You’re still at work? What do you think you’re getting done between now and quitting time? Cut out and stop pretending. Make it POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
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I read that 5th century BC Athenian book sellers probably sold supplementary Sappho material. My first thought was that they weren’t book sellers yet. Then I mentally shuffled through alternate phrasing like scroll sellers, literary merchants, and pre-codex barkers, sympathized with the source, and decided there was no harm in book sellers. I had just been complaining that streaming services are killing album liner notes.
If you’ve ever read the liner notes accompanying the Steely Dan album The Royal Scam, you’ve missed a gem. There’s no greater rendering of coked up Los Angeles Me Gen slimeballs to be had. Read that and realize, of course they later wrote “Hey Nineteen.” That doesn’t make “Hey Nineteen” a bad song or The Royal Scam a bad album, it just gives insight into the minds behind the music, fuels personal distaste, and serves as another go-to in the the argument about judging the art separately from the coked up artist. Album art is still a going concern, relegated to iTunes or Amazon Music thumbnail icon art, but still. Liner notes are gone. I figured I sensed an million-dollar idea opening, but found a site already dedicated to collecting and archiving record art, scribblings, and really deep thoughts from Justin and Lance. And another. Neither seems to be raking in dough.
Sappho wrote lyrics meant to be sung to accompanying music. In her work she mentions specific types of harps, lyres, and flutes and then in art—she tops whatever they call the archaeological Billboards List for most appearances on recovered vases, potsherds and whole, for a female poet, Mediterranean category—with a variety of instruments. The ancients didn’t have sheet music, or if they did, we don’t have any. We have flecks of her metered verse. That combined with knowledge of what instruments were around probably results in more arguments than certainty of what a Sappho concert would have sounded like, but it’s fun for those drawn to figure out such things. Now, the source that mentioned supplemental material said the booksellers probably sold such things. “Probably” means some contemporary or classical source threw out a reference telling us such things existed, but we don’t have one to look at. That must be tantalizing to scholars.
Even if we decide some enterprising Sappho scroll seller invented the accompanying material in the 400s BC and revolutionized music publishing, that’s twenty-four hundred years of musicians and orbiting talent commentary sold with enlightening sleeve script. Surely he wasn’t the first. They’re older than that. In any case, pace hipster vinyl shops in Brooklyn and near microbreweries in other places, twenty-four hundred plus years of tradition got blown out of the water by Jobs and Bezos in twenty-five regular old not-hundred years; a kind of musing lost in time, like a perm in the rain.
I was reading about Sappho because of Anne Carson’s Nobel Prize for Poetry win. I don’t keep up with contemporary awards, but after her laurels were announced my Twitter timeline erupted in gleefully meanspirited astonishment with accompanying pics from The New Yorker pages of her less-than-spectacular original poetry. I’m open to the possibility that those were poor examples of her work, that for reasons beyond me The New Yorker passed on the good and cogent in favor of the discombobulated. The commentary consisted of “You don’t understand art,” volleyed back and forth with “Have enough backbone to call an naked Emperor naked.” Respected poets I follow didn’t make excuses for what was passed around. A few said uncongenial things about her poetry and listed luminaries more deserving, but almost all suggested that no matter how bad her originals were, her essays were superb. What caught me was how effusive most were about her Sappho translations.
When looking into a classical poet, I’m generally most interested in what translation would have inspired the poets I love whose praise brought the classical poet from the background to the forefront of my interest. A poet mentions the way Horace juxtaposes familiar words. I want to know what translation the poet favored, assuming the poet required a translation, because I want to know what he means, experience what he did, and avoid a translator who isn’t as observant of juxtaposition or whatever the praised quality is.
Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation was a great influence on the Imagistes, for whom I’ve made no secret of my admiration. Ezra Pound recommends the book to the poet Iris Barry in a 1916 letter: “Wharton’s “Sappho” is the classic achievement. That you should find in any decent library.”
I only have the Pound side of the Barry/Pound correspondence, but I get the sense Barry was not so impressed as Pound. I can see her point. Wharton’s translations are in prose with each followed by several extant verse translations, some good, some meh, but none unavailable anywhere else. I assume that was Barry’s complaint, but whatever it was, she elicited an apology from Pound: “I’m sorry about the Wharton, only, as I remember it, he does give a decent and lucid prose translation, wherewith one can follow the Greek.” In the same letter to Barry, Pound writes, “Your poems are on the other side of a floor I have just stained and it is too wet and sticky to cross. You shall have them in a few days.” That has to be the lamest excuse one poet has given to another for not having read her stuff.
Barry’s opinion aside, Pound loved the Wharton text. Aldington loved the Barry text. Most tellingly, Hilda Doolittle, publicly known as HD, the Imagist most influenced by Sappho in all her purported ways, considered Wharton’s Sappho “a close companion throughout H.D.’s poetic apprenticeship,” according to Diana Collecott in “H.D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910-1950.”
The bulk of the surviving six hundred and fifty or so surviving lines of what’s believed to be the ten thousand she wrote, are range from romantic to racy, though not all. Secondary sources say she wrote mostly about family, occasion songs for wedding and the like, and hymns. Wikipedia drops the intriguing claim that she also wrote about “invective.”
This cleaves closest to invective I could find. It’s fantastically cruel.
Fragment 68
Sappho (c. 630-c. 570BC)
Translation by Henry T Wharton (1846–1895)But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.
Below his prose translation, Wharton features numerous verse translations by others. This is credited to “? Felton.” It seems Wharton was unsure. Cornelius Conway Felton (1807–1862), was an American professor of classics at, and later president of, Harvard. I lay no special claim to him being Felton referred to, but a quick search and Grok session suggests him as probable. Whoever the translator is, he or she writes starkly, as seems proper.
Fragment 68
Translation by “? Felton”In the cold grave where thou shalt lie
All memory too of thee shall die,
Who in this life’s auspicious hours
Disdained Pieria’s genial flowers;
And in the mansions of the dead,
With the vile crowd of ghosts, thy shade,
While nobler spirits point with scorn,
Shall flit neglected and forlorn.
? Fulton provides a terrible example of what are known as “Sapphics” in that he neither attempts nor succeeds in trying to give a sense of a Sapphic stanza. There are few definitions of what a Sapphic stanza is as it’s an attempt to adapt Ancient qualitative verse, or verses that are punctuated with long and short syllables, to our stressed language. Wikipedia will tell you all about hendecasyllables and such, but The Poetic Dictionary by John Drury is more reasonable, matter of fact, and decisive:
“Quatrain in which the first three lines contain eleven syllables and the fourth line contains five syllables.”
Few practitioners follow the definition slavishly, but then neither do they any of the other definitions, so it’s as good a description as any. In English, expect stresses on syllables 1,3,5,8, and 10 in the first three lines and then at 1 and 4 in in the fourth line. On that last line, Drury invokes the Beatles:
“It is also a natural phrase rhythm in English, appearing frequently in expressions (‘Put up or shut up!’) and names (Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Rigby, Theodore Roethke.)”
I’ve spent a couple of days with various translations and putting aside the Anne Carson poetry debate online, her If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho stands out as exceptional. It seems to be an expression of the poet’s love for a young woman, though it’s argued that this is a wedding song and is congratulatory from a friend or relative’s point of view. The fragment is of an incomplete work.
Fragment 31
Translation by Anne Carson (1950- )He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speakingand lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in meno: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills earsand cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
It’s common knowledge that Sappho was gay, that because of her fame as such, her native island, Lesbos, gives us the word lesbian. It’s not that cut and dry. Common knowledge may be off. In Classical Greek comedies she was frequently portrayed as a lusty and promiscuous heterosexual. Wharton didn’t think much of claims that she was homosexual, but can we chalk that up to Victorian prudery? Her work disappeared for hundreds of years. It surprised me, but from the 10th or 11th century until the 19th, Sappho was known of but not known. Renaissance scholars blamed Gregory VII. The Pope had her salacious works destroyed, or some such. Per Wikipedia, sources say it’s more likely that she vanished because Attic Greek was the Ancient Greek that pervaded scholarship and she wrote in Aeolic dialect. Not many read her language so no one invested in laborious scribes to keep her front and center. Her homosexuality as reason for her low profile seems like projection from a modern view that accepts, rather than doubts her nature.
Little is known and lots is speculated about her life. She was high born. That seems to be consensus. Was she a music teacher, a priestess, an organizer of public events requiring songs, a quiet family woman? There’s someone who will say yes to all of those. There is evidence that she fell out of favor and was exiled to Sicily at a time involving political conflict. That would indicate that she was not just wealthy or prominent, but she or her family were involved in politics enough to be considered trouble. Maybe she jumped off a cliff for love. Maybe she didn’t. Not much is certain but the texts.
No matter what Sappho scholars debate, decide, and declare, Sappho is a lesbian icon to the modern world. As such she’s ingrained in the language. She was revered enough by the ancient world to be called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.” That’s rarefied air.
Of all the fragments collected, there is only one whole poem, known start to finish. We have it complete from Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c.60 – c.7 BC), who included the work in his On Composition in corroborating scraps found on the grandly titled 2nd century AD scrap Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2288, found at Oxyrhnchus, Egypt.
Below is the Wharton prose translation followed by one in verse by John Myers O’Hara who I gather was the reigning King of English Sappho translation after Wharton until Carson knocked the crown off his head. It is worth reading Carson’s version as well. Better still to buy her Sappho book and read the whole. Just keep away from the New Yorker stuff.
Ode to Aphrodite
Translation by Henry T Wharton (1846–1895)Immortal Aphrodite of the broidered throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee break not my spirit with anguish and distress, O Queen. But come hither, if ever before thou didst hear my voice afar, and listen, and leaving thy father’s golden house camest with chariot yoked, and fair fleet sparrows drew thee, flapping fast their wings around the dark earth, from heaven through mid sky. Quickly arrived they; and thou, blessed one, smiling with immortal countenance, didst ask What now is befallen me, and Why now I call, and What I in my mad heart most desire to see. ‘What Beauty now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee, Sappho? For even if she flies she shall soon follow, and if she rejects gifts shall yet give, and if she loves not shall soon love, however loth.’ Come, I pray thee, now too, and release me from cruel cares; and all that my heart desires to accomplish, accomplish thou, and be thyself my ally.
Ode to Aphrodite
Translation by John Myers O’Hara (1870-1944)Aphrodite, subtle of soul and deathless,
Daughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee
Neither with care, dread Mistress, nor with anguish,
Slay thou my spirit!But in pity hasten, come now if ever
From afar of old when my voice implored thee,
Thou hast deigned to listen, leaving the golden
House of thy fatherWith thy chariot yoked; and with doves that drew thee,
Fair and fleet around the dark earth from heaven,
Dipping vibrant wings down the azure distance,
Through the mid-ether;Very swift they came; and thou, gracious Vision,
Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,
Leaned to me and asked, “What misfortune threatened?
Why I had called thee?”“What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,
Whom its wild desire would persuade to passion?
What disdainful charms, madly worshipped, slight thee?
Who wrongs thee, Sappho?”“She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow,
She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,
She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,
Love thee, the loth one!”Come to me now thus, Goddess, and release me
From distress and pain; and all my distracted
Heart would seek, do thou, once again fulfilling,
Still be my ally!
[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]