Stung With Love
STUNG WITH LOVE
SAPPHO was born after 630 BCE and died around 570. A native of the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. Though a poet of considerable range, she is best known for amatory poems focusing on adolescent females. After her death she became a figure of legend and, in the Hellenistic period (323–146 BCE), was canonized as one of the nine lyric poets worthy of study. Though little of her poetry survived the Middle Ages, archaeological excavation has recovered numerous fragments. She is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history.
AARON POOCHIGIAN attended Moorhead State University in Moorhead, Minnesota, 1991–6, where he studied under the poets Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. After travelling and doing research in Greece on fellowship, 2003–4, he earned his PhD in 2006. His original poems have appeared in such journals as Arion, Dark Horse and Poetry Magazine.
CAROL ANN DUFFY is a British poet, playwright and freelance writer. Her poetry has received every major award in Britain, including the Whitbread and Forward Prizes for Mean Time and the T. S. Eliot Award for Rapture. In the USA she has received the E. M. Forster and Lannan Awards. Carol Ann has also written extensively for children and has edited many anthologies. She is the Poet Laureate.
SAPPHO
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
AARON POOCHIGIAN
and with a Preface by CAROL ANN DUFFY
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This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009
1
Selection, translation and editorial material copyright © Aaron Poochigian, 2009
Preface copyright © Carol Ann Duffy, 2009
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator and editor has been asserted
An extract from ‘The Language of Women’ by Rachel Hadas is reproduced on page xxxii by kind permission of the author and of The Hudson Review, where it first appeared in issue 60:4 (Winter 2008)
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 9781101489895
Contents
Preface
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text and Translation
Poems and Fragments
GODDESSES
DESIRE AND DEATH-LONGING
HER GIRLS AND FAMILY
TROY
MAIDENS AND MARRIAGES
THE WISDOM OF SAPPHO
Index of First Lines
General Index
Preface
She was born after 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Plato honoured her as the Tenth Muse, and she was to inspire the naming of both a sexuality and a poetics. The Ancient Greeks celebrated her as their finest poet and reproduced her image on their coins and vases, and poets from antiquity to the present day have recognized her supreme lyric gift. The Roman poets Catullus and Horace, who probably read her work in its entirety, emulated and were influenced by her. Horace declared in his Odes that her poems merited sacred admiration. The list of poets who have translated her, written versions of her poems or written poems about her, is endless, but includes Ovid, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Alexander Pope, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and many poets writing in our own twenty-first century, notably the distinguished Canadian writer Anne Carson. Sappho’s poems survive in fragments, some found as scrunched ingredients in papier mâché coffins, and in a handful of more complete lyrics; but ninety per cent of what she wrote is lost to us now. She would have sung her poems, accompanying herself on the lyre, and she may well have invented the pēctis, a variation of the instrument. It is from this ancient verse, sung to the lyre, that lyric poetry evolved. As one of a ‘new wave’ of Greek poets, she was one of the first poets to write out of the personal, moving away from the narrative of the gods to the direct and human story of the individual and in doing so she transformed the lyric line. In these wonderful new translations by Aaron Poochigian we hear the voice of a great and enduring poet in our ear again. Sappho.
Because once on a time you were
Young, sing of what is taking place,
Talk to us for a spell, confer
Your special grace.
Sappho’s style was melodic, intimate, sensual, and she wrote lyrics of love and desire, of loss and longing. As Poochigian notes in his superb and meticulous introduction, there is always something truly youthful about Sappho’s spirit. She was a great celebrator, had a poet’s and a woman’s eye for the ‘gorgeous’; for flowers – chervil, rose, marigold and sweet clover; for smells – frankincense, aniseed, myrrh and honey; she loved the moon and ‘The glitter and glamour of the sun’; she loved, as her epithalamia, or marriage songs and other poems, show us, a good party, a ‘gleaming feast’. What is extraordinary, in reading these startlingly fresh, new versions, is how much life is conveyed by so little. Presented with only a tenth of what she wrote, we are vividly and deeply immersed in Sappho’s world – we walk with her on her island where ‘the breeze feels as gentle as honey’ or where she sees an apple tree or hears a nightingale singing the note of desire. And this is achieved through a confident and shining poetic simplicity which has endured for over two thousand years.
The greatest poets are able, long after their deaths, to speak to our humanity and it is in her love poems that Sappho does this most clearly. These poems are earned out of her openness to desire, her willingness to love, her acceptance of a lover’s suffering. In this, too, her spirit is forever young. Her love poems are why she endures and where we recognize ourselves: infatuated and jealous; smitten and fulfilled; brain and tongue shattered by love; wanting to die; remembering past encounters, ‘all beautiful’. Aaron Poochigian’s translations retain Sappho’s intense sense of being singingly alive and of being on the side of youth, and loveliness, and love. They will find many new readers for the major woman writer of antiquity.
Carol Ann Duffy
Chronology
Dates are birth–death for people.
after 630–c. 570 BCE Sappho.
c. 620–early to mid 500s BCE Alcaeus, a poet from Lesbos contemporary with Sappho, who may have composed the opening lines of ‘I want to tell you
something but good taste’.
384–322 BCE Aristotle, student of Plato and philosopher, whose Rhetoric preserves ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’.
342–291 BCE Menander, writer of New Comedy, whose Leucadia recounts Sappho’s legendary leap from the ‘Shining Rock’ (Leucas Petra).
c. 257–180 BCE Aristophanes of Byzantium, head librarian at the great library in Alexandria, who co-edits the nine-book collection of Sappho’s poems with Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 220-c. 143 BCE).
84–54 BCE Catullus, Roman poet, who adapts several of Sappho’s poems, including ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.
65–27 BCE Horace, Roman poet, who composes many of his Odes in the Sapphic stanza and describes Sappho’s utterances as ‘worthy of sacred awe’ (Ode 2.13).
60–after 7 BCE Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Greek historian and rhetorician, whose On Literary Composition preserves Sappho’s ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’.
43 BCE–17 CE Ovid, Roman poet, who popularizes the legend of Sappho’s suicide in a literary epistle written in her voice (Heroides 15).
first century CE Longinus, Greek rhetorician and critic, whose On the Sublime preserves ‘That fellow strikes me as god’s double’.
125–185 CE Maximus of Tyre, Greek rhetorician and philosopher, whose Orations preserve, among other fragments, ‘Here is the reason: it is wrong’ and ‘Like a gale smiting an oak’.
130–169 CE Hephaestion of Alexandria, Greek metrist, whose Handbook on Metre (an epitome of a longer work in 48 books) preserves numerous fragments of Sappho’s poems, including ‘A full moon shone’ and ‘Kytherea, precious’.
end of second–beginning of third century CE Athenaeus, Greek rhetorician and grammarian, whose lengthy Scholars at Dinner preserves numerous fragments, including ‘The ambrosial mixture’ and ‘Once as a too, too lissome’.
331–363 CE Julian the Apostate, last polytheistic emperor of Rome, who cites Sappho’s ‘You were at hand’ in a literary epistle addressed to the deceased Iamblicus (245–325 CE), a Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher.
end of tenth century CE The compilation of the Suda, a massive Byzantine encyclopedia containing a biographical entry on Sappho.
1110–80 CE John Tzetzes of Constantinople, Byzantine poet and grammarian, who laments that ‘time has frittered away Sappho and her works, her lyre and songs’ (On the Metres of Pindar 20–22).
Introduction
After his nephew had sung one of Sappho’s songs over wine, Solon of Athens, the son of Execestides, told the boy to teach it to him at once. When someone asked Solon why he was so eager, he answered, ‘So that I may learn it and die.’
Aelian in Stobaeus 3.29.58
Born after 630 BCE, Sappho died around 570. She lived on Lesbos, a large island in the Aegean near the coast of modern Turkey. Lesbos was famous for the purity of its olive oil, as it still is today, and for its wine, which Sappho’s brother Charaxus exported to Egypt. Though she may have been born in the small town of Eresos, she spent most of her life in the largest city on the island, Mytilene, an international emporium at the crossroads between the Greek West and the Lydian East. Less than a day’s travel from the wealthy capital of the Lydian Empire, Mytilene was renowned for luxury. According to ancient report, the Lesbians themselves were luxury-loving, and Sappho’s poems present a mixture of Greek customs and exotic Eastern commodities: she sings of ornate headbands and frankincense, and ‘Lydian war cars at the ready’ come to her mind when she imagines a battle array.
We are given six different names for Sappho’s father – the one most often attested is Skamandrios, which at least has the advantage of being derived from the Skamander River in the Troad (north-western Turkey) near Lesbos. We hear of three brothers: Eriguios, Larichos and Charaxus, the eldest. The last, we assume, is the one mentioned in this fragment:
Nereids, Kypris, please restore
My brother to this port, unkilled.
During his voyages as a wine merchant to Naucratis (now Kom Ge’if in Egypt), Charaxus became involved with a courtesan named Doricha. Sappho is said to have reviled him for the entanglement but none of this invective has come down to us. Through we hear nothing of Eriguios, she did praise Larichos for obtaining the aristocratic office of cup-bearer at the town hall in Mytilene (this poem also has not survived).
Ancient and medieval biogaphies attest that Sappho had a daughter, Kleïs (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1800, fr. 1 and the Suda Σ 107). The conclusion was most likely drawn from this fragment:
I have a daughter who reminds me of
A marigold in bloom.
Kleïs is her name,
And I adore her.
The word pais which I have translated as ‘daughter’ can mean ‘slave’ as well as ‘child’ – thus we cannot determine whether Kleïs is the speaker’s child or slave. Furthermore, we cannot be certain that the ‘I’ in this poem was expressing biographical details about the historical Sappho or even that the speaker was not some other character entirely. Some scholars, in fact, deny that Sappho had a daughter. In the tenth-century-CE Byzantine encyclopedia known as the Suda (or ‘Stronghold’), the unidentified author of the entry on Sappho attests that her mother was also named Kleïs. Though he may simply have been operating under the assumption that grandmothers and granddaughters should have the same name, it is possible that he had access to more complete versions of the relevant fragments.
The Suda entry also claims that Sappho married ‘a very rich man’ but goes on to preserve, without a wink, a bawdy joke as the name of her husband: Kerikles (Prick) from the island of Andros (Man). It seems the claim that she had a husband is not to be taken seriously. It is attested that the poet Alcaeus (c. 620 – early to mid 500s BCE) was her lover but this inference probably resulted merely from the fact that they were contemporaries living on Lesbos. It is likely that they at least interacted, however, if Sappho did, in fact, compose the second part of ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’ as a response to one of Alcaeus’ poems. Comic poets in the third century BCE name the poets Archilochus, Anacreon and Hipponax as her lovers, though the former lived a generation too early and the latter two a generation too late!
Other poets and playwrights include the Adonis-figure Phaon among Sappho’s lovers. According to tradition, an old ferryman named Phaon once conveyed the goddess Aphrodite, disguised as an old woman, in his boat for free, and she repaid him by either transforming him into a beautiful youth or giving him ‘an alabaster jar full of a lotion which he applied daily to make women fall in love with him’ (Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid 3.279). Sappho does show interest in the mythic affairs of goddesses with mortals – e.g. Aphrodite’s affair with Adonis and Dawn’s with Tithonous, and her allusions to these myths may explain how later readers came to assume that she herself had an affair with Phaon. The story that Sappho, in despair over her love for this irresistible youth, died by jumping from Leucas Petra (or the ‘Shining Rock’) into the Aegean probably derives from the fact that she mentions the rock in a poem. In a play by Menander (342–291 BCE) we find:
They say that Sappho, while she was chasing haughty Phaon,
Was the first to throw herself, in her goading desire,
From the rock that shines afar.
(Leucadia fr. 258)
This same ‘Shining Rock’ appears in Homer’s Odyssey when the god Hermes escorts the souls of the suitors slain by Odysseus to the Underworld: ‘and they passed by the streams of Okeanos and the Shining Rock and passed the Gates of the Sun and the District of Dreams’ (24.11–12).1 The rock came to be regarded as a kind of lover’s leap that would cure the jumper of love one way or another, as death occasionally resulted. Though fitting for a poet of intense passions, both Sappho’s love for a mythological character and her subsequent leap are, of course, unlikely to have been historical but are important for understanding the reception of Sappho in antiquity and modernity. The fatal leap provides a moral – the poet of love dies through an excess
of passion, and her death serves to refute what she professed in her poetry. Furthermore, this uncontrollable heterosexual passion goes some way towards compensating for the homosexuality which made so many of Sappho’s readers uncomfortable. Thus Ovid’s Heroides 15 (written c. 15 BCE) presents Sappho as a reborn heterosexual who self-consciously states that her previous affections for various females do not compare with her love for Phaon.
In a philosophical dialogue by Plato (428/7–348/7 BCE) Socrates, a character in it, calls Sappho ‘beautiful’ (Phaedrus 235b). Writing five hundred years later, Maximus of Tyre (125–185 CE) explains that this adjective must have been intended to refer to her poetry because Sappho ‘was repugnant and exceedingly ugly, being dark in complexion and rather short’ (Orations 18.7). This description may result simply from a biographer’s assumptions concerning her interest in women. We have no contemporary accounts of her appearance, and no coins or statues bearing her image appear until centuries after her death. It is safer to leave Sappho’s physical appearance a mystery.
We receive no specific information about the daily operation of the group of females associated with Sappho, only assertions that she kept a ‘school’. Evidence from the songs and later testimony confirms that this group consisted primarily of girls between the ages of puberty and marriage. The Suda biography lists her female love-interests as ‘companions and friends’ with whom ‘she had a disgraceful friendship’: Atthis, Telesippa and Megara. The same source also assigns her the ‘disciples’ Anagora, Gongyla and Eunica. All these names seem simply to have been gleaned from the poems, and their relationships to Sappho determined partly by the context in which they appeared and partly by the biographer’s imagination. We are told that she had ‘rivals’ as well, Andromeda and Gorgo, and subsequent tradition has made these women into headmistresses for competing schools. Modern scholarship has widely disagreed over the nature of Sappho’s group: some scholars accept the traditional ‘school’ interpretation; others regard the group as a religious organization or a club analogous to contemporary male hetaireiai (or political clubs) on Lesbos. In order to determine, as best as we can, the nature of her group, it will be useful to take a look at society on Lesbos during her lifetime.