Sappho Foreword

Foreword

If there were two names which everyone would immediately associate with Greek poetry, they would probably be those of Homer and Sappho. But there is a huge disparity between the four printed volumes of the Iliad and Odyssey, which come down to us in a well known and readable format from ancient times, as compared with our dozen pages of Sappho gleaned from Hellenistic literary sources and scraps of Egyptian papyrus used as wrapping paper for business accounts. The Homeric texts come in a steady flow of manuscripts confirmed by early samples in essays and many papyri, so there is little question about the authenticity of the text. Sappho on the other hand was being read in 7th century Byzantium in a collection of some half dozen volumes, but thereafter these were suppressed on the grounds of her supposedly aberrant sexual preferences, and removed from the libraries and the copyists' benches. So one would almost think of classifying her, along with a vast body of what has not come down from Greek times, with the 'lost literature' of a vibrant culture which once had a quarter of a millions volumes in its great libraries. One might think her name had largely faded out in our times.

But this is not the case. In preparing this study I thought it worth checking with one of the search engines on the Internet for the word "Sappho", a name which is not likely to be conflated with other names or titles. (Homer is not a good search term, it might be an American painter, a baseball term, a pigeon type or either name of generations of American men.) To my amazement, I got a count of 119,000 returns, and examining the first hundred "best choices". I came up with these classes: First and foremost, "Sappho" appears as the keyword for Lesbian websites, which are operating actively throughout the world. In the last half of the 20th century the volcano of social change which altered the topography of the Western world forever, turned public attention to matters of sexual preference which had been buried since the times of the Greco-Roman civilization.

In the spirit of inquiry which after 1900 unearthed Oedipus and incest as a component of the new Freudian psychology, it soon would be perfectly natural for Sappho to reappear as the patron saint of a new turn in female sexuality. Of course this has become more a topic of popular mythology than a matter of history, since two variables are involved: First, was Sappho actually homosexual? And then did homosexuality have the same meaning in the social world of ancient Greece as it had in the modern Christian West? But for gay rights activists, such details would seem academic and not worth pursing in the light of a new sense of personal freedom. But a second upheaval of social consciousness also surfaced in that last half century as the Women's Liberation Movement, and academic activists could easily fix upon Sappho as key person in the history of Women in the West. On the one hand Sappho was a fine and well known poet, against a backdrop of a male dominating society where few feminine literary names appeared, so this indicates the suppressed potential of women as writers. On the other hand since her case is an exception, we have to face the question about "Why so few women...?". With Sappho as a quasi-deity of Women's Rights, the voice of protest could emerge angrily in public meetings, or more conveniently and persuasively in a college course like "The Role of Women in Antiquity", with sixteen weeks of around the table discussion and college credits as well. This was legitimate study in the history of the West. But there is a third group which I find on my list of a hundred Sappho sites, one which stems from an older line of University scholarship, from the academic tradition of Classical Philology. Since the beginning of a new spirit for an exacting classical scholarship after l800, the search for remnants of Sappho's poetry in the corpus of later Hellenistic writing was on, and each scrap of a line or even a word was sought as avidly as the artifacts for which the archaeologist hunted at Pompeii. But as the 19th century ended, papyrus fragments began to come from Egypt where British and French colonialists had ready cash for antiques, and a new papyrological discipline came to the fore. In the spirit of quasi-scientific investigation, a major of Sappho Scholarship accrued, with books and articles in a dozen languages examining and testing each new scrap of papyrus and each possible notion
of poetic interpretation. This was all couched in a scholarly diction which was of great interest to those in the field of Classical Studies, but hardly readable to lovers of literature outside. My searched list had much from this well developed academic source, under the general area of university publications and library resources, constituting a virtual Sapphic library unto itself. But there is a fourth group, one which involves a wider circle of literary interest, for which the name of Sappho has always had a magical allure.

There have been attempts at translating Sappho into a modern readable format since Mary Robinson's elegantly printed l796 volume and on up to the present day. I even find that my earlier paper on Sappho with several translations, which appeared on the Web in l996, has already been copied, purloined and cached on dozens of sites unknown to me, all of which points to a wildly growing interest in Sappho, whether as Lesbian, Liberation or as Literature. Translations of Sappho continue to appear with new ones coming up with the lillies each year, although Sappho is virtually impossible to translate effectively, and it is clear, as Robert Frost warned us decades ago, that "Poetry is what is lost in translation".

But there are problems which arise as soon as you try to translate. The basic one is the matter of interpretation, since words change meaning over the course of the centuries. Words, notions and sentiments are not cross-culturally exchangeable, so reading a text from a far place in a distant time is always going to be difficult. This becomes worse when we have writing in an obscure dialect like the Aeolic language of Sappho, in which we have little linguistic base for comparison. Add to this the personal poetic component of Sappho's lines, that unforeseen idiosyncratic combination of words and thoughts which makes poetry a special art beyond the usages of ordinary communication, and we have a delicate situation.

Unrolling a papyrus volume is done with the greatest of care, use rough hands and the whole thing is gone. But the same is true of unrolling the meanings of a delicate piece of poetic fabric. And just as a sheet of paper has two sides, a poem has two dimensions glued as it were onto the same verbal framework. There will be a range of denoted verbal data, which we roughly classify under the heading of Meaning. But there is also the matter of the Form, the actual configuration of the words as words, and the sounds as they are arranged in their careful mosaic patterning. These elements reside on a different plane from the communicative data of Meaning. Translation can do fairly well with Meaning if done conscientiously and with attention to background and historical change, but the Form can only try to match the original at specific points, as it manages to touch base with the original text here and there. A complete reconfiguration would be a replication of the original, an exact duplication. After Davenport surprised the literary world with his recreation of Archilochus in l963, he went on to translate Sappho's similarly fragmented poems, and did a fine job in his customary style. He has a way of putting his finger on an important point in a poem, and gets the tone across although it may not be the actual tone of the original. This is better than most interpretations of Sappho, but it catches only the peaks of the waves, and misses the depths of her feelings which cannot be caught so easily.

In order to go deeper, we need the Greek. Many people are starting Greek these days, in a college course or simply working on their own, and there seems to be a phil-Hellenic spirit in the air. The Classics have been so long saddled by the idea of "Greek and Latin" as a matched pair, that to many it is assumed that you study Latin first, along with one William Shakespeare, and then do a "little Greek" later if you can. The formidable Dr. Johnson said about Greek, that a gentleman should get as much of it as he can, like the lace on the wrists of his 18th century dress jacket. And it was not really surprising that a man I know who loves Greek literature and signed up for a M.A. program in Greek at a prominent University, was told that he had to take Latin as well as an adamant program requirement. Greek as background for Latin makes sense, but hardly Latin as foreground for Greek!

I remember the little old lady on the fast food advertisement who enchanted the TV world for a time with her remark, as she peered into her hamburger, asking: "Where's the beef?". I peer into the welter of writing on Sappho, and the translations of Sappho, and the cultural discussions of Sappho, and find myself asking the same question: "Where's the Greek?" This study brings together the actual Greek text of the more interpretable poems of Sappho, accompanied by a new translation for those not reading the Greek, along with detailed discussion of Form as form, as needed for overall interpretation. This approach is aimed at the literary quality of Sappho's artistry, and brings to the literary reader of poetry the closely coupled ranges of both Form and Meaning . For this we have to have the Greek at hand, but for those for whom this is new, I also print a text in Roman characters which may make phonetic reading easier. For those for whom Greek is new, I suggest imbibing the Greek with meanings foremost as a first step, while later rearranging the words and forms mentally with dictionary and grammar at hand, as the traditional way to approach any new linguistic sample. Since Aeolic language is largely a thing unto itself, re-phrasing it in terms of Attic grammar would be an unnecessary process, something like explaining Chaucer's language in terms of modern English grammar.

We have a bad tendency to teach "the grammar" first and then try to do some reading with it, whereas Grammar is the after-the-fact result of what surfaces from large amounts of intelligent practice in reading. In fact there are no Paradigms except in the grammar books.
But there does congeal after a certain amount of reading, a sense of "paradigmatic unity", which is the mental perception that certain linguistic phenomena (in Greek these are often associated with the "endings") fall into regular classes of behavior. In our native speech we have little awareness of grammar as grammar, but we are inuitively aware of what features fall together into what (unspecified) classifications. This is the grammar of the unconscious mind upon which all use of language depends. In the case of Greek this is not always easy to grasp, and we will continue to reach for our Smyth grammar or the Liddell & Scott dictionary as our lifesavers in the rough sea of turbulent wave-whipped wording.

But what must be kept in mind as paramount is what the words "says" in its context, and when you have clearly understood that, you have made the initial vital step. Seeing the same linguistic item or "tag" later, you will remember seeing it before with a prior meaning in its prior context, and thus you begin to assemble your mental Paradigm in the back of your mind. I strongly suggest this procedure as feasible in reading Sappho, since the amount of text is severely limited and you can have it all memorized and context-sorted very quickly. Then, you can ask grammatical questions, then is the time to check it out and see if you got it completely right. At the end of the Commentary to Poem I you will find a grammatical analysis of each word in that poem, which should be useful for those just now starting their study of Greek, or others whose Greek has been confined to the Attic mold. A second version of this analysis has the grammatical functions marked in bold, as a review of what grammar has been employed in the poem. If this can possibly aid or encourage, that is all it is intended to do.