Sappho...and Beyond

Thank you for your patience and your kind thoughts during my extended break.  Now: back to Ancient Greece!

Sherod Santos recently published Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation, a fabulous collection of poems by a variety of ancient Greek poets.

Early in Santos' book is a selection of Sappho poems.  His translations are lyrical and ornate compared to some of the plain, direct versions of her work.  Sometimes I find that more ornamented style to be effective with those little fragments that have survived from Sappho's originals.  When we have very little remaining, it feels fairly comfortable to add a bit of decoration.  But often--especially with the longer fragments--I'm put off and wish for the plainness, the directness of Sappho's speech really holds it on.  Santos' poetry, while beautiful, seems to compete with that other kind of beauty the Lesbian poet offers us.

Here is the start of his version of that famous poem I talked about recently:

     He must feel blooded with the spirit of a god
     to sit opposite you and listen, and reply,
     to your talk, your laughter, your touching,
     breath-held silences.

There are a few phrases in his translation that leave me breathless: "when you return from Crete, meet me at the apple grove, our little temple, its leafy alter incensed with the mineral scent of your soapy hair."  The specificity of the line makes it seem intensely real and immediate, and the use of senses other than sight and hearing makes the image lush.

Even Santos' brief but thoughtful introduction is written in this lush style.  One of my favorite sections explains how Sappho is the heir to what comes before:

To read Sappho is to gaze across the every-widening gulf of history into the flickering lucidities of an interior life, a scattered dialogue of self and soul that seems to begin where Penelope [from the Odyssey] left off, in a brooding meditation on love and loss--the anguish of separation, the intense carnality of the loved one's presence, the rattled, nerve end wait for love's return--all the keen desiderata of a heart ensconced dead center in the sway of any given moment.

*  *  *

The best thing about Santos' book are all the poems by Greek lyricists unknown to me.

Many of the male poets seem to accept that the proper topic for writing is war.  But unlike Homer who believes a man should come home carrying his shield or on it (that is, fighting bravely instead of running away from battle, even if one was to die), here we see poets challenging that idea:

     The Shield

     Some half-cocked Thracian swaggers about 
     raising up before his men my blazoned shield,
     the one I abandoned near a blackthorn tree.
     So?  It's not my head he's ragging them with,
     and any old shield can replace that one.

    --Archilochus

Like Sappho, Archilochus seems to be talking about a very specific person, talking about the real experiences confronting him, rather than the almost mythological heroes of Homer's epics.  This is definitely the first text I have read in my lifetime reading plan that seems to directly confront the politics and culture of the state.  And this, perhaps, is a major step toward the modern.  Much of ancient literature (ie, Homer) exists to justify national power.  Other ancients, such as Sappho, discuss a very separate private world.  But here with Archilochus, we have the roots of the subversive.  A huge step.

Sappho's BFF

In these days when my brain has been so Sappho-addled, I attended one of my husband's office parties.

Let me say up front that his office mates are brilliant and interesting people--but they are not (in general) the wonderfully strange, obsessed nerdy types with whom I usually associate. When I get together with my own colleagues, we rarely mention anything that the average 21st-century American would ever think to talk about. If someone speaks 21st-century to us, a lot of us have no clue what he or she is saying. I'm pretty lost when people start talking about what was on television last night--much less what new techno gadget to acquire, or what the newest lingo is.

(It is ironic that I am confessing my luddite status on a blog, is it not?)

One case of this current-culture blindness on my part is my ignorance of the whole Silly Bandz craze. You know those shaped rubber bands kids stack up on their wrists these days? (No? Just trust me. I only learned when someone offered my son one.)

But back to this office party full of normal people:

One of my husband's coworkers, the mother of two daughters, held up her wrists and showed us her newest acquisitions, found in a local gas station on the way to the party...

...rubber band shapes, words turned into art--difficult to puzzle out in the original, then twisted away from recognition completely, and stacked together in ways giving meanings perhaps not intended by their creators.

And I thought immediately what I know you must be thinking right now:

this is exactly what happened to Sappho's words!  It is the hidden echos, our own efforts to stretch those words into something meaningful to us now, that gives her poetry such power. It is the twisted stacking of mutilated words, made into something delicate but strong.  It is the crystal color of her words, so flexible that they can be shaped to our own modern minds and bodies, yet still holding the powerful snap of their original meaning.

(And as I gradually realized that all these nice people were wondering politely what the hell I was talking about, I immediately thought you all of you, all my new BFFs who understand such thoughts and obsessions...)

Stung with Love

In my reading of these various translations of Sappho, I've been struck by the difference in not just translations of the poem but in the introductions.  One especially comprehensive commentary can be found in Aaron Poochingian's Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments. The introductory essay is especially strong in its discussion of the historical context in which Sappho wrote as well as in its analysis of the history of Sappho interpretation.

In addition to the strong introduction, Poochigian provides specific commentary on each poem--significantly more detailed than in any other edition I have seen. In most translations, the footnotes are about translation issues or are explanations of little-known references. Here, however, we get full literary analysis. And the analysis is on set on facing pages--in what I think of as Shakespeare style. (Did you grow up with those paperback editions with notes on the even pages?)

Although I love the volume's introduction and its notes, I'm not bowled over by Poochigian's translations. As I have read Sappho over these last two weeks, I've grown to love the illusive and incomplete echoes of her poems that are still extant. Poochigian, on the other hand, wants to heal the rifts: "I confess that, though Sappho's remains are usually fragments that are themselves fragmentary," he writes, "I have done my best to create a sense of completeness." As he says, "I wanted my translations to be real poems in their own right."

In his efforts to emphasize the fact that Sappho did not write in free verse, the translator rejects using free verse translation. Translators who do so "betray her poems by their very nature," says Poochigian. Although the forms Sappho used to not convey into English, he chooses to use a form that would emphasize the fact that Sappho's poems were actually songs. He therefore uses rhyming English lyric.

Sweet mother, I can't take shuttle in hand.
There is a boy, and lust
Has crushed my spirit--just
As gentle Aphrodite planned.

Personally, I find Poochigian's use of rhyme heavy or clunky--not at all consistent with the almost ethereal echoes I've come to love in the more open translations of Sappho's fragments.

Here is another example--a part of one of Sappho's most famous verses:

That fellow strikes me as god's double
Couched with you face to face, delighting
In your warm manner, your amiable
Talk and inviting

Laughter--the revelation flutters
My ventricles, my sternum and stomach.
The least glimpse, and my lost voice stutters,
Refuses to come back.

Compare this even to William Carlos William's strictly paced version and we see something that, at least to my ears, seems flat.  But--although I'm increasingly drawn to the open weave of translations that acknowledge the tatters (such as Carson's), I'm intrigued by the idea that what Sappho's original readers may have heard was much closer to the tightly bound songs presented by translators (such as Poochigian).  What do you think?  Where do you fall?

Anybody else know of other translations to check out?

Sappho, "as long as you are willing"

If you have any interest in the general issue of translation, Sappho's writing is a perfect piece of literature with which to start your explorations.  Try to check out and compare a few different versions.  Why Sappho?  First, the total volume of Sappho's writing that has survived is tiny--making the comparison of several translations a project that won't take you much more than a few hours.  Another reason it is such an excellent project is because the translations differ from one another quite enormously.  As Anne Carson says, reading Sappho is fundamentally an exercise in imagination.  You can see--in the various versions discussed in the previous posts and here--how much translation is an art rather than a science.

Although his version first came into print in 2002, I have just discovered that Stanley Lombardo has translated Sappho's poems.  Having very much enjoyed his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, I was very eager to see how he would treat Sappho.  Similar to Mary Barnard, Lombardo makes Sappho's fragments read like poetry.  Similar to Carson, he is more forthcoming about the the limits of the text we have extant.  He also tries to be reflective of the original rhythmic phrases.  On top of that combination of strengths, this version also includes a wonderful critical introduction by Pamela Gordon.  (My favorite quote from the intro: "An extensive bibliography seldom satisfies a longing to speak with the dead.")

Lombardo's recreated poems are both sharp and fragile--almost brittle, even, in their luminosity.  Using language like "quenched desire," "trembling," and "climax," he seems to get at the intense physicality of Sappho's poems about love without treading into too-modern wording.  One fragment leaves me breathless: "earth embroidered with flowers."

Pamela Gordon writes in her introduction that one of the most rewarding way to read Sappho is for us "to read an individual fragment as though we were reading a note in the bottle.  Each fragment comes to us against the odds and across the centuries, and none arrives with any original instructions about context or meaning.  All we know is that the sender is Sappho (though occasionally we are not even sure of that), and some of us are certain that we are the right recipient."  I am sure the latter us true for me.

*  *  *

Another wonderful contemporary translation of Sappho's work is Willis Barnstone's Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho.  (He has a newer paperback edition called The Complete Poems of Sappho which I gather is the same translation.)

In some ways similar to Lombardo's book, Barnstone's volume begins with an excellent introduction which places Sappho in historical and literary contexts.  His poems attempt to be true to the originals, but Barnstone is not nearly as concerned with producing a literal translation as some others, such as those I discussed in my previous post.  He cares more about allowing Sappho to speak with a voice that can be heard, with at least some of the power it had in the ancient world.  "I go partway in reflecting the abused Greek text," he says, but typically he "limit[s] the mirror so the English can live."

I love how Barnstone shapes puns in English that try to reflect some of the depth of the Greek.  For example, here is the translator's version of "Words with Virginity":

Virginity, virginity, where have you gone, leaving me abandoned?
No longer will I come to you.  No longer will I come.

And here is Barnstone's translation of the new-to-us Sappho poem, found in 2004:

Growing Old


Those lovely gifts of the fragrant-breasted Muses,
girls, seek them eagerly in thrilling song of the lyre.


Old age has grasped my earlier delicate skin
and my black hair has become white,


my spirit turned heavy, my knees no longer 
carry me nimble for dancing like a fawn.


About these thing I groan.  What can I do?
For a human not to grow old is impossible.


They say Dawn, dazzled by love, took Tithonos
in her rose arms to the utter end of the earth.


Once beautiful and young, time seized him
into gray old age, husband of a deathless wife.

Barnstone states his hope that more library time sifting through papyrus fragments--and more technological advances such as the use of infra-ray technology to reveal texts, might possibly turn up more Sappho as the years progress.  What a gift--and how ironic that it is through the most modern of means that we may more closely approach the ancient.

Sappho: If Not, Winter

Although I love Mary Barnard's poetic translations of Sappho, there are many other interesting choices available for the reader.  I'll spend the next few posts talking about some of the options available.  Today I will focus on a few translations by authors who say they place an emphasis on being accurate.  In the next post, I'll look at a few translators they are more concerned to create poems which the authors consider accessible to modern readers.

*  *  *

Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho is a fascinating version which emphasizes the fragmentary nature of what we have from Sappho.  When I first saw Carson's book on the shelf, I was stunned. How on earth could there be a 400-page edition of Sappho fragments?!

Carson does not give us a long introduction, but in the few pages she offers, she gives a beautifully provocative statement: "Even though you are approaching Sappho in translations, there is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure."

Carson's volume presents each fragment of Sappho's poetry on one page with a facing page in the original Greek.  Most of the gaps and guesses are marked very clearly with space and brackets.  Some of her translations are drop-dead gorgeous--but, by my lights, sometimes the poetry gets interrupted with Carson's efforts to be more faithful to the texts we have (rather than the feel of the poems as they might have felt at the time).  If you are interested in approaching the text as an historian--or as a detective--or even as a poet you might find this translation to be perfect.  Personally, I found Carson's interpretation fascinating and stunningly gorgeous in places, but I am very glad I had seen Barnard's translation first.

For a beautiful review by a reader who loves the poetry of Carson's version, check out Emily's discussion over at Evening All Afternoon.  As she writes, "I think my love for this book is due in equal measure to the stunningly beautiful translation of the parts of the poems that remain, and the spaces of silence where the papyrus has failed.  And don't miss Jason's review which contains the most brilliant sentence I think I've ever read: "I have never had a relationship with a piece of punctuation like I've now developed with the square bracket."

There are times when Sappho fragments seem almost too...um, well, fragmentary...to justify a two-page spread:

      they became [
      for not

or

      ]
      sinful
      ]

At the same time, there is something absolutely wonderful about actually seeing almost everything extant from Sappho.  Our understanding of her writing style builds with each fragment we read, and our ability to to that "imaginal" work which Carson describes becomes a terrific game.

The title fragment is a wonderful example of the suggestive possibilities.  For me, the phrase "if not, winter" started resonating with the idea of unrequited love.  Instead of the narrator basking in the joy and sunshine of returned affection, the world turned dark and cold.  Of course, you might imagine this fragment in a wholly different way.

My favorite imaginings came from one of the last pages, which include several single-word poem fragments.  I loved putting the following bits together in my mind.  I didn't know they made Cel-Ray back in Sappho's Day!

      189
      soda


      191
      celery


      192
      gold anklebone cups

*  *  *

David Campbell's Greek Lyric: Sappho and Alcaeus gives us an even less poetic version.  If you are interested in experiencing the emotional pleasure of Sappho's poetry, this is NOT the translation for you.  But if you are interested in seeing behind the scenes and experiencing the intellectual puzzle that is the translator's art--and especially the complications a Sappho translator faces--this book is an incredible source.  See if you can find a copy in the library to glance through.

An example of what Campbell presents:

           22
          ...task...lovely face...unpleasant...otherwise winter...pain(less?)...I bid you, Abanthis, 
          take (your lyre?) and sing of Gongyla while desire once again flies around you, the lovely one

And this short section also has two footnotes directly beneath discussing translation issues (one even questioning whether a new poem might have started at "I").

Another example:

          58
          ...(fleeing?)...(was bitten?)...(you of many names?)...gives success to the mouth...

*  *  *

I suppose too much accuracy leads us to abandon Truth.

*  *  *

Another kind of accuracy that translators seek to match is Sappho's poetic style.  Paul Roche in his The Love Songs of Sappho (Literary Classics) acknowledges the difficulty of replicating the meter of the poet's Greek because Greek and English have inherently different sounds.  "Confronted with the perennial challenge of transferring the perfection of one language to the perfection of another," he writes, "I have done my best to get near not only to what Sappho said but the way she said it."

Trying to create in English the exact metrical patterns of Sappho's Greek lines would seem strained and strange.  They work only in the Greek.  "When a poetry is stripped of its original music," says the translator, "a completely new set of sounds and rhythms has to be found."  Roche has emphasized the ancient poet's use of both tight form and deep richness by creating his translations with assonance, alliteration, and a loose rhyming pattern.  Here is his version of one of the poems I've quoted before:

I More than Envy Him


He is a god in my eyes, that man,
Given to sit in front of you
And close to himself sweetly to hear
     The sound of you speaking.


Your magical laughter--this I swear--
Batters my heart--my breast astir--
My voice when I see you suddenly near
      Refuses to come.


My tongue breaks up and a delicate fire
Runs through my flesh; I see not a thing
With my eyes, and all that I hear
      In my ears is a hum/


The sweat runs down, a shuddering takes
Me in every part and pale as the drying
Grasses, then, I think I am near
      The moment of dying

* * *

It is astonishing to me how different these poems feel in their different translations. What do you think? Which ones do you find yourself drawn to? Perhaps this gets to the question of why we are reading ancient literature in the first place and what we hope to gain from it.

Sappho: Advice

If you are squeamish
Don't prod the
beach rubble.

--Sappho

from Mary Barnard's translation

* * *

You can hear some of Sappho's poetry read in her original Greek here. 

And you can get the above quote on a t-shirt from Shimer College.

Sappho the Lesbian

One of the few things we know about the poet Sappho is that she was a Lesbian.

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene 
by Simeon Solomon (at the Tate)

 Uhm...that is...she lived on Lesbos, a Greek island off the coast of what is now Turkey. 

Of course, what most of us grew up hearing is that she was a lesbian Lesbian--but on that lower-case adjective, we're a lot less certain.  Certainly the way Sappho's sexuality has been portrayed over the centuries gives us a much more complex picture.  She has been portrayed as a sex-crazed heterosexual prostitute, a suicide that leaped to her death because her love for a specific man was unrequited, a school marm, a cult leader, and a virgin.  Take your pick.

Sappho was probably married, although some scholars suggest that the name for her husband implies her marriage was all a big joke.  (Could she really be married to someone named "Dick All-Cock from the Isle of Man," as one scholar questions?)  Her poems indicate she had a daughter, although some scholars suggest that her references are in fact to a young lover.

And some of her poems are about heterosexual love, as is this one, translated by Mary Barnard:

12. It's no use

Mother dear, I
can't finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite

soft as she is

she has almost
killed me with
love for that boy.

--translated by Mary Barnard

I love the sweet freshness of this poem.  It conveys the emotions of a first crush so beautifully.  But just because Sappho says she is talking about a boy doesn't mean she was in love with a real boy.  Just as Hesiod might have been creating a fictitious narrator, Sappho could have been assuming a different persona.  Since it is believed that many of her poems might have been performed at weddings, this interpretation seems quite feasible.  We just can't know what a love poem means about the feelings of its author.

Many of Sappho's poems are about a particular group of women.  And interestingly, many of these poems are much more erotic--about both bodily pleasure and bodily desire.  Look at this example, translated in that late 1950s by the incomparable William Carlos Williams:

Peer of the gods is that man, who
face to face, sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
          laughter.

It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast.  At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
          is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
          thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down.  I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
          of dying.

Certainly, the intensity of this poem (or any of the others like it in the collection) does not prove that Sappho loved women any more than the first example proves that she engaged in relationships with men.  And even if it did prove she had female lovers, that would not make her a lesbian (or bisexual) since those are constructions of sexuality that arose more than two thousand years after her death.

Nevertheless, I think it is hard to deny that Sappho's poems saw that women were sexual beings, full of beauty and passion and longing.  She imagined that both emotional and physical desires could be fulfilled in a variety of ways without censure or disapproval.  What a modern--and yet eternal--vision!

Perhaps it is exactly that idea that women can have desires that really sets the poems of Sappho apart from those of most of the men writing in the ancient world.  The poet-narrative feels great desire--and expresses it in her poems as love for other women.  Although this seems to be very clear evidence that Sappho was (at least in a loose ahistorical way) a lesbian Lesbian, I can also imagine that it might have been less threatening to see a woman being an active lover of other women than a woman being an active lover of men.  Whatever the choices that Sappho made, and however we interpret the choices her narrator made, the poems that we have of Sappho's give strength and a sense of eternal tradition to women who love women today.

*  *  *

For more about Sappho's life and her changing reputation over time, see these fascinating books:
The Sappho Companion (a fascinating compendium of writings about Sappho over time)
Sappho Is Burning (a difficult read but a thoughtful and very scholarly book)
Sappho's Immortal Daughters (an erudite and highly readable study)

The Poetry of Sappho

After the success of Homeric epic poetry in Ancient Greece, a new kind of writing began to bloom: lyric poetry. One of the most famous lyric poets in ancient Greece was Sappho.  Sappho's poems use her own voice to tell the story of her own experiences.  She insists that daily life and love are every bit as worthy of poetry as the martial splendors and stories of gods found in earlier epics.

Originally, lyric poetry was poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and possibly performed with the help of mimes and dancers.  Soon, however, lyric came to mean short, personal and immediate poems which could use a variety of meters.  Sappho wrote with what translator Mary Barnard (1958) calls a "fresh colloquial directness." Maurice Bowra says Sappho's language is "ordinary speech raised to the highest level of expressiveness." And Dudley Fitts argues that both Sappho's work and Mary Barnard's translation "is stripped and hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth."  Paul Roche says her poems have a "sharpness and jewelry of sound": "plain and ornate at the same time, in the same line, in the very same phrase."

Only two complete poems of Sappho's still exist--and one of the two was found only a couple of years ago.  A few others seem very close to complete. Others poems are merely fragments.  A few are bits of Sappho's work quoted in later authors' texts.  Many poems were found on degraded papyrus--many of which had been torn into strips to make wrappings for mummies, or were faded and then turned into usable paper.  Some of these were preserved only because they were in very dry ancient trash heaps in the deserts of Egypt.

A century ago, archaeologists began to collect  these postage-stamp size bits of ancient papyrus and sent them to England.  As Jeanette Winterson writes while channeling the spirit of Sappho, "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?  When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow."

Some of Sappho's poems present an impressionistic view of nature.  I love these lines (translated by Mary Barnard) personifying the morning light:

3. Standing by my bed

In gold sandals

Dawn that very

moment awoke me.

and these about the evening light:

24. Awed by her splendor

Stars near the lovely

moon cover their own

bright faces

                when she

is roundest and lights

earth with her silver

* * *

Several extant fragments show Sappho confronting with the issues of mortality--the issue with which both Gilgamesh and Achilles struggle. Just as the two men come to understand, Sappho knows that while her body will die, her memory will live on.  That is, the body is mortal but nevertheless the self can become immortal.

60. You may forget but

Let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us

and, more obviously:

100. I have no complaint

Prosperity that

the Golden Muses

gave me was no

delusion: dead, I

won't be forgotten

Gilgamesh hoped to be remembered as the great king of a great city.  Achilles knew he would be remembered as a magnificent warrior-hero.  But Sappho knows that she will be remembered because of her poetry. As she writes in fragment 9, "Words which I command are immortal."

*  *  *

In the next post, I'll discuss Sappho the Lesbian.