Laurie Anderson’s Mind-Blowing Performance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Waiting for the Barbarians” & “Ithaca”

In the video above, Lau­rie Ander­son describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, giv­en that it con­tains an emper­or, sen­a­tors, and ora­tors, though Cavafy him­self said that none of them are nec­es­sar­i­ly Roman. The uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion the poem describes, in which a state’s elite turn out in their fin­ery despite hav­ing noth­ing to do but await the tit­u­lar bar­bar­ian inva­sion, cer­tain­ly has­n’t been lost on its inter­preters. J. M. Coet­zee, for exam­ple, set his nov­el Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians on the edge of an unnamed “Empire.”

Ander­son also men­tions think­ing, while con­sid­er­ing the poem’s evo­ca­tion of gov­ern­ment dead­lock, “Hang on, this sounds famil­iar” — and none can deny that com­par­isons between the Unit­ed States and the declin­ing Roman Empire have been in the air late­ly. That, in part, inspired the per­for­mance that fol­lows, in which Ander­son and a ver­i­ta­ble Greek cho­rus inter­pret both “Wait­ing for the Bar­bar­ians,” which Cavafy wrote in 1904, and the Odyssey-based “Itha­ca” (which you can also hear read by Sean Con­nery with a Van­ge­lis score) from sev­en years lat­er. “Itha­ca” is Cavafy’s best-known work, thanks not least to its being read at the funer­al of for­mer first lady of the Unit­ed States Jacque­line Kennedy Onas­sis.

It was, in fact, the Alexan­der S. Onas­sis Foun­da­tion, estab­lished by Aris­to­tle Onas­sis in the name of his late son, that spon­sored this event, which took place in New York City’s Saint Thomas Church in Novem­ber of 2023. The occa­sion was the open­ing of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, on whose web­site clas­si­cist Gre­go­ry Jus­da­nis declares that the poet­’s “great­ness lies in his tal­ent to pre­dict our own world one hun­dred years ago.” Cavafy might well have under­stood that some polit­i­cal con­di­tions are inevitable, but he could­n’t have known how Ander­son­’s per­for­mance of his words, in Eng­lish trans­la­tion with the right instru­men­tal and elec­tron­ic back­ing, would sound like some­thing right out of her Big Sci­ence era.

via Metafil­ter

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 in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.