miller has also been published. Caesar’s VastGhost,his reflections on the history and culture of Provence, including a late flowering of poems, appeared a few days before his death at his home in Sommieres in 1990.

Copyright

First published in 1962