Fragments

Many works of the ancients have become fragments; many works of the moderns begin that way. Friedrich Schlegel

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Sleep

Sappho May you sleep on your tender girlfriend’s breasts

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Afroditi of the Flowers at Knossos

Sappho Leave Kriti and come here to this holy temple with your graceful grove of apple trees and altars smoking with frankincense. Icy water babbles through apple branches and roses leave shadow on the ground and bright shaking leaves pour down profound sleep. Here is a meadow where horses graze amid wild blossoms of the [...]

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Varieties of Ecstasy

again, from Barnstone’s intro to his Sappho translations, all things for me to consider as I’m writing blessings. “The fragments of Sappho’s 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 [...]

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considering love poetry

I’ve never been able to stand most love poetry (or most love songs, for that matter). Too much is just trite, too much is just sappy and pathetic (including, sadly, too much of my own!), and some of it is just outright creepy, predatory, and violent. I once had a male lover who held my [...]

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Psapfo, Latinization, and voiceless bilabial fricative f

from Willis Barnstone’s translation of Sappho’s poems, a footnote on the intricacies of the pronunciation of her name. I leave the hardest part of this essay to a footnote, still pondering on phi and eta, whether Greek phi = English ph or f, and whether Greek eta = e or i, and a few other [...]

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the war between grammarians and libertines

from Willis Barnstone’s introduction to his translation of Sappho 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 [...]

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in case you ever need an epitaph for me

you can always borrow this, from Apuleius’ Apology, written about Sappho: She was a woman of Lesbos too, who wrote lasciviously yet with such grace that she reconciles us to her outrageous speech through the sweetness of her songs.

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Manly Sappho

quotations from various ancient sources about Sappho, as listed in Willis Barnstone’s translation Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho [She was called] “manly Sappho,” either because she was famous as a poet, an art in which men are known, or else because she has been defamed for being of that tribe [of homosexuals]. from Porphyrio, in [...]

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some advice remains good across the eons…

If you are squeamish Don’t prod the beach rubble Sappho, fragment 84 in the Barnard translation.

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