Another poetic companion for a time of social isolation: Sappho

Of all the poets of the Greco-Roman world, Sappho is the only woman whose name we know and whose words (at least a few of them) have come down through the centuries to us. Even this well known image of a female writer from a fresco at Pompeii is probably not her. ( Raddato, C. (2015, May 02). "Sappho" fresco, Pompeii. Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.ancient.eu/image/3840/) 

The fact that her poems exist almost entirely in fragments can be attributed not just to the erosion of time but also to the hostility of early and medieval Christians to the love for women which suffuses her work. As everyone knows, her home island of Lesbos gave its name to the  love she celebrated.  During the nearly thousand years of classic civilization that followed her, Sappho's poetry was traditionally performed by young women. References by other classic authors point to the existence far more of her poetry than the approximately 700 lines we have today.

Little is really known for certain about her life, beyond that she lived in the Sixth century BCE and was deeply involved in a community, or perhaps a school, of women and that she was a devotee of Aphrodite.  There is plenty written about her on the net, including the ancient legends about her life. I like the concise version of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

There is so much about Sappho that makes her an ideal poetic companion in this time of social isolation. She appears to be the world’s first lyric poet, the first to write as herself and to express her own emotions. She doesn’t hold back, and her fragments that have inspired many poets to write their own responses to the few words that she utters. We tend to love her and to think that we know what she intends to say, or at least that’s how I see it.

Of course, the monks who copied over the ancient Greek manuscripts and preserved them for coming generations hardly felt that way. Most of the existing fragments that we have came down in works of rhetoric which quoted her as an example of style or diction. Or sometimes she was quoted as an example of sin. Other fragments were found  in more recent times recycled into the kind of cardboard mummy wrappings used in Egyptian burials during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt.

The go-to book for the original Greek fragments is the dual language Loeb Classic of Sappho and Alcaeus. The translations are literal but are essential to get a sense of her meaning. My attempt to learn ancient Greek stopped at the ability to pronounce her words in the most faltering way. What I do like to read are the many wonderful efforts at rendering her ancient words into new songs.

My favorite is Anne Carson’s fairly recent If Not, Winter .  Here’s some of her translations:

You will have memories
because of what we did back then
when we were new at this

Yes, we did many things then — all
beautiful

And then there are some poems of which only a single phrase survives, like:

You burn me

and

as long as you want

Anne Carson has great respect for Sappho’s original text, broken though it is, and gives us many poems which preserve the missing parts via ellipses:

] frequently
] for those
I treat well are the ones who most of all
] harm me
] crazy
] you, I want
] to suffer
] in myself I am aware of this
]

I also like the late Mary Barnard’s translations of Sappho from 1958. She captures the plain spoken nature of Sappho’s speech but works around the broken and missing parts of the text to create a smoother, but perhaps less accurate, flow. Here’s a sad one which also supports the idea that Sappho ran a kind of boarding school for girls on Lesbos:

We put this urn aboard ship
with this inscription:

This is the dust of little
Timas who unmarried was led
into Persephone’s dark bedroom.

And she, being far from her home, girls
her age took new edged blades
to cut, in mourning for her
these curls of their soft hair.

There are many others who have attempted translations of Sappho,including Will Barnstone, who is pretty good. And then there’s my two very free translations of a couple fragments which appeared in 2003 in a long defunct literary magazine:

Sappho to Atthis
Inspired by fragment 49 of Sappho, Loeb Ed., 1994

Trembling woman growing old
dreaming of love in the darkening woods

The silver leaves that fluttered like the fluttering
of your heart beneath my trembling hands

The red berries that we picked like the red
of summer’s blood upon your lips and tongue

Sappho to Gongyla
Inspired by fragment 52 of Sappho, Loeb Ed., 1994

My face was hot. My need was strong.
I saw you lifting your arms at the edge of the sea.

Did you truly expect to touch the sky?

You did not glance in my direction.
You did not hear me breathing as I breathed your name.

When the moon sets, I will still be here counting the stars.

In this time when we are told every day that it could kill us to get physically close to another human being, I think that we ought to read (and maybe write) love poems and remember that sooner or later we won’t be afraid to hold each each other’s hands and to kiss each other.


(There are several older books on Sappho and her poems at Project Gutenberg)