March 24: Sappho
One difficulty with reading Sappho is that none of her poems has come
down to us complete. In some cases, what we have are torn fragments of
papyrus found in Egypt; because of the tears and other damage words and phrases
have been lost, and editors have to guess at the missing words. In other
cases we have isolated phrases and short snippets quoted by later classical and
early medieval authors. These snippets sometimes contain striking images,
but read outside of the context of the longer poems of which they were a part,
they can leave the misleading impression that Sappho wrote something like haiku
(this is particularly true of the translations by Barnard).
A second difficulty is that translation is inevitably interpretation,
and as a result there will be subtle variations from one translation to another
among translations of the same work. This is particularly true of
Sappho's poetry. The following chart is a concordance of sorts for some
of Sappho’s most famous poems:
|
standard number (Lobel/Page edition) |
(don’t worry about the transcription of the Greek) |
[.pdf file] |
||
|
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
Dapple-throned Aphrodite |
|
16 |
16 |
3 |
4 |
To any army wife in Sardis |
|
31 |
31 |
2 |
8 |
He is more than a hero |
|
34 |
34 |
4 |
|
|
|
55 |
|
65 |
|
|
|
94 |
94 |
|
|
No word |
|
96 |
96 |
. |
. |
. |
|
. |
. |
. |
. |
. |
|
. |
. |
. |
. |
. |
1. Read all of the translations listed above.
How do they differ from one another? Generally speaking, which do you
prefer? Why?
2. What is each of these poems about?
3. How would you characterize their subject matter
as a group?
4. Under what circumstances would you imagine they
were first recited/performed? Why?
5. How "private/personal" is this
poetry? How "public"? What is
"private/personal" about it? What is "public?"
6. Read Cox' translations numbers 90-104 [scroll down]. These fragments are generally considered to
come from songs sung at weddings (epithalamia).
a. to judge from these fragments, what are the
principal themes of these epithalamia?
b. to judge from these fragments, how are these epithalamia
similar to the poems of Sappho you read earlier? how are they different?