Classical Intoxication - Love through the lens of Sappho

Classical Intoxication

 

Love through the lens of Sappho

 

By A.E. STALLINGS

The Weekly Standard

 

Jul 27, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 43

 

 

 

Much of what we think we know about Sappho is apocryphal, conjecture, invented, or wrong, maybe even her name. (Sappho calls herself Psappho.) Yet somehow we feel we know her, that she is speaking directly to us across chasms of time, language, geography, and alphabets. And this is only from one, perhaps two, complete poems and a smattering of fragments from the nine-scroll corpus known in antiquity.

 

‘Sappho and Alcaeus’ by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1881)

What we can reasonably say is that she was born on the island of Lesbos and flourished around 600 b.c., that she composed in the Aeolic dialect, that she probably had a daughter named Cleis—and thus, by deduction, a mother named Cleis, since (then as now) Greeks named grandchildren after their grandparents. She was a musician as well as a poet—her poems should properly be regarded as lyrics—and she was considered by the ancients to be the inventor of the plectrum—roughly, a guitar pick—and the Mixolydian mode. (It’s as if she invented the blues note.) Her poems are often addressed longingly to young women. 

 

Love is hardly Sappho’s only subject—there are hymns, bawdy wedding songs, musings on family difficulties, snippets of narrative, hints of political upheaval—but it is the love poem that she seems almost to invent, and if not love itself, certainly love-sickness, with her psychosomatic description of love’s symptoms: The sufferer is tongue-tied, dizzy, feverish, in a cold sweat, pale. It’s as if she’s the first pop singer to rhyme “fire” and “desire.” 

 

Sappho’s lost poems exert a mysterious influence, like dark matter, invisible to us but affecting the gravitation of all the lyric poetry after it. It’s something of a shock, then, to receive a new volume whose title is Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works.

 

Of course, what the authors mean is that this is a translation of all poems and fragments we have to date. This is also the only volume available, at this writing, that includes the “Brothers” poem, which electrified (and polarized) the classics world in 2014. Besides adding five nearly complete stanzas to her corpus, the poem refers directly to Sappho’s brothers, Charaxos and Larichos, whom we know by name from other sources. 

 

The story behind the reappearance of the new poem could be the basis of an A. S. Byatt novel, involving as it does ancient Egyptian papyrus, an anonymous collector, the evangelical Christian owners of Hobby Lobby (who hunt ancient manuscripts for a Bible museum), skeptical academics, and the man who recognized the new lines as Sappho’s (an Oxford papyrologist with the protagonist-worthy name of Dirk Obbink). This discovery happened just as this book, a 30-year labor of love, was going to print, and the authors were able to include the “new” poem. Another fragment could be discovered tomorrow; but for now, Diane J. Rayor and André Lardinois have bragging rights.

 

Anyone with an interest in Sappho will want to add this to their library: It includes a thorough scholarly introduction, copious notes, all extant fragments, an appendix on the new poem, and unvarnished translations that hew dutifully to the originals. Usefully, the authors have set forth the fragments in “order,” rather than grouping them by subject, making it easier to track down a specific fragment. What the book lacks is a certain grace: It could do with less whiff of lamp and more attar of Pierian roses. 

 

In her introduction, translator Diane Rayor discusses her choices for fragment 168B—which, as it happens, might not even be Sappho, written in a suspect dialect:

The Moon and Pleiades have set—

Half the night is gone.

Time passes.

I sleep alone.

This early effort is one of the more satisfying—simple and unadorned, the off-rhyme bringing out a quiet music as well as closure. Rayor is dutiful about reproducing sound effects such as alliteration, but subordinates music to accuracy: “To re-create the vivid and direct effect of the Greek,” she writes, “I retain all specific details and imagery, while compensating for formal aspects, such as lyric meters that sound awkward in English.” But she does not say how she compensates, and I’m not sure I hear it. She talks about revising translations she had done in 1980 for “clarity, accuracy, and sound,” but this seems to be at the expense of poetry. Thus, “and soldiers battling in shining bronze” becomes “and soldiers battling in arms.”

 

Earlier in her introduction, Rayor says that translations “need to keep the possibilities of the poem intact so that readers can re-create their own Sapphos, based on all the bits of text that still exist. My goal is to activate this potential, revealing the uncertainties of the physical texts, without losing Sappho’s poetry.” 

 

Maybe this sounds admirable (“activate this potential” aside), but I disagree. Do readers want to re-create their own Sapphos? Don’t they want the translator to do that for them? Notes can suggest the frustrating decisions that must be made between one textual choice and another, one meaning and another, but the English translation has to choose. For another tack, we look to another translation altogether, keeping a weather eye, if we can, on the original.

 

Any Sappho has to have a note on the very first word of the very first poem, “poikilothron’” or “poikilophron’”—a description of Aphrodite that could mean either something like “on an embroidered throne” or “with a fickle mind.” The sound note by scholar André Lardinois reads:

On the throne of many hues: Some manuscripts of Dionysios read “with thoughts of many kinds” (poikilophron). It is hard to decide between these two readings. Olympian gods are typically depicted on many-coloured thrones, but “with thoughts of many kinds” fits “weaving wiles” in the next line.

Compare Anne Carson’s scholion on the same word, from her evocatively titled If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (if Raynor and Lardinois slyly overstate completeness in their title, Carson fetishizes the fragment): 

Now certainly the annals of ancient furniture include some fancy chairs, especially when gods sit on them; and initial mention of her throne provides an elegant point of departure for the downrush of Aphrodite’s next motion. on the other hand, it is Aphrodite’s agile mind that seems to be at play in the rest of the poem and, since compounds of thron- are common enough in Greek poetry to make this word predictable, perhaps Sappho relied on our ear to supply the chair while she went on to spangle the mind.

Carson ingeniously discusses the scholarly and textual issue while thinking aloud as a working poet, revealing how one word can hide another. Color the mind spangled!

 

The Rayor and Lardinois translation is a less agile, sturdier sort of work, destined for the classroom rather than the boudoir. Yet it lacks what would make it most handy for serious students of Sappho: the facing Greek, which Carson’s more eccentric version has. I imagine she and her publishers are, at this moment, working up a new edition. Likewise, I would encourage Cambridge University Press to produce another version of this thorough Sappho with the Greek included.

With translations of great poets, the more the merrier, or maybe the more poikilophron. I am glad to have this useful new Sappho on my shelf, but it does not replace Mary Barnard’s intimate, unfussy plainsong, nor Aaron Poochigian’s sleek and sexy Penguin, with its essential introduction. Willis Barnstone, another poet-translator, retains Sappho’s surprising strangeness: She is Psappho, not Sappho, and love is “sweetbitter” rather than the naturalized English “bittersweet.” Barnstone’s, too, includes the Greek, handsomely printed en face. But none absolutely renders a new Sappho redundant, a symptom of the poet’s greatness.

 

The moths of time have been busy at her tapestry. The medieval church was scandalized by the frank depiction of female desire and destroyed what manuscripts it could. (Even more recent critics seem uncomfortable with the poems’ implications and emphasize Sappho’s role as a priestess of a church of Aphrodite, or headmistress at an elegant school for girls, a music teacher, choral leader—anything but a lesbian from Lesbos, though the last does not exclude any of the others.) 

 

Still, Sappho survives. one of the epitaphs for her included in the Palatine Anthology says that “there will never be a sunlit day that lacks the name of lyric Sappho.”

 

We are tantalized, too, that there could be more Sappho to come. A lost painting is lost forever: A copy is not an original. But with poems, every copy is the original, even a few lines scrawled on the back of a laundry list and stuffed into an Egyptian mummy. We hang on anxiously for every syllable that can be added to the lacework of loss, because Sappho seems to speak directly to us, as if knowing someday we would overhear. Tears prick my eyes when I read, even in Rayor’s plain version, in a language that did not yet exist two and a half thousand years ago: I say someone in another time will remember us.

 

A. E. Stallings, poet and translator, is the author, most recently, of Olives: Poems.