Someone, I tell you, in another time,
will remember us.
Sappho is remembered despite the multiple violations of time. The fragments of her poems contain the first Western examples of ecstasy, including the sublime, which the first-century Longinos recognized and preserved for us. They also include varieties of ekstasis briefly alluded to in these pages: the bliss of Edenic companionship, dancing under the moon, breakfasts in the grass; the whirlwind blast of love; the desolation and rage of betrayal; the seizure and paralysis before impossible love; and as all her ordinary senses fail, the movement near death—the ultimate negative ecstasy. Yet even when she has lost herself, her senses, her impossible love, Sappho is remembered. The diversity and clarity of her voice, the absolute candor, the amazing fresh authority of the poetry, whether in addressing a goddess, a Homeric marriage couple, the moon and stars, a sweet apple or mountain hyacinth, a lamb or cricket, a lover or companion, those qualities compelled in antiquity as they do today.
Ordering of the Texts with Respect to Chronology and Other Editions
The order of Sappho’s poems in standard editions does not reflect chronology of composition or the author’s age. It may, as in the work by Edgar Lobel and Denys Page, attempt to reflect Sappho’s nine “books” or, given the losses, the remnants of her collections. Lobel and Page fragments 1 to 117 are presented as clearly by Sappho, and fragments 118 to 213 (none of the longer poems) follow under the title Incerti libri, meaning that they are of uncertain ascription. The actual order or grouping within the books is mostly unknown, since Sappho’s hand is not there. They were accomplished in hellenistic times. This traditional presentation is thought to have been determined three centuries after Sappho by the Alexandrian scholars Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchos of Samathrace, when her work was alive and well received.
In this edition the fragments have been ordered independently of their traditional numbering, under a logic that is a mixture of theme and implied chronology and event. Here, the poem number generally follows the number established in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, edited by Lobel and Page (abbreviated here as LP), and the Loeb Classical Library Sappho and Alcaeus, edited and translated by David A. Campbell. The latter normally has the same numbering as Lobel and Page, though the Greek texts differ. So unless otherwise noted, the numbering standing alone refers to the Lobel and Page Greek text.
My reading of letters and words tends to be closer to the more recent editions by Eva-Maria Voigt, Max Treu, and Campbell than to Lobel and Page. Where the poems do not follow the numbering of Lobel and Page, I indicate in the Sources which other text has been followed, usually Campbell. When Campbell ascribes a poem to Sappho that Lobel and Page ascribe to Alkaios, I also follow Campbell, who always notes the Lobel and Page ascription. I have also consulted the Denys Page transcriptions in Sappho and Alcaeus. When one of Sappho’s fragments is not in Lobel and Page but is found in Campbell, Ernest Diehl (Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, vol. 1), Voigt (Sappho et Alcaeus), or Treu, who adds his own material to earlier Diehl, these differences in judgment are indicated. The judgments refer to texts of uncertain ascription—whether to Sappho, Alkaios, or to a late false attribution—and are indicated by “incert.”
With respect to Campbell’s English renderings, I have found his strictly prose versions excellent and a benefit to all readers. I would use the word “interpretation” to describe them, because the Greek is so uncertain. He has also chosen, with exceptions, to reproduce those lines of Greek that lend themselves to intelligible translation and then his guesses in reading uncertain letters and words are chaste and selective. Even as a gloss and dictionary they are invaluable, and more so than the existing beautiful poetic versions.
The measure for determining which of the diverse texts I draw from for each fragment has been their intelligibility for translation purposes. At times the Greek is unintelligible, which means that in a number of poems many lines are omitted (Campbell generally follows this practice).
Sources and Titles
In the Sources, Notes, and Commentary section, I provide bibliographical source information for the poems translated in this edition as well as ancient commentary related to the poems. Sappho’s fragments survive in papyri or in ancient commentaries. For almost each fragment, if an ancient commentary exists—prosodic, grammatical, or literary—it is provided here. First given is the ancient bibliographical source; any ancient commentary appears next in quotation marks. My own commentary sometimes follows.
The source and formal commentary normally provide the material from which the poem’s title comes. Sappho did not title her poems. I have made use of the “free line,” which is a poem’s title, in order to give the reader information found in the source and commentary, or derived from a close study of a difficult or evasive fragment. A simple example: In the one-line fragment 54, the subject noun of the verb is missing in the Greek text. It reads: “. . . came out of heaven dressed in a purple cape.” However, the lexicographer Pollux, in whose Vocabulary this line is cited and thereby preserved, states that Sappho is describing Eros. Hence we know the subject of the verb and have an informative title: “Eros.” Some translators add titles, others do not. I add them because a fine title can offer an immediate smooth opening into a mutilated text. It is preferable to obtrusive footnotes and gives the reader clues before turning to the back of the book. If it illumines, good. Then the reader can choose, or not choose, to look for more end-of-book information.
In the event of translation there are many ways to reach a Sappho, and the history of ancient literatures globally, alas, abounds in literary remnants. Titles help give them sense. In what seems to be the most recent version of many of Sappho’s fragments, in striking re-creations Sherod Santos provides appropriate titles. Mary Barnard gives titles. Anne Carson’s elegant versions do not, but the poet and classical scholar more than makes up for any information gap with her abundant and fascinating endnotes and commentary on the poems.
Greek Words in English
The transliteration of proper nouns and common nouns from one language to another is universally transitional and vexing. One cannot be entirely consistent without being silly and awkward. Who is happy when the English render Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani’s birthplace, as Leghorn? However, there is radical change. In transliterating Chinese into English, in a generation we have gone from standard English Wade-Giles to standard Pinyin. At the beginning Pinyin was shocking and difficult. Now Pinyin is de rigueur for scholarship, dictionaries, and newspapers, though it remains a difficult replacement. Some frequently used words in common speech have quickly yielded to Pinyin, such as Peking, now rendered as Beijing.17 Canton (Kwangchow in Wade-Giles) is on the way to becoming Guangzhou, but that change is challenging.
Rendering the Greek alphabet in English is more challenging because there are so many interests that have imposed their spelling on Greek as it has slipped into other languages. Latin Rome conquered Greece and translated Greek gods into Roman ones. Artemis became Diana, Zeus yielded to Jupiter or Jove. Greek words were transliterated into Latin letters, not always close in sound or feeling. English and the Romance languages have followed the practice of Latinizing Greek names while Germany and Eastern Europe keep closer to the Greek.
While the ancient Alexandrian scholars preserved and fashioned Sappho, ordering and editing her poetry, since Horace and Quintilian there has been war between “grammarians” and “libertines” over the nature of translation itself, between fidus interpres, which the Latin writers mocked, and literary re-creation and imitation. In modern times the soft war goes on between translation as a literary art or a classroom language test, which is revealed in spelling. The combatants regularly have seats in the academy, and victory depends on which audience and publisher receives and acclaims them. As for the gods and their IDs, outside Romance tongues the Greek gods have regained their identity. As for the transcription of names, unlike Chinese where one power has enforced its system (notwiths
tanding holdouts in Taiwan and Singapore), there is no single rule book for regulating transliteration. This free-for-all mode reflects language flux, which is always with us, no matter who is emperor.
With no absolutes on the horizon, what is happening now? Despite the minor brawls, much happened in the twentieth century to return us to equivalents resembling the Greek scripture (though James Joyce did not get the word when he dropped the bomb of Ulysses). My own perplexities on the how (and here the quandary is not art versus gloss but simply on how to record the change of signs between tongues) at least is typical, and in my weathercock self I spin with each puff of revelation. I have been tinkering with classical Greek for many decades along with Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew. When I undertook the translation of the New Testament, a book from Asia Minor, I chose to restore, as far as one can know, the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek names so that a reader might observe that most of the figures in the scriptures, including gods and demons, are Semitic, not European. So it is Yeshua the Mashiah, not Jesus the Christ. One may recognize that Saint James is not from London or China but a Jew from Jerusalem, and that it would be best to call him Yakobos as in biblical Greek, or better, Yaakov, reflecting his name in Aramaic and Hebrew. Similar convictions about reflecting original language and place have led me to a spelling I have presented, with variations, in rendering Greek lyric poetry and the philosophers Herakleitos and Plotinos.
The main lesson from all this is that whatever one does will make a lot of people furious. One cannot be consistent, and therefore one is an incompetent and worse. Any linguistic change troubles like new currency and stamps. Even God and his envoy Adam had trouble in naming and spelling in the Garden. In these often pained choices I have been helped hugely by my former colleague at Wesleyan University, William McCulloh, with whom I collaborated for both Greek Lyric Poetry (1961) and Sappho: Lyrics in the Original Greek and Translations (1965). Now, as in the past, it is his scholarship against my amateurism. I learn from him. McCulloh is absolute in making me note all sins. So what you find here may be enervating but not slipshod. Not on McCulloh’s watch, for which I am endlessly grateful.
In general I prefer to be closer to what Italians do with Cicero and Greeks with Euripides. They pronounce all common words and ancient names as they do Italian and modern Greek and do not aspirate their ϕ. Hence, Greeks sitting in an ancient amphitheater or standing in an Orthodox church understand the old chanted Greek. Whatever script is used to record Sappho in another tongue, as she sings in Greek she must sing in English. The smallest of her surviving Greek fragments echoes with music.
If you hear some here, you may forgive the graphic signs.
W.B.
October 2005
1. Many scholars now call Longinos, the first-century author of On the Sublime, by the name Pseudo-Longinos to distinguish him from Cassius Longinos, a third-century author who through the nineteenth century was incorrectly believed to have composed this major treatise.
2. Some of those forms that she invented one could not see on papyrus as lineated verse, because the words were jammed together to save space. Those distinctions of lines and stanzas were the work of hellenistic rhetoricians in Alexandria centuries later.
3. One of these two poems, fragment 58, was first published in 1922, but this was only a partial translation, based on an incomplete Greek fragment. The complete version of the poem—so far as we can tell—was published in 2004 after the discovery of a third century B.C.E. papyrus found in the Cologne University archives. Martin. L. West first published the find in Greek alone in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 151 (2005), 1–9, and in Greek along with his English translation in the Times Literary Supplement (June 21, 2005, 1).
4. Mytilini was the major polis of ancient Lesbos. It is now the name of both the capital and the island. On modern maps, “Lesbos” often appears in parentheses and in modern Greek remains as an elegant synonym for “Mytilini” the island.
5. Just how prevalent the disguisement was, was proved to me one day in June of 1962, in Burgos, Spain. I had been working in the archives of the Spanish poet Manuel Machado, brother of Antonio Machado, to find information about don Antonio. I came on a postcard to Manuel sent to him in the early 1930s by Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno was a foremost Spanish novelist, poet, and philosopher, and also a classical scholar, maverick journalist, and then rector (president) of the University of Salamanca. In intellectual thought, Unamuno was and remains a grand world author, admired for his novelistic innovations that anticipate later postmodernism. His most famous exchange with history occurred in late August of 1936, when Francisco Franco’s army took over Salamanca and its medieval university. At a meeting with the generals in his office, Unamuno denounced them, saying, “Vencerán tal vez pero no convencerán” (You may win but not convince). The response was shouts of “¡Muera la inteligencia!” (Let the intelligentsia die!). The philosopher was placed under house arrest, where he remained till his death. Despite all of his enlightened academic, creative, and courageous baggage, Unamuno wrote in his card to Manuel Machado that he had recently been rereading his Greek Sappho, “not the one of the infamous reputation but the true Sappho in the poems.” Unamuno’s message was that whoever really knew Greek knew that Sappho was not a lesbian.
6. See David A. Campbell, ed., Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection (London: Macmillan, 1967), 5 n. 4.
7. The above description of the sapphic is crude, omitting all reference to length of syllables (short and long) and irregularities. For more see Denys Page’s “Appendix on Metres” in Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry by James W. Halporn, Martin Ostwald, and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1963); and the Metrical Guide by William E. McCulloh at the end of this book.
8. Oratio ad graecos, 53.
9. In the last few years our means of deciphering both papyri and parchment texts have dramatically increased as a result of X-rays and infrared technology. At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University, a particle accelerator is being used to read a hitherto unreadable tenth-century palimpsest containing a 174-page book of the mathematician Archimedes hidden below a Christian prayer book. The original writing was erased in order to record a Christian prayer book. By shooting X-rays at the parchment, the iron in the ink of the “erased” ancient text glows, revealing a now perfectly legible mathematic treatise under the later prayer book.
A parallel technological breakthrough is being used to decipher the literary elements of the some four hundred thousand Oxyrhynchus papyri fragments. Through multispectral imaging based on satellite imaging, the faded ink on ancient papyri comes clearly into view. English and American scientists and scholars have already deciphered lines from Sophocles’ lost play Epigonoi (The Progeny), three pages in elegiac meter by the seventh-century lyric poet Archilochos, and works by Euripides, Hesiod, and Lucian. There is realistic hope that in coming years the amount of significant ancient texts, including early Gnostic and Christian scripture, may be increased by more than twenty percent. Hopefully, this translation of Sappho’s works will soon be outdated when new strophes from the popular Lesbian poet are revealed. For extensive information, see POxy (Oxyrhynchus Online) at www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk.
10. In 1961, for the first time, a cache of eight original papyri, in poor condition, was found in continental Greece at Dervani (Lagada). See Herbert Hunger, “Papyrusfund in Griechenland,” Chronique d’Egypte (Brussels) 37, no. 74 ( July 1961).
11. Bowra modifies his defense of Sappho’s “purity” in the 1961 edition of his Greek Lyric Poetry, by which time fellow scholars took a new line, acknowledging that Sappho’s poems were indeed homoerotic.
12. William Mure of Caldwell, A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Antient Greece, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854), pp. 315–16.
13. John Addington Symmon
ds, Studies of the Greek Poets (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1873), p. 173.
14. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 80–81.
15. The translation is by Aliki Barnstone in The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy: A New Translation (New York: W. W. Norton 2006), 36.
16. For an interesting and full examination of the condition of transport, see Marghanita Laski, Ecstasy: A Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).
17. In Wade-Giles, if one knew the rules, which neither people nor dictionaries did, Peking was supposed to be pronounced Beijing because the unvoiced consonants p and k were to be voiced. Fat chance. Only when ungainly Pinyin took over did we have a clue about transcribing Mandarin (putonghua) into English. We are still stuck with Tao instead of Dao, though not for long.
AFRODITI OF THE FLOWERS AT KNOSSOS
Prayer to Afroditi
On your dappled throne eternal Afroditi,
cunning daughter of Zeus,
I beg you, do not crush my heart
with pain, O lady,
but come here if ever before
you heard my voice from far away,
and yielding left your father’s house
of gold and came,
yoking birds to your chariot. Beautiful
quick sparrows whirring on beating wings
The Complete Poems of Sappho Page 4
