Welcome In The Barbarians Poem by Dr Ian Inkster
Welcome In The Barbarians
Welcome in the Barbarians [after C.P. Cavafy 1898]
Don't you worry your heads till they drop
Don't rattle your brains till you flop
Just welcome in the barbarians
They won't have you talk nor offer a prop.
No discourse nor arguments cropped
Just welcome in the barbarians
The Barbarians
You might wait in the senate or in the market-place
But I tell you now these guys have got no time to waste
You think it's just a matter of losing face
Wounded only by your own disgrace
But they shall snap your necks soon as look at you
There'll be no time for words
The barbarity grows stronger in your own poor minds
Its you that fail to act, living lies amongst your crimes.
You claim the enemy's beyond, that they're all outside
Sitting still yet thinking to turn the tide
But you shall trap yourselves because you're never true
You've got no time for words.
All that's Barbaric now is you
Ian Inkster 20 October 2016
Petrou Cavafy, born Alexandria 1863 writing his peotry in modern Greek,1898]-
There have been many translations into English of the original written in Greek in 1898. The prose poem is discursive and reflective and very critical of European society and polity. It is doubtful that the principal barbarians were ever entirely outsiders, Cavafy arguing for inner erosion and lethargy as the true origions of social dissolution. I have based this version on the translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, PUP,1992- highly recommended.
Wishing to put this into song it needed simplifying and shortening, and more importantly given a scanning cadence and rhyming form. This of course leaves much to be desired. I would not blame anyone criticising the lack of inclusiveness or of poetic and aesthetic meaning compared with the original but I do hope I capture the spirit of the poem but in a 21st century context. The eternal truth is that its easy for us, whether we be senators or no, to blame others and 'other' those others with labels such as 'barbarian'.
For the song - which I have deliberately sung with vibrancy and a rough edge - see the attached MP3 file, which I hope you shall enjoy! ! It needs earphones of some sort as its a simple recording to say the least!
Ian Inkster 21 October 2016
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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4/30/2024 7:04:23 PM # 1.0.0.1119
As the author of this poem/song I thought I might just add this rider. The election of Donald Trump as the next US President may well be seen as the arrival of barbarians who came from the very heart of the system itself. Given that I only wrote this a couple of weks ago it seems especially apt to these days, dismally so. But we should wonder who is to blame - a major problem in modern democracy is that pundits and intellectuals keep missing out on the main events - Brexit and Trumpland are really worrying major exemplars. Serious opinion missed the point on both these occasions and will continue to do so until the majority neo-liberalism begins to sit up and look at where the problem is coming from. It involves all of us, something that my song predicts. But the media outpouring and Trumpian victory rhetoric, , the insults and the slam-dunks do not serve to communicate, they are not proper conversations, they do not enlighten. The underlying crumbling of the political economy continues. Dr Ian Inkster November 2016