Stung With Love Booknote
She was born after 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Plato honoured her as the Tenth Muse, and she was to inspire the naming of both a sexuality and a poetics.
She was a great celebrator, had a poet’s and a woman’s eye for the ‘gorgeous’; for flowers – chervil, rose, marigold and sweet clover; for smells – frankincense, aniseed, myrrh and honey; she loved the moon and ‘The glitter and glamour of the sun’; she loved, as her epithalamia, or marriage songs and other poems, show us, a good party, a ‘gleaming feast’.
These poems are earned out of her openness to desire, her willingness to love, her acceptance of a lover’s suffering.
In this, too, her spirit is forever young. Her love poems are why she endures and where we recognize ourselves: infatuated and jealous; smitten and fulfilled; brain and tongue shattered by love; wanting to die; remembering past encounters, ‘all beautiful’.
384–322 BCE Aristotle, student of Plato and philosopher, whose Rhetoric preserves ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’.
Introduction
Lesbos was famous for the purity of its olive oil, as it still is today, and for its wine, which Sappho’s brother Charaxus exported to Egypt.
Ancient and medieval biogaphies attest that Sappho had a daughter, Kleïs (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1800, fr. 1 and the Suda Σ 107). The conclusion was most likely drawn from this fragment:
I have a daughter who reminds me ofShe was born after 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Plato honoured her as the Tenth Muse, and she was to inspire the naming of both a sexuality and a poetics.
She was a great celebrator, had a poet’s and a woman’s eye for the ‘gorgeous’; for flowers – chervil, rose, marigold and sweet clover; for smells – frankincense, aniseed, myrrh and honey; she loved the moon and ‘The glitter and glamour of the sun’; she loved, as her epithalamia, or marriage songs and other poems, show us, a good party, a ‘gleaming feast’.
These poems are earned out of her openness to desire, her willingness to love, her acceptance of a lover’s suffering.
In this, too, her spirit is forever young. Her love poems are why she endures and where we recognize ourselves: infatuated and jealous; smitten and fulfilled; brain and tongue shattered by love; wanting to die; remembering past encounters, ‘all beautiful’.
384–322 BCE Aristotle, student of Plato and philosopher, whose Rhetoric preserves ‘I want to tell you something but good taste’.
Lesbos was famous for the purity of its olive oil, as it still is today, and for its wine, which Sappho’s brother Charaxus exported to Egypt.
Ancient and medieval biogaphies attest that Sappho had a daughter, Kleïs (Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 1800, fr. 1 and the Suda Σ 107). The conclusion was most likely drawn from this fragment:
I have a daughter who reminds me of.
A marigold in bloom.
Kleïs is her name,
And I adore her.
The fatal leap provides a moral – the poet of love dies through an excess of passion, and her death serves to refute what she professed in her poetry. Furthermore, this uncontrollable heterosexual passion goes some way towards compensating for the homosexuality which made so many of Sappho’s readers uncomfortable.
It is safer to leave Sappho’s physical appearance a mystery.
Sappho also clearly belonged to an aristocratic family: she had access to luxury items and education, she seems to have shared some of Alcaeus’ political views, and her brothers held an honorary government post and exported wine.
On occasion Sappho addresses these girls as hetairai (companions or fellow group-members). Hetaira in male discourse comes to mean not just ‘female companion’ but ‘prostitute’, and it is likely that the predominance of this second sense contributed to the tradition that Sappho was herself a prostitute.
Scholars often cite as a parallel the Spartan public upbringing called the agōgē in which boys and girls separately participated. It is probable that the agōgē for girls began in Archaic times and that the Spartan institution was therefore contemporary with Sappho’s group. Whereas participation in the agōgē was obligatory for the daughters of citizens, membership in Sappho’s circle seems to have been voluntary and even international – that is, if her ‘disciples’ Anagora and Gongyla did, in fact, come to Mytilene from Miletus and Colophon.
Claude Calame, the leading proponent of the thiasos theory, reads the terms adikein (‘to commit an injustice’) and philotes (‘love based on mutual confidence’) in ‘Subtly bedizened Aphrodite’ as evidence supporting an institutional base for Sappho’s group: ‘To betray Sappho was not only to betray the intimate reciprocal relationship of philia [mutual love] the poetess was setting up with the girls of her group, but it meant also to break the bonds sanctioned by a contract.’ According to Calame, the group provided post-pubescent, unmarried girls with an environment regulated by rules and with activities such as musical training.
Writing in the 1950s, Denys Page argues that her hymns must be ‘records of personal experience, designed to be heard rather by mortals than gods, to be judged by the standards not of priesthood but of poetry’. Page’s conclusion most likely results from discomfort with the way that Sappho mingles the religious and the erotic.
The assumption that these elements cannot coexist, however, is based on a misconception of the jurisdiction of Aphrodite.
In contrast to Page, Walter Burkert asserts that ‘the worship of Aphrodite finds its most personal and most complete expression in the poems of Sappho’.
Sappho’s erotic hymns, in contrast, do not have a sharp ironic edge. Though, like Aphrodite in Sappho’s most famous hymn, they smile on occasion, they never sneer.
In a famous monologue in which she argues that women are ‘the most abused creatures of all’, the mythic Medea complains of the bride’s powerlessness in this situation: ‘we bid a very high price in dowries only to buy a man to be master of our bodies… then comes the greatest risk: will we end up with a good man or a bad?’ (Euripides, Medea 231–5).
As part of this process, the singer strives to make herself more appealing to Abanthis, and the two characters are both subjects who feel desire and objects which rouse it – they are mutually lover and beloved. Feminist scholars have pointed out that, in contrast to the power-dynamic common in masculine erotic encounters, the singer ‘does not attempt to impose her will upon the person she loves but instead, through engaging appeals, tries to elicit a corresponding response from her’.
Speaking of this appropriation of Homeric images and situations, Mary Lefkowitz observes that ‘it is as if Sappho were saying that what happens in a woman’s life also partakes of the significance of the man’s world of war’.
Page Dubois sees in this poem ‘one of the few texts which break the silence of women in antiquity, an instant in which women become more than the objects of man’s desire’.
In one very short fragment (‘more golden than gold’, fr. 156.2) a comparison involving a luxury paradoxically points to something that surpasses the luxury in its own quality, most likely the appearance of a girl.
Burnett explains the relationship between extravagance and beauty as part of a ‘circular, Sapphic law according to which beauty demands love and love, in turn, creates the beautiful’.
The question remains, however: was Sappho a feminist? In Ancient Greek literature male poets tend not simply to portray women as lecherous but to attribute to them a species of lust different from that of males: a subhuman and automatic reflex, an animalistic urge. Sappho is important because she gives a fully human voice to female desire for the first time in Western literature. Since she defiantly chooses the quintessential love-object Helen of Troy as her freethinking agent, she seems fully conscious of the revolutionary claim she is making.
A Note on the Text and Translation
Subsequently the depredations of time, chance and puritanical taste so reduced the number of poems available that the Byzantine grammarian John Tzetzes of Constantinople (1110–80 CE) could declare ‘time has frittered away Sappho and her works, her lyre and songs’ (On the Meters of Pindar 20–22).
I confess that, though Sappho’s remains are usually fragments that are themselves fragmentary, I have done my best to create a sense of completeness and, on occasion, translated supplements proposed by scholars.
Sappho continues to amaze readers because she retained the intensity of passion which we associate with the young even into old age. She never grew out of desire, and we can greatly admire her ardour.
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments
The lush, vivid description of the sanctuary has provoked various interpretations: some scholars argue that Sappho describes a real shrine in a precise cultic environment; others, that the sacred precinct is a metaphor for women’s sexuality.
The landscape is distinctly Aphrodisiac: Burnett calls the fragment a ‘portrait in which the goddess’s best-known attributes and parts are rendered as bits of landscape… Gardens, apples, perfumes, roses, field-flowers and horses all serve to remind Aphrodite of herself, as she is worshipped in her various cults’ (1983, p. 263).
The thick roses, which belong to the spring, and the apples, which belong to the autumn, suggest the perennial growing season of the Golden Age. In addition, the floral imagery evokes the blossoming fields where, at least in literature, erotic encounters often take place.
Here substance shades into insubstantiality: the roses turn to shadows and the leaves ‘drip slumber’.
When the goddess Kalypso tries to replicate a ‘mortal’ domestic home life for Odysseus, she also weaves (Odyssey 5.61–2).
The tone rapidly fluctuates between torment and tenderness, and a mere four lines convey the girl’s coming of age: the mother and loom on one side, the boy and Aphrodite on the other are playing tug of war, and the girl is torn between them. There are two possible futures for the girl who speaks these lines: she may go on to marry and become a female head-of-household like her mother (and keep on weaving), or, under the influence of Aphrodite, she may give in to her sexual attraction to the boy and be ruined like the flower in ‘A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat’. Desire here is simultaneously violent and tender, and we find a similar bitter-sweetness in ‘That impossible predator’.
Aphrodite flies down from Olympus in a chariot drawn by sparrows, which were associated with lasciviousness and fecundity, and their flesh and eggs eaten as aphrodisiacs.
Aphrodite may promise only that ‘in the course of time the beloved will naturally and inevitably become a lover, and will almost inevitably suffer rejection at least once’ (‘The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho Fr. 1’, in Greene 1996, pp. 227–8.)
Though this fragment is our earliest evidence for the Adonis cult, annual ritual lamentation for his death and burial in a lettuce bed (which we find in other brief fragments of Sappho) accord well with accounts in subsequent sources. We are told that at the Athenian Adonia women gathered on rooftops and engaged in loud obscenity (Aristophanes, Lysistrata 387–96), and celebrants prepared gardens of fennel and lettuce (regarded as an anaphrodisiac).
These plants spring up and wither quickly, and the women may have been lamenting impotence as well as the untimely death of the vegetation god. Beating one’s breast and rending one’s garments were part of ritual lamentation, itself a part of funerary rites in general. Mourners would also cut their hair short and lacerate their cheeks. The ritual context here suggests that the Sapphic community, at least on occasion, served a religious function.
The god Eros himself is described as the ‘Limb-Loosener’ in ‘That impossible predator’, and ‘limb-loosening love’ is central to several of Sappho’s erotic songs. She applies the epithet (or characteristic title) ‘rosy-forearmed’ to Dawn (Eos) in ‘Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright’.
Now, Dika, weave the aniseed together, flower and stem
Untainted Graces
With wrists like roses,
Please come close,
You daughters of Zeus.
Now, Dika, weave the aniseed together, flower and stem,
With your soft hands, crown yourself with a lovely diadem
Because the blessèd Graces grant gifts to the garlanded
And snub the worshipper with no flowers on her head.
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
浅尝辄止是件危险的事；
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
痛饮吧，否则就品尝不到皮里阿斯的清泉了。
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
浅浅的海水令人陶醉，
And drinking largely sobers us again.
喝酒基本上又让我们清醒过来。
God-crafted product of the tortoise shell,
神造的乌龟壳制品，
Come to me; Lyre, be voluble.
DESIRE AND DEATH-LONGING
Eros is the god of ardent desire. He appears either as a universal principle promoting procreation or the mischievous son of Aphrodite, armed with bow and arrows. In Hesiod’s Theogony Eros is ‘limb-loosening’, and in Homer a hero’s limbs are loosened in battle when he loses consciousness or dies. Sappho combines these traditions as Eros here loosens limbs by dismembering a body. Though it is difficult to determine exactly what rough beast the god Eros is supposed to be, his predation is both pleasant and painful, and this bitter-sweetness characterizes Sappho’s erotic songs.
‘Like a gale smiting an oak’ is in essence an epic simile like those which regularly appear in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. By using this literary device Sappho again suggests that matters of the heart are comparable to military matters.
‘But a strange longing to pass on’ is one of a number of erotic songs which express death-longing. Acheron is a lake in the underworld across which the boatman Charon ferries the shades (or ghosts) of the dead. Lotuses (probably the Ziziphus lotus), associated with forgetfulness, grow along its shore. Sappho handles the underworld motif in a conventional manner, and Giuliana Lanata observes that ‘the relative fixity of its formulation expresses a moment typical of the Sapphic experience of Eros, destined to repeat itself more times in analogous situations’ (‘Sappho’s Amatory Language’, in Greene 1996, p. 19).
But a strange longing to pass on
但有一种奇怪的渴望要传递下去
Seizes me, and I need to see
抓住我，我需要看到
Lotuses on the dewy banks of Acheron.
But I must suffer further, worthless
但我必须忍受更多的痛苦，毫无价值
As I am…
我就是这样。
‘In all honesty, I want to die.’
“老实说，我想死。”
Leaving for good after a good long cry,
在痛痛快快地大哭一场后，永远地离开
She said: ‘We both have suffered terribly,
她说：“我们俩都遭受了巨大的痛苦。
But, Sappho, it is hard to say goodbye.’
Always remembering what we did. To me
永远记住我们所做的一切。对我来说
You have meant everything, as you well know.
你知道，你意味着一切。
‘Yet, lest it slip your mind, I shall review
“然而，为了避免你忘记，我将回顾
Everything we have shared – the good times, too:
我们分享的一切——也包括美好的时光：
‘You culled violets and roses, bloom and stem,
“你采摘了紫罗兰和玫瑰，花和茎，
Often in spring and I looked on as you
常常在春天，我看着你
Wove a bouquet into a diadem.
将花束编织成王冠。
‘Time and again we plucked lush flowers, wed
“我们一次又一次地摘下繁茂的花朵，结了婚。
May gales and anguish sweep elsewhere
五月的狂风和痛苦会席卷其他地方
The killer of my character.
我性格的杀手。
HER GIRLS AND FAMILY
We know that ‘But I love extravagance’ are the last two lines of a four-line epigram.
Stand and face me, dear; release
亲爱的，站起来面对我，放开
That fineness in your irises.
你虹膜上的细腻。
‘May you bed down’ may have belonged to a similar context, and one of Sappho’s very brief makarismoi fragments may have appeared shortly before it, such as fragment 117: ‘Farewell, bride, and farewell, groom’.
The girl adored you more than anything,
这个女孩崇拜你胜过一切，
As if you were a goddess –
就好像你是一位女神 –
But most of all she loved to hear you sing.
但最重要的是，她喜欢听你唱歌。
Now she outshines those dames with Lydian faces
现在她比那些有着利迪亚面孔的女人更光彩照人
Just as, when the sun
就像，当太阳升起时
Has set, the rosy-fingered Moon surpasses
月出皎兮，佼人僚兮。舒窈纠兮，劳心悄兮。月出皓兮，佼人懰兮。舒懮受兮，劳心慅兮。月出照兮，佼人燎兮。舒夭绍兮，劳心惨兮。
The stars surrounding her.
‘You will have memories’ preserves a part of this process. However, we are left to wonder just what beautiful things the speaker and addressee ‘did back then’ when they were young, which, the speaker asserts, will remain with the addressee throughout her life.
You will have memories
你会有回忆
Because of what we did back then
因为我们那时所做的一切
When we were new at this,
当我们刚开始做这件事时，
Yes, we did many things, then – all
是的，当时我们做了很多事情，所有
Beautiful…
真美。
I loved you once, years ago, Atthis,
几年前，我曾经爱过你，阿特丝。
When your flower was in place.
当你的花到位时。
You seemed a gawky girl then, artless,
你那时看起来像个笨拙的女孩，没有艺术感，
Without grace.
没有恩典。
… because
因为
The people I most strive to please
我最努力取悦的人
Do me the worst injuries…
给我造成最严重的伤害。
Sappho does not merely study the experience of love and loss in others but actively participates.
As you are dear to me, go claim a younger
因为你是我的挚爱，去要求一个更年轻的
Bed as your due.
按时睡觉吧。
I asked thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
我问你，“给我不朽吧。”
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
然后，你微笑着答应了我的请求。
Like wealthy men who care not how they give.
就像那些不在乎如何给予的富人一样。
But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills,
但你强大的时辰愤怒地执行了他们的意志，
And beat me down and marred and wasted me,
击败我，毁坏我，耗尽我，
And though they could not end me, left me maimed
虽然他们无法结束我，却让我伤痕累累
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
与不朽的青春同在，
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
永恒的年纪与永恒的青春并存，
And all I was, in ashes.
They say that rosy-forearmed Dawn, when stung
他们说，当玫瑰色手臂的黎明被刺伤时
With love, swept a sweet youth to the earth’s rim –
伴随着爱，甜蜜的青春被扫到了地球的边缘
Tithonous. Even there age withered him,
提托诺斯。即使在那里，年龄也使他枯萎，
Bound still to a wife forever young.
仍然被妻子束缚，永远年轻。
I have a daughter who reminds me of
我有一个女儿，她让我想起了
A marigold in bloom.
盛开的万寿菊。
Kleïs is her name,
克莱斯是她的名字，
And I adore her.
我很崇拜她。
TROY
As Wilson points out: ‘there is no good and evil in [this song], merely a superlative state that could be defined as excellence’ (1996, p. 154).
In Sappho’s fragment military divisions serve as foils leading up to the climactic declaration: the ‘most beautiful’ thing is ‘whatever a person most lusts after’.
Further confusion has resulted from reading Helen as love object instead of active subject. She decides of her own free will to give up her husband and family for a person that she desires.
Dubois sees this poem as ‘one of the few texts which break the silence of women in antiquity, an instant in which women become more than the objects of man’s desire’ (1996, p. 79).
As Sappho revises the traditional account of Helen’s arrival at Troy, so here she further alters the backstory: everyone must have heard, or so the speaker claims, that Leda simply found the egg from which her children (including Helen) were born. In the standard version Leda is impregnated both by Zeus (in the form of a swan) and her husband Tyndareus. She gives birth to two eggs: one containing Helen and Polydeuces (Zeus’ children) and another with Clytemnestra and Castor (Tyndareus’ children).
MAIDENS AND MARRIAGES
In Greek literature the culling of flowers indicates that a girl is ready for marriage. The maiden, however, is most tempting at this time, and her plucking of a bloom often leads to her own deflowering. She is both defenceless and seductive.
Once as a too, too lissome
曾经，我是一个太，太灵活的人
Maiden was plucking a blossom…
少女在摘花。
And all the gods pronounced her Frontier Goddess 所有的神都称她为边疆女神 And Slayer of Stags, and Eros never crosses 猎杀牡鹿者，爱神从不越雷池半步 Her path… 她的路。
These two similes, ‘A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all’ and ‘A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat’, are both composed in a metre called dactylic hexameter, used in hymns, epithalamia and epic.
… I urge you not to slip and fall, my dears.
…我恳求你们不要滑倒，亲爱的。
Remember how flagrantly you have attained
还记得你是如何明目张胆地获得
The buxom age that turns the heads of men.
丰满的年龄，让男人目不转睛。
A ripe fruit is not easy to protect.
成熟的果实不容易保护。
A ripe red apple grows, the highest of them all,
一颗成熟的红苹果生长着，它是最高的。
Over the treetop, way up on a tapering spray, But apple-gatherers never see it – no, Rather, they do see it is far away, Beyond their reach, impossible. This matter stands just so.
A hillside hyacinth shepherds treaded flat, A red bloom in the dust – it is like that. ‘Maidenhead, maidenhead, where have you gone?’ ‘I shall never, ever join you again.’
In ‘What do you resemble, dear husband-to-be?’ the answer (a sapling) suggests both the youth of the groom and the ‘family tree’ that will grow from him. Genital joking is not far beneath the surface of this fragment as well.
Compare the anonymous phallic song: ‘Get up and give the god some room to grow, for the god – upright, in full throb – longs to pass through our midst’ (Denys Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (1962), 851a).
THE WISDOM OF SAPPHO
Aristotle defines a gnomē as ‘a statement not about particular things, such as what sort of man Iphicrates is, but about generalities, and not about all things, such as that straight is the opposite of crooked, but about kinds of actions and whether they should be taken or avoided’ (Rhetoric 1394a21–6).
Two of the most famous gnomai were written in the entry to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess’ and ‘Know thyself.’
In Figures of Speech the Greek grammarian Tryphon (late first century BCE) cites ‘Neither the honey nor the bee’ as an example of a proverb, and the anthologist Diogenian (early second century CE) explains in his work on Proverbs that it ‘is used of those who are unwilling to take the good along with the bad’. The original is mēte moi meli mēte melissa. I was unable to preserve its striking alliteration.
The gorgeous man presents a gorgeous view; The good man will in time be gorgeous, too.
The fragment captures the fatalistic mindset of the lover. Certain that she has been scorned, the lover only wonders why.
‘I want to tell you something but good taste Restrains me.’
I declare That later on, Even in an age unlike our own, Someone will remember who we are.
by F. W.