Waiting for the gays

[just mercedes]

after Waiting for the Barbarians, C P Cavafy 1904
 
 
 
Why are we hanging around the pub?
 
The queers are due here today.
                                                                                                                             
Why isn't anyone playing pool?
What are the brothers doing just sitting there?
 
Because the queers are coming today.
What’s the point of starting a game?
Once the gays get here, we'll be busy.
 
Why did our leader arrive so early,
and why is he sitting at the bar
on a stool, drunk, wearing the colours?
 
Because the queers are coming today
and he’s waiting for their leader.
He even got a condom with ripples
and raspberry flavour.
 
Why are the sergeant-at-arms and the members
carrying overnight bags?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many jewels,
and rings sparkling with magnificent stones?
Why are they wearing motorbike chains
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
 
Because the queers are coming today
and gays like things like that.
 
Why isn’t Motormouth mouthing off about it?

Because the queers are coming today
and he doesn’t want to scare them off.
 
Why this everyone rushing around yelling?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why is the bar emptying so quickly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
 
Because night has fallen and the queers didn’t come.
And some who have just got out of jail say
there are no real poofters any more.
 
Fuck, what will we do without gays?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

[Leanne]

Damn them and their non-invasive, ultra-subversive bromosexuality. Maybe they don't like raspberry ripple. I've heard queers are fussy like that. Get us another fluffy duck, Sarge.

[Achebe]

beautiful. and thanks for sending me off to read Cavafy. I'm not a big fan of translated poetry, but I've heard so much about the man - he was good.

[just mercedes]

beautiful. and thanks for sending me off to read Cavafy. I'm not a big fan of translated poetry, but I've heard so much about the man - he was good.

I actually envy you, reading Cavafy for the first time.

[billy]

hell's angels and bike lube, who'd a worked that one out.

[Bueller]

 
Fuck, what will we do without gays?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

I don't know why this is in "For Fun" with fantastic lines like this. 

I think about that a lot, how people try to eliminate a "bad element" in society, but where is that impulse coming from? And "solution" to all kinds of things: violent impulses, boredom, search for meaning. Indeed, what would we do without the enemies that define us?

Bloody good stuff.

[Flánnan]

This has a nice point to it. It's also well written which makes all the difference. Nice job!

[Ton Romus]

This was my fav:

Why isn't anyone playing pool?
What are the brothers doing just sitting there?

[RiverNotch]

Critical notes of one kind.

Although it is its own point, I find Cavafy's version of the last line of the second response stronger than the last line here, as it's no mere notion; also stronger is Cavafy's answer to why his brutes' secondary officers sparkle. Meanwhile, the lines on the sergeant-at-arms' regalia and on the panic of the bikers are particularly weak, the former copying too much of Cavafy (and being, in their context, a little too absurd), while the latter could have been more inventive (they're at a bar, after all).

Critical notes of another.

I'm not too familiar with biker culture, but I suspect that, in this case, whether the speaker is more knowledgeable doesn't matter. Every difference between the two kinds of brutes (the Romans and the bikers. I wouldn't consider the barbarians as brutish -- we only hear of the Wicker Man in one sentence of Caesar's commentaries, while Rome's love of the crucifix is more than well-known) supports a subtler point in conjunction with Cavafy's criticism of how societies work, a point that is perhaps more specific to our time. Politics for the bikers is a game, not to be treated as business, unlike their negotiations with the gays (and what those negotiations entail, I just noticed, is kept quite ambiguous, the rapist isn't the only one who can transmit). If the Romans make the divisions within their society clear, leaving the task of greeting the barbarians to their praetors and consuls and imperators, the bikers sustain their illusion of democracy. And the sinister purpose of the orators' silence is made more explicit by this modernized take. Overall, this is a good piece, turned great when compared to the original -- both make the same general point, but comparing the two yields something less "universal", and thus more potent. In fact, it's that very comparison that made me revisit the piece in the first place: a video I was watching mentioned Cavafy, and I was immediately reminded of this. Lovely work.

[just mercedes]

Thanks all, for your reads and comments.