Musing on Sappho

[Ecurb]

The latest issue of "The New Yorker" includes an article on Sappho. Here's a link:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted

Among the interesting tidbits in the article:

1) Many scholars think that Sappho's poems were performed by a chorus. In addition, many of them use the plural Greek form. So the famous line, "You scorch me" might be more accurately translated as "you scorch us". Daniel Mendelsohn (the author of the piece) speculates that this might represent a very different view of individuality and love than that of us moderns.

2) Mendelsohn discusses problems in translation. In a newly discovered poem one translation reads:

"beautiful and young, but in time gray old age seized even him with an immortal wife..." - Diane Raynor

"But me -- my skin which once was soft is withered now
by age,my hair has turned white which once was black..." - M.L. West

According to Mendelsohn, Raynor's translation captures the simplicity and directness of Sappho's Greek, while West's captures the rhythm and meter.

3) The article gives a good recap of what we actually know about Sappho (very little) and her poetry (a few fragments). This may be old hat to those who know more about Sappho than I do, but I enjoyed it.

By the way, the same New Yorker issue contains an interesting article about the Warburg Library in London. Here's a link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/in-the-memory-ward
This also might interest some of the bibliophiles on this board.

[Lykren]

According to another article in the New Yorker about Sappho:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hearing-sappho

Aeolic Greek had three tones, in the same sense that we say Mandarin has four and Vietnamese has six. Am I understanding correctly? Pompey Bum, can you help me out here?

[Pompey Bum]

Thanks, Ecurb and Lykren, for posting these articles. I'm a big fan of Catullus, a first BC century Latin poet and general weirdo who was greatly influenced by Sappho. Sappho herself remains a ghostly figure, of course, but perhaps we'll dig up more of her body parts at Oxyrhinchus. Personally I wouldn't read too much into the "communal Sappho," though. Hellene intellectuals thought and expressed themselves in terms of the universal, especially in Sappho's day, and it's really no great insight that ancients conceived of individuality and community differently than we do. The fact remains that Sappho emerged at a time when poetry meant massive recitations in heroic hexameter, about war and myth, which took weeks to even hear; and she brought to it--quite radically--a potential for short, lyrical, intensely personal, playful, and even randy love poetry. I like the comparison to Joni Mitchell in one of the articles. Sappho was a beatnik. So was Catullus. Modern fantasies about Sappho as "leader of a female collective" are, in my opinion, just as much of a projection as the 19th century view of the lonely poetess pouring her heart out in her rich husband's estate. But of course people need to make their own way in the garden of the past.


According to another article in the New Yorker about Sappho:

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/hearing-sappho

Aeolic Greek had three tones, in the same sense that we say Mandarin has four and Vietnamese has six. Am I understanding correctly? Pompey Bum, can you help me out here?

Well sort of. I don't read (much less sing) Aeolic Greek, but I don't think the tone rules are different than in Attic. In Chinese, each syllable has a tone or is neutral, the tones usually (though not always) stay the same regardless of syntax, and the meaning of each syllable/word is profoundly affected by it's tone. (My wife refuses to let Westerners pronounce her Chinese name because it always comes out meaning "duck sh*t"). But in Greek, tone marks can appear on any of the final three syllables of a word, the tone required depends on the length of vowel sounds, but it is effected by the word's position in the sentence, and there is less potential for change in meaning of a word than in Chinese. So yes, both languages use tones, but not exactly in the same ways.

As one of the article's points out one of the things that makes Greek poetry a little counter-intuitive for English speakers is that meter and tone are not the same thing. It's like a jazz number in which the rhythm section (the meter) is doing one thing and a clarinet (the pitch) is doing something else. When I was a pup, we worried about meter (which is easy) in reading, followed a formula for placing tone marks in composition, and seldom messed with formal recitation and correct pitch (which is somewhat speculative in any case). Current scholarship likes to fuss with pitch (the poor students!) because it was neglected in the past and consequently lends itself good new dissertation topics. And hey, what if an ancient Lesbian invites you to recital? I mean, what else would you have to talk about?

[Lykren]

Very interesting! Thank you Pompey Bum. So in Attic Greek, 1) not every syllable had a tone, and 2) which tone was used in a syllable depended on what part of speech the word was being used as.

I'm learning Japanese, in which the temporal length the vowel sounds of a word occupy are part of a word's essential phonology. So for instance obāsan (long 'a') and obasan (short 'a') mean different things (grandmother and aunt, respectively). If I understand both the article and you, there is a similar phenomenon in ancient Greek dialects?

Sorry to pester you!

[Pompey Bum]

Very interesting! Thank you Pompey Bum. So in Attic Greek, 1) not every syllable had a tone

Correct. The only syllables which may potentially take tone marks are the last three.


and 2) which tone was used in a syllable depended on what part of speech the word was being used as.

No. But the tone can change depending on where the word appears in the sentence (whether it is the last word, for example, or followed by other words). The part of speech doesn't matter.


I'm learning Japanese, in which the temporal length the vowel sounds of a word occupy are part of a word's essential phonology. So for instance obāsan (long 'a') and obasan (short 'a') mean different things (grandmother and aunt, respectively). If I understand both the article and you, there is a similar phenomenon in ancient Greek dialects?

Well, there is in Chinese, a language in which it is all too easy to call your mother a horse, but the article greatly exaggerated Greek's potential to do that. Usually screwing up your tone marks doesn't change a word's meaning--it's just a mistake and you get a little red ink on your composition (but typically you're reading rather than writing anyway). The story about the weasel was cute, though.


Sorry to pester you!

Not at all. Thanks for the article and good luck on learning Japanese.

EDIT: Here are the rules. Compare them to the fact that you really don't need tone marks to read Greek (just to pronounce it right) and you get an idea of how worthwhile they are! :)

http://www.chioulaoshi.org/BG/Paradigms/accents.html

[Lykren]

Ah! Very helpful, thank you!

[Ecurb]

Well, there is in Chinese, a language in which it is all too easy to call your mother a horse...



If only Areion had been born in China! Problem solved! (Areion was Demeter's son, who happened to be a horse because mom had unsuccessfully attempted to flee the sexual overtures of Poseidon by shape shifting into a horse and hiding in Onkios' stables.)

[Melanie]

Thank you, Ecurb, for posting this thread.

Sappho, one of the Greatest Women in History
who many, as does this New Yorker article posted in the OP,
link her to Homer as having started Western Literature
But Homer never wrote like this:

By the cool water the breeze murmurs, rustling
Through apple branches, while from quivering leaves
Streams down deep slumber. ~Sappho