Sappho

Ancient Greek bust of Sappho the Eresian.

Sappho (Attic Greek Σαπφώ Sapphô, Aeolic Greek Ψάπφα Psappha) was an Ancient Greek lyric poet said by some to have been born in Eressos on the island of Lesbos. In history and poetry texts, she is most often associated with Mytilene (now the capital city of Lesbos), which was a major city even in the 7th century B.C.E., when the island was a significant cultural centre. She was born sometime between 630 B.C.E. and 612 B.C.E., and it is said that she died around 570 B.C.E. The bulk of her poetry has been lost, but her reputation is immense.

Life

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Sappho by Gustav Klimt

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 B.C.E., 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.

Contributions to the lyric tradition

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Sappho reading

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.

Transmission and loss of Sappho's works

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Sappho, an artistic notion of the Greek poetess by Charles-August Mengin (1877).

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.

During the Renaissance, historians began to suspect that Sappho's work had been deliberately censored and destroyed by leaders of the early Roman Catholic and Byzantine churches. The near obliteration of her writing has been explained as an attempt by the Church and ancient Christian politicians to destroy her messages of erotic love and worship of pagan gods, especially Aphrodite. It has not been determined to what extent, if any, this is true.

Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus (329-374) is alleged to have incited the burning of many texts by pagan writers, either on his own instance or at the urging of his son, who is known as St. Gregory of Nazianzus. Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085) has also been accused of having Sappho's texts burned, again, along with the writings of many other non-Christians. Given the long standing hostility of many Christian authorities to works that depict pagan or sexual matters in a positive light, the belief that the churches were responsible for the loss of Sappho's work is understandable even if not provable.

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. 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.

Works

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.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Greek Lyric 1: Sappho and Alcaeus, D. A. Campbell (ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., (1982) ISBN 0-674-99157-5 (Contains complete Greek text and English translation, including references to Sappho by ancient authors. A good starting-point for serious students who are new to this poetry.)
• If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson (Translator) Knopf (2002) ISBN 0375410678; also Virago Press Ltd, UK, ISBN 1844080811 (A modern bi-lingual edition for general readers as well as students of ancient Greek languages)
• Poetarum Lesbiorum fragmenta, E. Lobel, D. L. Page (eds.), Oxford, Clarendon Press, (1955).
• Sappho: 100 Lyrics by Carman Bliss (1907) Public domain text available from Project Gutenberg [1]
• Sappho: A New Translation by Mary Barnard, University of California Press; Reissue edition (June 1986) ISBN 0520223128
• Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets translated by Willis Barnstone, Schoken Books Inc., New York (paperback 1988) ISBN 0-8052-0831-3 (A collection of modern English translations suitable for a general audience, includes complete poems and fragments along with a brief history of each of the featured poets.)
• Sappho Is Burning by Page DuBois, University of Chicago Press (1995) ISBN 0-226-16755-0
• Sappho's Immortal Daughters by Margaret Williamson, Harvard University Press (1995) ISBN 0-674-78912-1
• Sappho's Lyre Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece Translated by Diane Rayor, University of California Press (1991) ISBN 0-520-07336-3 (cloth); ISBN 0-520-07336-3 (paper)

External links

• "Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics by Bliss Carman"
• Oxford University jpeg collection of Sappho lyrics in original Greek from the Oxyrynchus Papyrus project
• "The Poems of Sappho"
• "The Divine Sappho"
• Wiki Classical Dictionary
• The sound of Sappho?
• SAPPHO: The World of Lesbian Poetry
• Sappho from Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1867)
• John Ezard, The Guardian, June 24, 2005, "After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho"
• Dinitia Smith, The New York Times (August 26, 2002) Books Of The Times; The Mystery of Sappho and Her Erotic Legacy (A review of Anne Carson's work, If Not, Winter.) [2]

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