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.