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Sappho (fl. c.610 - c.580 BC) | |
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Greek poetess, who lived on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is the most famous female poet of antiquity, but only incomplete poems and fragments remain of her work. Most of Sappho's love poems were addressed to women. The Greek philosopher Plato called her the tenth Muse. I ASKED MYSELF What, Sappho, can Little is known for certain of Sappho's life, although there are many anecdotes. Her parents were of aristocratic origin. Sappho may have been born in 612 BC at Eresus, one of the towns of Lesbos. Her father was Scamandronymus, or according to some sources his name was Scamander. She had three brothers, Erigyius, Larichus and Charaxus, the eldest, who was a merchant. He sailed to Egypt with a cargo of wine. There he was involved with a local slavewoman named Doricha and purchased her freedom. Sappho disapproved the affair. She was more fond of the young Larichus; he poured the wine at council banquets. As a child, at some date between 604 and 595 BC, Sappho was taken to exile in Sicily due to political disturbances. An inscription in the Parian Chronicle says: "When Aristokles reigned over the Athenians Sappho fled from Mitylene and sailed to Sicily." After returning she spent most of her life at Mytilene, the native city of her mother Cleis. Countless sources mention that Sappho was married to one "Kerkylas of Andros," but according to Holt N. Parker, it's a joke name - "Dick Allcock from the Isle of MAN". (Piecing Together the Fragments: Translating Classical Verse, Creating Contemporary Poetry by Josephine Balmer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 64) Sappho's slightly senior contemporary poet, Alcaeus, another
leader of the Aeolian school of poetry, also came from Lesbos. He wrote
some erotic (homosexual) lyrics. Not much imagination has been needed
to develop the argument, that they lived in friendly intercourse,
especially when fragments of their existing poetry point to the
direction. Sappho had a daughter, Cleis, named after her grandmother.
Sappho speaks of her daughter's beauty: ''I have a beautiful child who
looks like golden flowers / my darling Cleis / for whom
I would not (take) all Lydia . . ." (quoted in The Poetics of Appearance in the Attic
Korai by Mary Stieber, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004,
p. 154) Ovid portrayed the poetess as short and dark in complexion,
Horace referred to her in Episles:
"How manly Sappho regulates her verse".
(The Epistles of Horace,
translated by David Ferry, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001,
p. 101) Alcaeus calls her ''violet haired, pure, honey-smiling
Sappho''.
Boccaccio knew more: she "had so fine a talent that in the flower of
youth and beauty she was not satisfied with writing solely in prose,
but, spurred by the geat fervor of her soul and mind, with diligent
study she ascended the steep slopes of Parnassus, and on that high
summit with happy daring joined the Muses, who did not nod in
disapproval." (quoted in The Sappho Companion, edited and
introduced Margaret Reynolds, New York: Palgrave, 2000, p. 86)
The medieval writer Christine de Pizan
(1364-1430), who
advocated women's equality and education, said in The Book of the City of Ladies,
that Sappho had a
beautiful body and face "and was agreeable and pleasant in appearance,
conduct, and speech. But the charm of her profound understanding
surpassed all of the other charms with which she was endowed, for she
was expert and learned in several arts and sciences, and she ws not
only well-educated in the works and writings composed by others but
also discovered many new things herself and wrote many books and poems."
(quoted in Culture and Values: A
Survey of the Western Humanities by Lawrence S. Cunningham,
John J. Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus, Stamford: Cengage Learning, 2014,
p. 323) Actually, we don't know anything about her physical
appearance. For
that matter, she could have looked like Jabba the Hut. In one poem she
complains that her hair has turned from black to white; "knees buckle
that once could dance light as fawns." (Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete
Works by Diane J. Raynor and André Lardinois, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2014. p. 54) The eleventh-century Byzantine lexicon Suda writes, that Sappho had three companions, Atthis, Telesippa, and Megara, and she was accused of "shameful love with them." Her pupils were Anagora of Milestos, Gongula of Colophon, and Euneika of Salamis. Sappho probably could read and write, not a common skill at that time, and it is not impossible, that she taught young women, preparing them into adulthood. One source dating to the second century AD speaks, that she educated "the best women not only from the natives [of Lesbos] but also of Ionia". Sappho's advices were practical. In one fragment she instructs Kleis, how to do her hair: "a girl / whose hair is yellower than / torchlight should wear no / headdress but fresh flowers". (from 'Don't ask me what to wear,' in Sappho: A New Translation by Mary Barnard, foreword by Dudley Fitts, 1966) In Mytilene, Sappho was the central figure of a female
literary group. It also formed the audience for her poetry. With her
friends Sappho may have performed religious rituals and worshipped the
goddess of love, Aphrodite, but her surviving poetry doesn't refer to
any systematic religious philosophizing. Aphrodite was also called
Cypris, the Cyprian. In one fragment Sappho said: "Come, goddess of
Cyprus, and in golden cups / serve nectar delicately mixed with
delights." (Sappho:
Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation by
Henry Thornton Wharton, London: David Stott, MDCCCLXXXVII, p. 71) When antique philosophers examined the laws of nature and the outside world, Sappho was interested in the inner world, her own feelings. Aristotle said that "everybody honors the wise . . . and the Mytilineans honored Sappho although she was a woman." (quoted in 'A Study in Sexual Reputation' by Harriette Andreadis, in Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, edited by Ellen Greene, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 112) Sappho's lyrics were more personal than in the widely read or recited Homeric epic. And her poems were really read - old Greek vases, some of which date to the 5th century, provide the proof. One of them shows an imaginary portrait of Sappho and words from her poem. Because of her intense feelings for her own sex, Sappho has often been described as a homosexual (lesbian) - originally the word "lesbian" meant "a person from the island of Lesbos". In one fragment (poem 31) she said: "as I look at you my voice / is empty and // can say nothing as my tongue / cracks and slender fire is quick / under my skin." (quoted in Sappho Is Burning by Page DuBois, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 65) In the poem she depicts her jealous passion while watching a young woman. A man sits facing the woman, listening her as she speaks softly and laughs. By singing about erotic desire among women, Sappho questioned the masculine, heroic gender roles familiar from Homeric epic. Sappho was unsentimental about the feeling of love: cold sweat pours off the poet, trembling shakes her body, she is paler than grass. Longinus praised the poem in his treatise On Sublimity, a classical work of criticism from the first century AD: "She is cold and hot, mad and sane, frightened and near death, all by turns. The result is that we see in her not a single emotion, but a complex of emotions. Lovers experience all this; Sappho's excellence, as I have said, lies in her adoption and combination of the most striking details." ('Longinus, from On Sublimity,' in The Sublime Reader, edited by Robert R. Clewis, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, p. 23) It is generally believed, that Sappho died c. 580 BC; she was about thirty. The legend of her death is
most probably a fabrication. The comic playwright Menander tells in The
Girl from Leukas, that Sappho fell in love with the young Phaon, a
boatman. When she was rejected, she flung herself into the sea from the
Leucadian cliff. In the Suda, this person has the same name
than Sappho, but she is not the well-known poet. She is a harp player
from the city of Mytilene and she composed poetry, too. However, the
story inspired Ovid, whose version is found at the end of his
Heroides, where she, supposedly writing to Phaon, "burns like
Etna". The English playwright John Lyly (1554-1606) and the American
playwright Percy MacKaye (1875-1956) have also dealt with the subject. The person and poetics of Sappho have fascinated a number of
male and
female writers, including John Donne, Tennyson, Baudelaire, Willa
Cather, Virginia Woolf, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolitle, Renée
Vivien, Marguerite Yourcenar, Ezra Pound, and Lawrence Durrell. In Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother
(1847) Christina Rossetti
(1830-94) imagined her living unloved and dying unwept,
untended and alone. Rossetti meditated further Sappho's afterlife in
'What Sappho Would Have Said Had Her Leap Cured Instead of Killing Her'
(1848). This poem was not published during her lifetime. Sappho's poetry was translated respectfully into Latin and much of her work survived until the end of antiquity. Scholars at the great Alexandrian library collected her poems in an edition of nine books, but this edition got lost during the Middle Ages. Such Roman poets as Catullus and Horace in the first century B.C. knew her work. Horace used the sapphic stanza frequently. Antipater of Thessalonica from the second century BC included Sappho in his list of nine women poets. Later critics quoted her works and there are also papyrus fragments. One poem is cited in full by the critic and historian Dionysius of Hallicarnassus, who lived in the first century AD, as an example of "polished and exuberant" expression. Approximately
two hundred fragments have been attributed to
Sappho. Many of them contain only a few words or lines. It is not know
for certain, how much of her poetry Sappho actually wrote down – her
poems were composed to be sung. Some
fragments have been found scratched in broken clay pots,
remembered by admirers of his work. She is
supposed to have called herself Psappha, a word meaning lapis lazuli.
It has been suggested that she was not a woman, but a group of women,
but none of the commentators on Sappho have doubted her to be a single,
individual woman. In Sappho's time the Greeks had no paper. An average Greek used pottery as a writing material, or anything at hand. Pieces of pottery were recycled into "scap paper". The earliest papyrus containing Sappho's poems is from the third century BC. The text, wrapped around an Egyptian mummy, was rediscovered by two researchers at Germany's Cologne University and published in 2005 with English translation in the Times Literary Supplement. Nearly all the Sappho papyri has been found from a dump in Oxyrhynchus, nowadays el-Behnese, 200 kilometres south of Cairo. Why the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus threw their papyri – legal documents, laundry lists, accounts, letters, poems, and other pieces – into the dumps is a mystery. Sappho wrote in the Lesbian vernacular, which did not become a literary language, as Homer's Greek did. Apuleius found it rustic and quaint. Her Aeolian dialect, direct, spontaneous, and simple, has been difficult to translate into English - or as Ford Madox Ford noted: "But work at your English version how you will, you will never—simply because English vowel sounds are so indeterminate—get either the sonority or the vowel coloring of the original Greek." (The March of Literature: From Confucius to Modern Times by Ford Madox Ford, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938, p. 124) Sappho mastered various meters. One four-line stanza has been named after her. The first three lines are long, and the fourth is short. Sappho's 'Hymn to Aphrodite' was written in this meter. Is addressed to the goddess to aid her seduction of a young girl whom the poet loves. Sappho also addressed informal hymns to Hera, the sister and wife of Zeus. Her other works include marriage songs (epithalamia), composed for choral performance. For further reading: Sappho und Erinna by Johann Richter (1833); A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, 5 Vols., by William Mure (1850-1857); Sappho in the Added Light of New Fragments by J. M. (John Maxwell) Edmonds (1912); Sappho and Her Influence by David M. Robinson (1924); Sappho of Lesbos by Arthur Weigall (1932); Sappho:Welt und Dichtung, Dasein in der Liebe by Wolfgang Schadewalt (1950); Sappho and Alcaeus by Denys L. Page (1955); Zur Kunst Sapphos by Helmut Saake (1972); Ancient and Modern Images of Sappho: Translations and Studies in Archaic Greek Love Lyric by Jeffrey M. Duban (1983); Love as War by Leah Rissman (1983); Sappho Was a Right on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, ed. Sidney Abbott, Barbara Love (1985); The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition by Judy Grahn (1985); Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 by Joan DeJean (1989); Sappho's Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, tr. Diane Rayor (1991); Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet by Germaine Greer (1995); Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene (1996); The Sappho Companion, ed. Margaret Reynolds (2001); The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by Ellen Greene and Marilyn Skinner (2009); Searching for Sappho: the Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet: Including New Translations of All of Sappho's Surviving Poetry by Philip Freeman (2016); The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by P. J. Finglass, Adrian Kelly (2021); Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading by Melissa Mueller (2023); The Missing Thread: A Women's History of the Ancient World by Daisy Dunn (2024) - In Finnish: Sapfon runoja on kääntänyt mm. Aapo Junkola kokoelmaan Sapfon runoja (1966) ja Pentti Saarikoski kokoelmaan Iltatähtu, häälaulu (1969) Editions:
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