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! :nod:


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.

http://img102.imageshack.us/img102/2193/moonphoto8co.jpg

[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. :nod:

[Bix12]

Thanks Amuse, Mono...I'm really starting to like this place. :nod: 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.

http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/3958/whophelia2d3gf.jpg

[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

[genoveva]

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.



Great! I have this booked currently checked out from the library along with:

Sappho: A New Translation by Mary Barnard (Foreword by Dudley Fitts)

Sappho Poems: A New Version (Translated from the Ancient Greek and with an introduction by Willis Barnstone)

Sappho: A Garland, The Poems and Fragments of Sappho Translated by Jim Powell

Oh, and I believe it is only Paul Roche who translated The Love Songs of Sappho poems; I believe Page duBois only did the introduction.

[stlukesguild]

A bit larger of a bio on Sappho from Wikipedia:

Sappho is believed to have been the daughter of Scamander and Cleïs and to have had three brothers. She was married (Attic comedy says to a wealthy merchant, but that is apocryphal), the name of her husband being in dispute. Some translators have interpreted a poem about a girl named Cleïs as being evidence that she had a daughter by that name. It was a common practice of the time to name daughters after grandmothers, so there is some basis for this interpretation. But the actual Aeolic word pais was more often used to indicate a slave or any young girl, rather than a daughter. In order to avoid misrepresenting the unknowable status of young Cleïs, translator Diane Rayor and others, such as David Campbell, chose to use the more neutral word "child" in their versions of the poem.

Sappho was born into an aristocratic family, which is reflected in the sophistication of her language and the sometimes rarified environments which her verses record. References to dances, festivals, religious rites, military fleets, parading armies, generals, and ladies of the ancient courts abound in her writings. She speaks of time spent in Lydia, one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries of that time. More specifically, Sappho speaks of her friends and happy times among the ladies of Sardis, capital of Lydia, once the home of Croesus and near the gold-rich lands of King Midas.

A violent coup on Lesbos, following a rebellion led by Pittacus, toppled the ruling families from power. For many years, Sappho and other members of the aristocracy, including fellow poet Alcaeus, were exiled. Her poetry speaks bitterly of the mistreatment she suffered during those years. Much of her exile was spent in Syracuse on the island of Sicily. Upon hearing that the famous Sappho would be coming to their city, the people of Syracuse built a statue of her as a form of welcome. Much later, in 581 BC, when Pittacus was no longer in power, she was able to return to her homeland.

Because some of her love poems were addressed to women, she has long been considered to have had homosexual inclinations. The word lesbian itself is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos from which she came. (Her name is also the origin of its much rarer synonym sapphic.) The narrators of many of her poems do in fact speak of infatuations and love (sometimes requited, sometimes not) for various women, but descriptions of actual physical acts between women are few and subject to debate. Whether these poems are meant to be autobiographical is not known, although elements of other parts of Sappho's life do make appearances in her work, and it would be compatible with her style to have these intimate encounters expressed poetically, as well.

During the Victorian era, it became the fashion to describe Sappho as the head-mistress of a girls' finishing school. As Page DuBois (among many other experts) points out, this attempt at making Sappho understandable and palatable to the genteel classes of Great Britain was based more on conservative sensibilities than evidence. In fact, there are no references to teaching, students, academies, or tutors in any of Sappho's admittedly scant collection of surviving works. Nonetheless, the notion that Sappho was in charge of some sort of academy persists.

Plato called Sappho The Tenth Muse, and the rest of the ancient critics agreed. She was one of the canonical nine lyric poets of archaic Greece, which meant that her works were studied by all those wishing to claim that they were properly educated. Older critics sometimes alleged that she led an aesthetic movement away from typical themes of gods to the themes of individual human experiences and emotions, but it is now considered more likely that her work belongs in a long tradition of lyric poetry, and is simply among the first lyric poetry to have been recorded in writing.

During Sappho's lifetime, and in much of Greek poetry thereafter, rhythmic patterns of sound were designed by alternating stresses within and between lines. The stresses were the alternating sounds of long and short vowels but the definitions of "long" or "short" are different from the definitions taught in American schools. The pronunciation of Aeolic Greek, like the other Greek dialects, included a tonal quality, as well. This gave a natural melody to the verses. Sappho's poetry is impossible to be rendered with a sound analogous to the original in an English translation but many have tried.

Like all early lyric poetry, Sappho's works were composed to be either sung or recited to music, in particular to the accompaniment of the lyre. Her extant poetry is in the form of monody, which means that it was designed to be sung by a single voice rather than by a choir. Plutarch credited Sappho with creating the Mixolydian mode of musical composition, which uses a descending scale of notes from b to B. She also developed what is now called the Sapphic stanza as a form of metrical poetry.

With less certainty, she may have invented the plectrum, or pick, which is used to strum the strings of the lyre. Prior to the development of the plectrum, the strings of the lyre were plucked by the fingers. The word which is generally understood to refer to the plectrum is olisbos, but its derivation is uncertain and other meanings have been proposed, thus the uncertainty of it being the specific invention of Sappho. It does appear, however, that she made great use of the plectrum at a time when others were content to pluck the strings.

Although Sappho's work endured well into Roman times, with changing interests, styles, and aesthetics her work was copied less and less, especially after the academies stopped requiring her study. Part of the reason for her disappearance from the standard canon was the predominance of Attic and Homeric Greek as the languages required to be studied. Sappho's Aeolic dialect, a difficult one, and by Roman times, arcane and ancient as well, posed considerable obstacles to her continued popularity.

Once the major academies of the Byzantine Empire dropped her works from their standard curricula, very few copies of her works were made by scribes. Still, the greatest poets and thinkers of ancient Rome continued to emulate her or compare other writers to her, and it is through these comparisons and descriptions that we have received much of her extant poetry.

Modern legends, with origins that are difficult to trace, have made Sappho's literary legacy the victim of purposeful obliteration by scandalized church leaders, often by means of book-burning. There is no known historical evidence for these accounts. Indeed, Gregory of Nazianzus, who along with Pope Gregory VII features as the villain in many of these stories, was a reader and admirer of Sappho's poetry. For example, modern scholars have noted the echoes of Sappho fr. 2 in his poem On Human Nature, which copies from Sappho the quasi-sacred grove (alsos), the wind-shaken branches, and the striking word for "deep sleep" (koma).

It appears likely that Sappho's poetry was decimated by the same forces of cultural change that obliterated, without prejudice, the remains of all the canonical archaic Greek poets. Indeed, as one would expect from ancient critical estimations, which regard Sappho and Pindar as the greatest practitioners of monodic lyric and choral poetry (respectively), more of Sappho's work has survived through quotation than any of the others, with the exception of Pindar (whose works alone survive in a manuscript tradition).

Although the manuscript tradition broke off, some copies of her work have been discovered in Egyptian papyri from an earlier period. A major find at Oxyrhynchus brought many new but tattered verses to light.[1] From the time of the European Renaissance, the interest in Sappho's writing has grown, seeing waves of fairly widespread popularity as new generations rediscover her work. Since few people are able to understand ancient languages, each age has translated Sappho in its own idiomatic way. Poetry, such as Sappho's, that relies on meter is difficult to reproduce in English, especially American English, which has a much more even pronunciation and emphasis than ancient Greek. As a result, many early translators used rhyme and worked Sappho's ideas into English poetic forms.

In the 1960s Mary Barnard reintroduced Sappho to the reading public with a new approach to translation that eschewed the cumbersome use of rhyming stanzas or forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, which were grossly unsuited to Sappho's style. Barnard's translations featured spare, fresh language that better reflected the clarity of Sappho's lines. Her work signalled a new appreciation and hunger for Sappho's poetry. Subsequent translators have tended to work in a similar manner, seeking to allow the essence of Sappho's spirit to be visible through the translated verses.

Ancient sources state that Sappho produced nine volumes of poetry, but only a small proportion of her work survives. Papyrus fragments, such as those found in the ancient rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus, are an important source. One substantial fragment is preserved on a potsherd. The rest of what we know of Sappho comes through citations in other ancient writers, often made to illustrate grammar, vocabulary, or meter. There is a single complete poem, Fragment 1, Hymn to Aphrodite: for a fine modern translation, with notes, see this page. Another modern translation of that ode, and translations of two more virtually complete poems (16 and 31 in the standard numeration) and three shorter fragments, including one whose authorship is uncertain (168b), are available on this page. Greek texts and translations of the main fragments, with introduction and commentary, are available here.

continued...

[stlukesguild]

The most recent addition to the corpus is a virtually complete poem on old age. The line-ends were first published in 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, no. 1787 (fragment 1: see the third pair of images on this page), but little could be made of them, since the indications of poem-end (placed at the beginnings of the lines) were lost, and scholars could only guess where one poem ended and another began. Most of the rest of the poem has recently (2004) been published from a 3rd century BCE papyrus in the Cologne University collection (image available here). The latest reconstruction, by M. L. West, appeared in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 151 (2005), 1-9, and in the Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 2005 (English translation and discussion). Another full literary translation is available. [2] The Greek text has been reproduced with helpful notes for students of the language, [3] together with other examples of Greek lyric poetry. [COLOR]In ancient and medieval times she was famous for (according to legend) throwing herself off a cliff due to unrequited love for a male sailor named Phaon. This legend dates to Ovid and Lucian in Ancient Rome and certainly is not a Christian overlay.

The 3rd Century philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that Sappho was "small and dark" and that her relationships to her female friends were similar to those of Socrates:

What else was the love of the Lesbian woman except Socrates' art of love? For they seem to me to have practiced love each in their own way, she that of women, he that of men. For they say that both loved many and were captivated by all things beautiful. What Alcibiades and Charmides and Phaedrus were to him, Gyrinna and Atthis and Anactoria were to the Lesbian.

A major new literary discovery, the Milan Papyrus,[4] recovered from a dismantled mummy casing and published in 2001, has revealed the high esteem in which the poet Posidippus of Pella, an important composer of epigrams (3rd century BC), held Sappho's 'divine songs'. An English translation of the new epigrams, with notes, is available , as is the original Greek text.

An epigram in the Anthologia Palatina (9.506) ascribed to Plato states:

Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth

[stlukesguild]

There is a recent (2002) translation of Sappho's work by the great Canadian poet, Anne Carson. Carson might be the ideal translator. She is a professor of classics and comparative studies, a scholar and frequent translator of Greek literature, as well as a powerful poet who frequently works with fragmented forms and literature which blurs the distinctions between poetry, essay, drama, story, etc... Her translation of the first poem in this thread is presented as follows:

I simply want to be dead
Weeping she left me

with many tears and said this:
Oh how badly things have turned out for us.
Sappho, I swear, against my will I will leave you.

And I answered her:
Rejoice, go and
remember me, for we know how we cherished you.

But if not, I want
to remind you
] and beautiful times we had.

For many crowns of violets
and roses
] at my side you put on

And many woven garlands
made of flowers
around your soft throat.

And with sweet oil
costly
you annointed yourself

and on a soft bed
delicate
you would let loose your longing

and niether any [ ] nor any
holy place nor
was there from which we were absent

no grove [ ] no dance
[ ] no sound

[

[bluevictim]

There is a story that when Solon heard someone perform one of Sappho's songs, he was so enamored by the song that he asked the performer to teach it to him. When asked why he so eagerly made this request, Solon replied, "so that I can learn it and die".

Sappho's poetry is one of the most heartbreaking losses of antiquity. I think Tzetzes of the 12th century captured it well when he poignantly wrote the following as an introduction to Pindar's poetry (the 'other lines'):

"Since Sappho has become lost to time, together with her things, the lyre and the songs, come, I will put before you, as models, some other lines."