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Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments (Penguin Classics)

par Sappho, Aaron Poochigian (Traducteur)

Autres auteurs: Carol Ann Duffy (Préface), Edith Handler (Artiste de la couverture)

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1977136,850 (4.37)2
More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.… (plus d'informations)
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Beautiful queer poetry ( )
  cleverlettuce | Nov 6, 2023 |
Sappho of Lesbos: Both her name and that of her native island have long designated homoerotic love between women. But she was more than that. Aristotle called her the tenth muse. As Homer was remembered as the paragon of the epic, she was of the lyric—texts meant to be sung accompanied by the lyre (she also seems to have invented one model of that instrument).
So high was the esteem she was held in that two librarians in Alexandria commissioned a collection of her works, which filled nine volumes. But, unfortunately, those have been lost like the rest of the Great Library. For centuries, the little of her preserved writing was in quotations in surviving books by others. More recently, this has been supplemented by papyrus finds (sometimes used as mummy wrapping).
It remains a fraction of what she created, perhaps ten percent. This book presents, in English translation, what we have. By my count, 479 lines. About one-third of the 150 or so pages in this volume are preface (by Carol Ann Duffy) and introduction by the translator, Aaron Poochigian. The poems and fragments themselves are printed with commentary on each facing page.
I found the editorial matter, both introduction and commentary, helpful. The introduction provides historical context and the various interpretations drawn from the little known of Sappho’s life. While the nineteenth-century suggestion that Sappho ran a boarding school was too much of its time, the reality might not have been far off. Sappho seems to have been entrusted with the care of maidens between puberty and marriage. In addition to matters of grooming and adornment, she instructed them in music and dance. Her lyrics were meant to be performed, whether solo or chorally. A good number of her works that survive are wedding hymns (epithalamia), suggesting that the group played an active role in wedding rituals as each was married off one by one. In the meantime, Sappho and her girls formed romantic attachments among themselves. The poems make clear that the boundaries between companion, teacher, role model, and lover were fluid and were no impediment to marriage (as an affair with a boy would have been).
Poochigian also explains his translation aims. He reports his disappointment that existing translations focus on the content, neglecting formal elements. On the other hand, he feels that attempts to reproduce the original meter of ancient Greek are flawed. Although Sappho didn’t, he opts to use rhyme to convey to English-speaking readers that these were song lyrics and to correspond to the emphatic line-endings Sappho often employed.
The commentary identifies geographical references and the various gods Sappho addresses (I can never keep Greek mythology straight). In the extant poems, Sappho doesn’t address male gods and only rarely refers to them. Most frequently, she appeals to Aphrodite, often addressed as Kypris (Cyprus, the island origin of the love goddess). It also identifies where a given lyric was cited by other antique authors.
And the poems themselves? I was surprised by how well they transcend the vast distance of time and language. They are the words of a woman who achieved a surprising degree of autonomy when I can’t imagine it was easy. She sings of tenderness, longing, jealousy, of the pleasure of memory. One poem I particularly enjoyed is the voice of a woman grown old, whose knees no longer permit her to join the dance. She encourages her girls to “chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns.” There is acceptance in her melancholy: “I groan much but to what end? Humans simply cannot be ageless like divinities.”
The poems and fragments are arranged according to theme: Goddesses, Desire and Death-Longing, Her Girls and Family, Troy, Maidens and Marriages, and The Wisdom of Sappho. I found this arrangement sensible. An appendix to this edition (2015) prints the two newest poems recovered. We can only hope that there are more to be discovered, whether in mummy wrappings or ancient trash heaps. ( )
  HenrySt123 | Oct 13, 2022 |
While the title of this collection highlights the erotic attitude of the poems of Sappho, there is a wonderful fragment of a poem entitled "Troy" that presents a mythic narrative. In doing so she veers away from the emphasis of the Homeric epic and focuses on a conventionally 'feminine' theme, a wedding scene. She elevates the wedding to epic magnitude, all the while featuring excellence rather than the morality of good and evil.

Other poems and fragments present themes of goddesses, desire, girls and their family, and marriage. The result in an excellent translation is a delightful selection. Here is a typical quatrain:

Untainted Graces
With wrists like roses,
Please come close,
You daughters of Zeus.

Sappho lived in a time of transition for Greece, after the Homeric era but before the more famous Golden Age of Athens. I, like others, find her language enchanting, and the gathering of poems and fragments by subject lends an order to this collection. Her passion shines through both the millennia and the translation to charm the reader while leaving a bit of sadness that we do not have more of her oeuvre. ( )
  jwhenderson | Oct 25, 2020 |
This book collects the entire known surviving works of the Greek poet, Sappho, who managed to cause her native island of Lesbos to become permanently associated with female homosexuality and have her own name modified into an adjective. Unfortunately for such an influential woman, her extant works sum to a slim volume of fragments from larger poems. This seems to be a great loss, as what does remain is remarkable.

Sappho famously dealt with the love and life of women as seriously as Homer dealt with the feuds and plots of men and gods and she did so in delightful, vivacious language, if these translations are any kind of reliable guide to the original.

The translator has placed a commentary facing each fragment as well as providing a concise introduction to what is known about Sappho and the society she lived in. These commentaries are often longer than the fragments they annotate, but they do illuminate and are worth the little amount of extra time they take to read. The entire book can be read with attention in an afternoon and if you are a fan of poetry generally, or of Greek literature, I strongly recommend you invest the time to do so. ( )
  Arbieroo | Jul 17, 2020 |
Greek Lyric: Sappho · Alcaeus, tr. David A Campbell, Loeb 1990
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, tr. Anne Carson, Virago 2002
Stung With Love: Poems and Fragments, tr. Aaron Poochigian, Penguin 2015

SAPPHICS FOR SAPPHO

Each ellipsis teases, inviting dreams – dreams
Formed from torn papyruses' single words. Bare,
Lonely scrawls of sigmas and psis that sing, still,
Sticky with meaning.

Fragments all. What's left is the one percent, rich,
Rare. When Alexandria burned, the whole world
Choked to breathe the smoke of the ninety-nine. Now,
Desperate to get you

Back, we trawl millennia-old unearthed dumps,
Hunting out your clotted Aeolic strung lines.
Lone hendecasyllables' sounds that awed Greeks
After you quoted.

Questing, reading, marvelling – so we search on,
Poets seeking answers to questions all lost
Lovers ask. Your answers still reach us, drenched, fresh
From the Aegean.

A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS

Towards the end of the second century AD, in the last flickering light of classical Greece, a philosopher called Maximus, in a city on the Levantine coast, wrote a grammatical textbook about figures of speech. Casting around in old books for examples of how poets have described love, he writes: ‘Diotima says that Love flourishes when he has abundance but dies when he is in need: Sappho combined these ideas and called Love bitter-sweet and “ἀλγεσίδωρον”.’

So we have this one word that Sappho wrote, some eight centuries before Maximus was born. This is what we mean when we talk about her poetry existing in ‘fragments’. The Canadian poet Anne Carson translates this example as:

171

paingiver


Very often these remnants are quoted with no regard to any poetic quality, but rather in illustration of some grammatical point. Apollonius Dyscolus, for instance, writing again some time in the 100s AD, included a throwaway remark on variant dialects during an essay on pronouns. ‘The Aeolians,’ he said, ‘spell ὅς [‘his, hers, its’] with digamma in all cases and genders, as in Sappho's τὸν ϝὸν παῖδα κάλει.’ Again Carson's translation gives us just the phrase in question:

164

she summons her son


Carson's translation of Sappho's oeuvre is well subtitled ‘Fragments of Sappho’, since most of what's left is of this nature. It's certainly nice to have everything collected in this way in English, though it must be admitted that her book sometimes seems more an exercise in completionism than in poetic expression. That said, as other reviewers have pointed out, reading pages and pages of these deracinated terms (‘holder…crossable…I might go…downrushing’) can succeed in generating a certain hypnotic, Zen-like appeal.

Nevertheless, such things lose a lot by being read in isolation; the as it were archaeological pleasure of digging them out of their original context, in works of grammar or rhetoric, is completely absent. For that, the Loeb edition translated by David A. Campbell is far preferable, for all that he has no pretensions to being a poet, just because you get Sappho delivered in that context of other writers. The fonts used for the Greek are also much more readable in the Loeb. (The Carson edition does include the original Greek, and points for that – though there are some strange editorial…choices? mistakes? – such as printing ς for σ in all positions.)

MUSIC AND LYRICS

To the Ancient Greeks, Homer was simply ‘The Poet’ – and ‘The Poetess’ was Sappho. She was held in extraordinarily high esteem, which makes it the more frustrating that so much of her has been lost: ninety-nine percent, according to some experts. Only one or two poems remain that can be said to be more or less complete.

Her poetry is mainly ‘lyric’, that is, designed to be sung while strumming along on the lyre. Sappho was, in modern terms, a singer-songwriter; she was known to be an extremely talented musician, designing a new kind of lyre and perhaps even inventing the plectrum. When we read her poetry now, we have to remember that we're looking at something like a shredded collection of Bob Dylan or Georges Brassens lyrics, with no idea of how their meaning would have interacted with the music.

But however important the lost melodies, we do know that she was revered for the beauty of her phrasing. This is something translators struggle with. Fragment 146, a proverb about not wanting to take the bad with the good, is rendered literally by Campbell as ‘I want neither the honey nor the bee’ and by Carson, ‘Neither for me honey nor the honey bee’ – which is better, but consider the alliterative dazzle of the original:

μήτε μοι μέλι μήτε μέλισσα
[mēte moi meli mēte melissa]


Reading the Greek, even if you don't understand what any of the words mean, will often get you halfway there with Sappho. Say it out loud and you'll get a tingle, as it starts to dawn on you what all the fuss might have been about.

But the rest of the job has to be done by translators. The Loeb edition will not help you here: its prose translations are only a crib to help you study the original. Carson's approach is slightly conflicted. She quotes approvingly a well-known statement from Walter Benjamin to the effect that a translation should ‘find that intended effect…which produces in it the echo of the original’, i.e. that one should translate ideas and feelings rather than words. But she also claims to be trying to use ‘where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did’, which is the sort of thing that makes me instantly suspicious.

Here's her version of Fragment 2, which is one of the more complete poems we have, scratched on to a broken piece of pottery which has miraculously survived from the second century AD. The first stanza (an invocation to Aphrodite) is probably missing, but the next two run like this:

]
here to me from Krete to this holy temple
where is your graceful grove
of apple trees and altars smoking
with frankincense.

And it in cold water makes a clear sound through
apple branches and with roses the whole place
is shadowed and down from radiant-shaking leaves
sleep comes dropping.


This is not bad. I think the word order is unnecessarily foreign at times, but it does sound good and Carson even includes a few of Sappho's famous hendecasyllabic lines – though they are not true ‘Sapphic’ verses, a very strict form which is not well adapted to English (as you may be able to tell from my attempt at the top of this review).

Aaron Poochigian, in a selected edition for Penguin Classics, takes a different approach. ‘Sappho did not compose free verse,’ he chides, perhaps with one eye on Carson, ‘and free-verse translations, however faithful they may be to her words, betray her poems by their very nature.’ Poochigian's version of the stanzas above goes like this:

Leave Crete and sweep to this blest temple
Where apple-orchard's elegance
Is yours, and smouldering altars, ample
Frankincense.

Here under boughs a bracing spring
Percolates, roses without number
Umber the earth and, rustling,
The leaves drip slumber.


I think that's pretty great. It takes much more liberties with Sappho's actual words but, to the extent that it produces a sensual thrill in English, it more faithfully reproduces the effect that Sappho had on her original audience. At least, to me it does. Poochigian's selection, called Stung with Love, is much shorter than the other two I read, but a very good encapsulation of her qualities. It also has by far the best introduction, a brilliant essay which puts Sappho in her context extremely well. And because it's the most recently published, it's also able to include the magic new Sappho poem discovered in 2013, written on a scrap of papyrus used to stuff a mummy.

BIGGER THAN A BIG MAN

‘Someone will remember us / I say / even in another time.’ Another fragment. The irony of this one upset me at first, because she should have survived in far greater quantities than she did. But even so, the thrill of hearing the voice of a woman who lived six centuries before Christ was enough to catch my breath over and over again. Generally speaking, women in antiquity are pretty silent. But Sappho isn't, and her influence, despite the meagre remains we have, is ginormous.

It might sound hyperbolic to claim that all modern love poetry is inherited from Sappho, but in fact there's a very real sense in which that's true – so great was her reputation among Classical writers and the Europeans who, in turn, studied them, that it's quite possible to trace a direct line from Sappho, through Catullus, to the Romantic poets and from them to contemporary pop lyrics. Every song about the pain of unrequited love owes something to Sappho's Fragment 31, for example – ideas now so clichéd that we forget they have an ancestry at all. That's just natural, surely – just the way people speak? But no, it isn't natural, it's Sappho. She's part of our inheritance, part of our language. She's under our tongue. ( )
  Widsith | Oct 21, 2016 |
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Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
SapphoAuteurauteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Poochigian, AaronTraducteurauteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Duffy, Carol AnnPréfaceauteur secondairetoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Handler, EdithArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairetoutes les éditionsconfirmé

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More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving poetry.

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