Sappho

[amuse]

as we all probably know, i'm not a performer or a lesbian. well, let me just say, to my astonishment, that after reading this poem aloud (as it would have been performed publicly in ancient greece, and i wanted the proper feel of the piece) that i was teary, amazed, and wished i'd known of her poetry much, much sooner. this is a piece of beauty:

Fragment:

Dead-no lie-I want myself.
She, wailing, was leaving me.

And so often said to me this:
"Alas, how terribly we have suffered,
Sappho, and now unwillingly I leave you behind."

And I answered her thus:
"Go gladly and remember
me, for you know how we cared for you;

if not, instead I want you
to swear.........
...and we used to experience beauty.

For coming with many wreaths
of red saffron together with
......by me you lay down.

and you threw many braids of
blossoms of thyme
about your soft neck,

and with much myrrh...
with perfume made from the rarest flower...
you were anointed as if royalty

and upon the bed
so soft.............
you would sate your longing...

And never would anyone...never...at all
Nor any temple...
Would have been from which we would have been absent,
Not a grove...dancing...
Noise...................
........................



i feel all misty again typing that...
do you like it? and did you read it silently or aloud; if aloud, did it make a difference. i guess i should ask do you ever read poetry aloud?

[mono]

Beautifully written and composed. I, unfortunately, cannot recite the work aloud without receiving strange looks from my roommates (laughs). Thank you for sharing the fragment, as many of the ancient Greek works prove always worth reading. Do you, however, know the name of the translator, just out of curiosity? No worries or regrets if you cannot find or recall him/her.

[amuse]

Beautifully written and composed. I, unfortunately, cannot recite the work aloud without receiving strange looks from my roommates (laughs).

lol - i can just imagine!

Do you, however, know the name of the translator, just out of curiosity?

the translation is by Robin Mitchell-Boyask, from my school's dept. of greek, roman and hebrew classics.

[simon]

Hmmm if this is the fragment I think you mean I have a very different translation by ML West:

Honestly, I wish I were dead.
She was covered in tears as she went away,
left me, saying 'Oh, it's too bad!
How unlucky we are! I swear,
Sappho, I don't want to be leaving you.'
This is what I replied to her:
'Go, be happy, and think of me.
You remember how we looked after you;
or if not, then let me remind
...............
all the lovely and beautiful times we had,
all the garlands of violets
and of roses and ...
and...that you've put on in my company.
all the delicat chains of flowers
taht encirlced your tender neck
..............
..............
and the costly unguent with which
you anointed yourself, and the royal myrrh.
on soft couches...
tender.....
you assuaged your longing.....
there was never a......
or a shrine or a .....
....that we were not present at,
no grove...no festive dance......

It's pretty amazing how different they are eh.

[amuse]

wow, so it is! hugely different...and yet the same poem.

[mono]

Hello, amuse. While paging through a book of love poems, I stumbled upon another by Sappho, and thought of this thread, for which I will type out. Enjoy.



One Girl

I
Like the sweet apple which reddens up on the topmost bough,
Atop on the topmost twig,- which the pluckers forgot, somehow,-
For got it not, nay; but got it not, for none could get it till now.

II
Like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found,
Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
Until the purple blossom is trodden in the ground.

Sappho
Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

[mono]

I wandered through a relatively lesser-known feminist bookstore in my city, and came across The Love Songs of Sappho, translated by Paul Roche and Page DuBois. I purchased it recently, and, to my surprise, read it in about two days.
Reminiscing of this thread, I thought to post a few of my favorites.

Yes
they gave me true success
the golden
Muses
And once dead
I shall not be forgotten.
Many have been cheated by oblivion
but by good judges
none.
And afterwards, I say,
I shall be remembered:
oh certainly, by some.
The understanding gods evoke tears.
But for me, listen well:
My delight is the exquisite.
Yes, for me
Glitter and sunlight and love
are one society.
. . . passion, yes
. . . utterly, I can
. . . shall be to me
. . . a face
. . . shining back at me
. . . beautiful . . . indelibly
The moon has gone
The Pleiades gone
In dead of night
Time passes on
I lie alone.

---

Young Artemis swore a great oath:
"A virgin forever I shall be,
Pure on the peaks of the mountains.
Father, for my sake, agree."
And the Father of the Blessed Immortals
Nodded assent. On Olympus
She is known to the gods as Deer-shooter,
Goddess of wilderness: title
Great in renown. And the god
Who never comes near her is Love.

---

Undying Aphrodite on your caparisoned throne,
Daughter of Zeus and weaver of ruses -
Now I address you:

Queen, do not hurt my heart, do not harry it
But come as before when you heard any you hearkened
A long way away,

And leaving behind the house of your father,
Harnessed a golden chariot winged
By your beautiful swans,

Beating and whirring across the sky,
Bringing you down to the unbright earth -
So suddenly there:

Mistress, the smile on your undying features
Asking me what was it troubled me this time?
What made me call you

This time? What was my desperate heart wanting done?
And your: "Whom shall I this time bend to your love?
Who is it Sappho

That's doing you wrong? For if she's escaping
Soon she'll be chasing; if she's refusing
Your gifts, she shall give them.

And if she's not loving, soon shall she love you,
Like it or no." . . . Oh, come again now:
Let me go loose from this merciless craving.
Do what I long to have done: be my own
Helper in Battle.

---

I am awed by your beauty
For when I look upon you face-to-face
It seems Hermione even never was
One such as you:
more like pale-haired Helen
I must say you are than any maid that dies.
And your tender beauty - O I shall confess -
I'd give all my thoughts in holocaust to it
And every sense for you in homage.

---

Let's not pretend.
No, Children, do not delude me.
You mock the good gifts of the Muses
When you say: "Dear Sappho we'll crown you,
Resonant player,
first on the clear sweet lyre . . ."
Do you not see how I alter:
My skin with its aging,
My black hair gone white,
My legs scarcely carrying
Me, who went dancing
More neatly than fawns once
(Neatest of creatures)?
No, no one can cure it; keep beauty from going,
And I cannot help it.
God himself cannot do what cannot be done.
So age follows after and catches
Everything living.
Even rosy-armed Eos, the Dawn,
Who ushers in morning to the ends of the earth,
Could not save from the grasp of old age
Her lover immortal Tithonus.
And I too, I know, must waste away.
Yet for me - listen well -
My delight is the exquisite.
Yes, for me,
Glitter and sunlight and love
Are one society.
So I shall not go creeping away
To die in the dark:
I shall go on living with you,
Loving and loved.

[Bix12]

Hello Mono, thanks fer the invite! I really like the thread, I hope that you don't mind that I posted here...if so, I will remove my posts..poste haste! This is a different translation to "Hymn To Aphrodite" than the one you posted (3rd one down~post #7). This one was translated by William Hyde Appleton in 1893. Which translation do you prefer? O! I meant to remark on how interesting it was to see that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the translator of one of the poems you posted (One Girl). I love his stuff!


THRONED in splendor, immortal Aphrodite!
Child of Zeus, Enchantress, I implore thee
Slay me not in this distress and anguish,
Lady of beauty.

Hither come as once before thou camest,
When from afar thou heard'st my voice lamenting,
Heard'st and camest, leaving thy glorious father's Palace golden,

Yoking thy chariot. Fair the doves that bore thee;
Swift to the darksome earth their course directing,
Waving their thick wings from the highest heaven
Down through the ether.

Quickly they came. Then thou, O blessed goddess,
All in smiling wreathed thy face immortal,
Bade me tell thee the cause of all my suffering,
Why now I called thee;

What for my maddened heart I most was longing.
"Whom," thou criest, "dost wish that sweet Persuasion
Now win over and lead to thy love, my Sappho?
Who is it wrongs thee?

"For, though now he flies, he soon shall follow,
Soon shall be giving gifts who now rejects them.
Even though now he love not, soon shall he love thee
Even though thou wouldst not."

Come then now, dear goddess, and release me
From my anguish. All my heart's desiring
Grant thou now. Now too again as aforetime,
Be thou my ally.

[Bix12]

SAPPHO, who called herself in her Æolic dialect Psappha, one of the greatest of the Greek lyrists, was a Lesbian, who flourished in the latter half of the 7th century B.C., being at the zenith of her fame about 610 B.C. Of her life almost nothing certain is known; from the mass of legend and of scurrilous anecdote which gathered round her name nothing trustworthy can be extracted. She belonged to, and was the chief glory of, the Æolian race in Asia Minor, a people who carried to their highest point the Hellenic love of beauty, their sympathy with all animate and inanimate nature, and their passionate emotions of love and joy. Sappho appears to have been the center of a luxurious society in Lesbos, devoted to art, poetry, and all forms of culture; and she collected around her a sisterhood of girl friends and pupils, with whom she formed a school of poetry and art. She was believed by the ancients to have been small in person, dark, with bright eyes, and of vivid passions; but all that is personal of her, her loves and her jealousies, has been completely overlaid with late and unfounded legend.

All antiquity combined to praise her genius as matchless and perfect. She was called simply "the Poetess"--just as "the Poet" meant Homer. No defect was ever suggested as entering into her art. She was named "the tenth Muse"; and from Heredotus, Plato, and Plutarch, down to the extinction of Paganism, the ancient world spoke of her with rapture, and she was considered to be, without question, the greatest genius to have appeared amongst women. She reached the highest range of lyric art. There is about every extant phrase of Sappho a peculiar stamp of exquisite and unique loveliness. It is no exaggeration when Mr. Symonds says: "Of all the poets of the world, Sappho is the one whose every word has a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace." It may be that her range was restrained to the praise of beauty and the expression of passion. But within that range, Sappho has never been surpassed--we may almost say, has never been equalled--by any poet in ancient or modern times. Professor Gilbert Murray writes: "She is a love-poet of a peculiar kind. She is the type of those natures to whom Love is no God of Joy, but a God of Terror. There is no thought of lightness or recreation, nothing frivolous, hardly anything cheerful, in her extant poems. Love, with her, is a consuming passion which burns all life away, and leaves the lover sick, miserable, and half-mad. Her poems have the solemnity and passion of Dante's Vita Nuova; though not the same spiritual mysticism." Her inimitable phrases, in the wonderful language of her country, have proved the attraction and the despair of poets from Catullus to Swinburne.

[Bix12]

THE MOON

THE stars about the lovely moon
Fade back and vanish very soon,
When, round and full, her silver face
Swims into sight, and lights all space.

[amuse]

i don't mind that you posted here.

[mono]

[i]Hello Mono, thanks fer the invite! I really like the thread, I hope that you don't mind that I posted here...if so, I will remove my posts..poste haste!

Of course, no one minds that you post. On the contrary, I would actually like to encourage it. And what lovely poems you shared!

Which translation do you prefer?

The book I have of Sappho's collected poem have Paul Roche and Page DuBois as translators, though I have heard of many, many good ones.

[Bix12]

Thanks Amuse, Mono...I'm really starting to like this place. From what I've surmised, more than a few of you are students, and therefore very busy. I, on the other hand, am not so awfully busy these days. Due to some early planning, and a few breaks along the way, I managed to retire from the work-a-day world at the ripe old age of 40. Now, I've got plenty of time on my hands, (sometimes I think maybe too much), and, as a result, I can spend my hours doing what I want to do...for the most part. So be not curious, nor surprised, as to the number of my posts.



Here's one of my personal favorites from of the lovely Sappho:

ODE TO A LOVED ONE

Sappho

LEST as the immortal gods is he,
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee, all the while,
Softly speaks and sweetly smile.

'Twas this deprived my soul of rest,
And raised such tumults in my breast;
For, while I gazed, in transport tossed,
My breath was gone, my voice was lost;

My bosom glowed; the subtle flame
Ran quick through all my vital frame;
O'er my dim eyes a darkness hung;
My ears with hollow murmurs rung;

In dewy damps my limbs were chilled;
My blood with gentle horrors thrilled:
My feeble pulse forgot to play;
I fainted, sunk, and died away.

[genoveva]

SAPPHO, who called herself in her Æolic dialect Psappha, one of the greatest of the Greek lyrists, was a Lesbian, who flourished in the latter half of the 7th century B.C.,

Thanks for the link to this thread, mono. It is interesting that Sappho is always described as a lesbian. She did also love men, and had a daughter, so she should really be refered to as bi-sexual (in my opinion).

[genoveva]

the translation is by Robin Mitchell-Boyask, from my school's dept. of greek, roman and hebrew classics.

What school? There are many ways to translate her poems (obviously); but I bet this translation by Robin was done straight from the Greek word for word.

Other translators that I am familiar with include:
Mary Barnard
J.M. Edmonds (1928)
Willis Barnstone (1999)
Jim Powell