And silent tears fall trickling from my eyes.
I go, ye nymphs, those rocks and seas to prove:
How much I fear, but ah, how much I love!
I go, ye nymphs, where furious love inspires;
Let female fears submit to female fires:
To rocks and seas I fly from Phaon’s hate,
And hope from seas and rocks a milder fate.
Ye gentle gales, beneath my body blow,
And softly lay me on the waves below.
And thou, kind Love, my sinking limbs sustain,
Spread thy soft wings and waft me o’er the main,
Nor let a lover’s death the guiltless flood profane.
On Phoebus’ shrine my harp I’ll then bestow,
And this inscription shall be placed below:—
“Here she who sung, to him that did inspire,
Sappho to Phoebus consecrates her lyre:
What suits with Sappho, Phoebus, suits with thee;
The gift, the giver, and the god agree.”
But why, alas, relentless youth, ah, why
To distant seas must tender Sappho fly?
Thy charms than those may far more powerful be,
And Phoebus’ self is less a god to me.
Ah, canst thou doom me to the rocks and sea,
O far more faithless and more hard than they?
Ah, canst thou rather see this tender breast
Dashed on these rocks than to thy bosom pressed?
This breast, which once, in vain! you liked so well;
Where the Loves played, and where the Muses dwell.
Alas, the Muses now no more inspire;
Untuned my lute, and silent is my lyre:
My languid numbers have forgot to flow,
And fancy sinks beneath the weight of woe.
Ye Lesbian virgins and ye Lesbian dames,
Themes of my verse and objects of my flames,
No more your groves with my glad songs shall ring;
No more these hands shall touch the trembling string:
My Phaon’s fled, and I those arts resign:
(Wretch that I am, to call that Phaon mine!)
Return, fair youth, return, and bring along
Joy to my soul and vigour to my song.
Absent from thee, the poet’s flame expires;
But ah, how fiercely burn the lover’s fires!
Gods, can no prayers, no signs, no numbers move
One savage heart, or teach it how to love?
The winds my prayers, my sighs, my numbers bear;
The flying winds have lost them all in air.
Or when, alas, shall more auspicious gales
To these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails?
If you return, ah, why these long delays?
Poor Sappho dies while careless Phaon stays.
O launch the bark, nor fear the watery plain:
Venus for thee shall smoothe her native main.
O launch thy bark, secure of prosperous gales:
Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling sails.
If you will fly—(yet ah, what cause can be,
Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me?)
If not from Phaon I must hope for ease,
Ah, let me seek it from the raging seas;
To raging seas unpitied I’ll remove;
And either cease to live or cease to love.
Ovid “Heroic Epistle, xv”
translated by Alexander Pope, 1707
Modern Literature1
Damned Women
Like pensive cattle lying on the sand,
They turn their eyes to the sea’s horizon,
Their feet and hands creeping slowly to band
And fuse in soft tremors and bitter abandon.
Some of these hearts beguiled by secrets shared
Deep in the woods where brooks chat noisily
Spell out their furtive love as children carve
Initials on green bark of a young tree.
Others are walking slow and grave like nuns
Across the rock fields filled with apparitions
Where once Saint Anthony saw lava stun
And surge like nude blue breasts of his temptation.
And some by torchlight of quiescent caves,
A resin smell in the old Pagan shrine,
Call for your help, Bacchus, healer who saves
And relieves them from screaming heat and pain,
Others wear scapulars round their throat,
Hiding a whip under their draping skirt,
And in dark forests and lonely night
Combine the foam of bliss with tearful hurt.
O virgins, demons, O monsters, martyrs,
Great spirits pondering reality,
Seeking the infinite, saints and satyrs,
Racked with sobs, breaking in ecstasy,
You whom my soul has followed to your hell,
Poor sisters, I love and pity you for your part
For desolate grief, for thirst your citadel,
And urns of love filling your great hearts.
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
Translated by Willis Barnstone
Iµέω
Thy soul
Grown delicate with satieties,
Atthis.
O Atthis,
I long for thy lips.
I long for thy narrow breasts,
Thou restless, ungathered.
Ezra Pound, 1917
Taking us by and large, we’re a queer lot
We women who write poetry. And when you think
How few of us they’ve been, it’s queerer still . . .
There’s Sapho, now I wonder what was Sapho.
I know a single slender thing about her:
That, loving, she was like a burning birch-tree
All tall and glittering fire, and that she wrote
Like the same fire caught up to Heaven and held there
And she is Sapho—Sapho—not Miss or Mrs,
A leaping fire we call so for convenience . . .
Amy Lowell, from “What O’Clock?,” 1925
TWO POEMS FROM NEW POEMS (Neue Gedichte) BY RAINER MARIA RILKE2
Eranna to Sappho
You the wild far-hurling woman
like a spear among common things,
I lay with my sisters. Your song burst
cast me somewhere. I don’t know where I am.
No one can bring me back.
My sisters think of me and weave,
and in my house familiar steps.
Only I am far off and given away
and tremble like a plea.
The beauty goddess burns in her myths
and lives my life.
Sappho to Eranna
I want to crush your heart,
I want to sword you with an ivy-wreathed staff.
Like dying I want to pierce you
and, like the grave, in all these things
I want to pass you on
1. In addition to ancient testimonia, abundant praise and reference to Sappho in literature continues into modern times, and especially since the nineteenth century. Most of it is not worthy of Sappho, but included here are a few outstanding ones by major poets.
2. Both selections are translated by Willis Barnstone.
SOURCES, NOTES, AND COMMENTARY
IN THIS SECTION, I provide source and additional information for the poems translated in this edition, as well as ancient commentary related to the poems. The notes that follow give, first, the source of the poem, then any ancient commentary in quotation marks, followed by my own explanatory comments. For more information on the sources, see the Introduction. More information on the poems is also provided in the Glossary.
1 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2288. Also Dionysios of Halikarnassos On Literary Composition 23 (6.114ss Usener-Radermacher).
“I shall now give paradigms of this style (that is, polished and exuberant), selecting S
appho among poets and Isokratis among orators. I begin with the lyric poet.” [There follows the poem, and then again Dionysios.] “The euphony and charm of this passage lie in the cohesion and smoothness of the connecting phrases. For the words are juxtaposed and interwoven according to the natural affinities and groupings of the letters. . . .” See the Testimonia for a more complete context of the poem, being with “The polished and florid composition . . .”
This poem to Afroditi is usually considered one of two complete poems of Sappho that have survived. Though it is therefore not a fragment, by accepted convention all lines of Sappho are identified by their “fragment” number, and here too we refer to it as fragment 1. The other complete poem, fragment 58, was published for the first time in 2005. There are fragments of other poems, however, that have more lines than this complete poem, such as fragment 44, “Wedding of Andromache and Hektor.” Despite the tone of intimate friendship and cheerful camaraderie, the poem to Afroditi has the formal structure of a prayer, with the expected invocation, sanction, and entreaty.
2 Ostracon Florentinum, ed. M. Norsa, Annali della reale Scuola normale superiore di Pisa, Lettere, Storia e Filosofia, series 2, 6 (1937).
Kriti [Crete] was thought to be the original seat of worship of Afroditi, or so its inhabitants claimed. The scene described here is a real place in Lesbos, devoted to the worship of Afroditi. Apples and horses were symbols of Afroditi, who was known as Afroditi of the Apples as well as Afroditi of the Horses. The prayer for epiphany in the poem is by no means proof that Sappho was a priestess or a poet of cult songs. Her concern with Afroditi was with a figure who represented beauty and love.
Line 11 retains only the first two words, and line 12 is missing altogether. The English translation might retain obediently, not indent, line 11 and leave an extra blank line or brackets between the third and fourth stanzas. However, here as elsewhere I attempt to go partway in reflecting the abused Greek text (which can have its own delight and freshness in mirrored English). Normally I limit the mirror so the English can live. But sometimes in treating very brief fragments, I try to make the English wording correspond in spacing as closely as possible. This device may still make the English conversion intelligible while giving it an interesting form based on the haphazard remains of the Greek text.
Fragment 2 is preceded on the same Ostracon Florentinum (an ostracon is a potsherd—a fragment of broken pottery) by the fragmentary phrase ανοθεν κατιου. This can plausibly be restored to mean “coming down from heaven.” It might or might not have directly preceded fragment 2 itself.
3 Papyri Berlin 5006 + Papyri Oxyrhynchus 3.424.6–18.
This important text is a botched column, yet remarkable in its power. For some broken words, I have followed the guesses of several scholars, especially Max Treu, who goes further in his German translation to make sense. He places conjectures for half words in brackets. I have made guesses for a few words here, too, though elsewhere I avoid the significant guesses outside of the endnotes.
4 Papyri Berlin 5006.
The text is obviously fragmentary, scarcely more than a column of words, yet the words are intelligible; the syntax and connective words present the main difficulty. Ezra Pound’s early poem imitating Sappho suggests a similar scrap of papyrus:
Papyrus
Spring . . .
Too long . . .
Gongula . . .
5 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 7 + 2289.6.
Nereids are sea nymphs or mermaids.
The poem is to Sappho’s brother Haraxos. The black torment is presumably his Egyptian mistress, Doriha, on whom Haraxos was “wasting” his fortune. In the mutilated lines that follow (not included here), Sappho seems to broaden her attack on Doriha. There are numerous attack poems against Doriha, or Rodopis, which are found much later in Herodotos and Strabon and in Athinaios’s Scholars at Dinner. This woman who is the object of Sappho’s hostilities was a Thracian by birth, who later went to Egypt as a prostitute. She became the mistress of Sappho’s brother Haraxos, who imported Lesbian wine to Naukratis. Sappho attacks her in several poems, presumably because Doriha captivated her brother and swindled him in commerce. Sappho wants his attention, and for him to reform and come back. For more, see the Testimonia, and Lobel and Page (202) for the traditional poems against Doriha.
5a, b, c incert. Herodianos On Anomalous Words 26 (ii 932 Lentz).
The translation of 5b and c is uncertain, but they are fascinating and so I include them, following David Campbell’s guesses, and repeating his apology about the elusive meaning.
6 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2289 frag. 1 a, b.
7 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2289 frag. 2.
9 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2289 frag. 4.
Another talk with Hera.
15 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 1 col. 1.1–12 + frag. 3.
After “Blessed,” the goddess’s name has not survived. Sappho was addressing, here as elsewhere, Afroditi.
16 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 1 col. 1.13–34, col. 2.1 + 2166(a) 2 (Ox. Pap. 21, p. 122) + P.S.I. 123.1–2.
Sappho begins the poem with a paratactic trope, found also in Tyrtaios’s famous poem on the Spartan soldier, fragment 9, and Pindar Olympian Odes 1, to compare the apparent splendor of military spectacles with the power of love. While she does not dull the public sparkle of the masculine world of war, to her all of this bright clutter of history cannot match the illumination of love and physical beauty in her personal world. While Sappho writes at least once in a Homeric voice, speaking of the wedding of Andromache and Hektor in fragment 44, she has chosen in that poem to celebrate the wedding of these two people, who are perhaps the two most developed and sympathetic characters in the Iliad, rather than to celebrate a warring hero. She also appears to show a preference for the Trojans over the Achaians (the Greeks), which may also be Homer’s preference, as he finishes his epic with great sympathy for the fallen Hektor, his funeral, the bereaved Andromache, and the soon-to-be annihilated Trojans. So after stating how once the gaze of love and powers of Afroditi led Helen to choose her lover before family, at whatever cost, Sappho reaffirms the centrality of love by comparing chronicle event to personal circumstance. Sappho would rather gaze at her beloved than to behold all the shining hoplites (foot soldiers) and chariots in Lydia.
16 incert. Hefaistion Handbook of Meters 11.3, 5 (pp. 35–36 Consbruch).
“The Aiolian composed acatalectic ionic a maiore trimeters in two ways, from two ionics and a trochaic metrical foot, [verse follows] and others from one ionic and two trochaic metrical feet. In their tetrameters they sometimes begin with a short syllable as in their trimeters [verse follows].”
The poem is attributed to Sappho or Alkaios but clearly appears to be Sappho’s. It is similar in tone to fragment 154, with lines about women before an altar in Kriti, and to “Afroditi of the Flowers at Knossos” (fragment 2).
17 P.S.I. 2.123.3–12 + Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 1 col. 2.2–21 + 2166a + Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2289 frag. 9.
18 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 1 col. 2.22–27 (vi versuum initia).
18b, c incert. Papyri Oxyrhynchus 220 col 9.7ss (Heph. p. 405 Consbruch).
19 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 2.
20 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 2131 frag. 9 + 2166(a)4a (Ox. Pap. 21, p. 122) (xxiv versuum frr.).
The text is very fragmentary. David A. Campbell’s literal translation in volume one of Greek Lyric reads: “. . . brightness . . . with the help of good fortune . . . to gain (the harbour?) . . . beach (earth?) . . . the sailors (are unwilling?) . . . great gusts . . . and on dry land . . . sail . . . the cargo . . . since . . . flowing (?) many . . . (receive?) . . . tasks . . . dry land . . .” “To Lady Hera” (fragment 17), as well as the other poems in this section, is a poem related to shrines and goddesses. Sappho addresses many gods in her poems, but when asking for help from a friendly deity, she normally addresses a goddess. As can be seen, the poem is from a strip of papyrus. The poem is one that has the sea-storm qualities of Alkaios, but here th
ere is less heroic symbolism and actual personal and immediate speech. It gives a hint of the broadness of Sappho’s vision and themes that were surely developed in other lost poems.
21 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 10.
The text is very fragmentary. David A. Campbell’s translation in the first volume of Greek Lyric reads: “. . . (in possession of?) . . . pity . . . trembling . . . old age now . . . (my) sky . . . covers . . . (Love?) flies pursuing (the young?) . . . glorious . . . taking (your lyre?) sing to us of the violet-robed one . . . especially wanders . . .”
22 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 12, 15.
23 Papyri Oxyrhynchus, 1231 frag. 14.
Hermioni (Hermione) was Helen’s daughter.
24a, b, c
24a: Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 13 + 2166(a)7a (Ox. Pap. 21, p. 124); 24b: Ox. Pap. 1231 frag. 17; 24c: Ox. Pap. 1231 frag. 22 + 25.
These wonderful fragments have the nostalgia of Constantine Cavafy’s many memory poems, where youth is contrasted with the harshness of age.
25 incert. 1.55b (p. 50s Wendel).
This line is attributed to Sappho or Alkaios, but it is surely by Sappho.
26 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231, frag. 16.
27 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 50–54 + 2166(a)5 (Ox. Pap. 21, p. 123).
27 incert. Papyrus fragment 2977a (ed. Oellacher, M.P.E. R., n.s., Pt. 1 p. 88) fr. 1(a).
Menelaos can also be rendered “Meneleos.”
30 Papyri Oxyrhynchus 1231 frag. 56 + 2166(a)6a.
This song sung by girls outside the window of the newlyweds humorously tells the groom to awaken and go out and join his old friends. The taunting tone goes well with the happiness of the occasion.
31 Longinos On the Sublime 10.1–3.
We owe the preservation of fragment 31 to the major Alexandrian literary critic Longinos, who cited these lines as an example of the sublime and the ecstatic. Fragment 31 is probably the most frequently translated of Sappho’s poems, from Catullus to William Carlos Williams. Catullus’s fifty-first ode to Lesbia—“referring to Sappho but actually addressed to his lover Clodia. It is a close version of Sappho’s poem, and a precious document and major poem:
Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
The Complete Poems of Sappho Page 9