If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

Overview

Reading Sappho means reading damage. She wrote nine books of lyric poetry around 600 BCE on Lesbos, in the Aeolic dialect, for performance to the lyre. Of that, one poem survives entire. Everything else is fragments: lines quoted by later writers, usually because the grammarian wanted to illustrate a rare word, and scraps of papyrus recovered from Egyptian rubbish heaps, some of which have been torn or cut so that only the middle of each line remains.

The standard numbering comes from Eva-Maria Voigt’s edition, and modern translations use it, so fragment 31 means the same poem in Carson as in Rayor.

The losses keep changing. In 2004 a papyrus supplied most of what is now called the Tithonus poem, about old age. In 2014 two more substantially complete poems appeared, though their provenance turned out to be badly compromised and the scholarly community has since treated them with great caution. The corpus is not stable.

How a translator handles the gaps changes the reading entirely. Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter prints the Greek opposite and marks every lacuna with square brackets, so you see the poems as ruins. Others supply plausible words and give you something smoother and less accurate. Both are defensible; know which you have.

What happens

The one complete poem. Fragment 1, the Hymn to Aphrodite, survives because Dionysius of Halicarnassus quoted it entire as an example of polished style. Sappho calls on Aphrodite for help, and the goddess arrives in a chariot drawn by sparrows, smiling, and asks what is wrong this time, whom Sappho wants now, and who is to be persuaded. She promises that the reluctant one will pursue, will give gifts, will love against her will. The poem’s charm is the goddess’s exasperated familiarity: this has happened before and will happen again.

Fragment 31. The most influential poem in the collection and one of the most influential in any language. The speaker watches a man sitting opposite a woman, listening to her talk and laugh, and calls him godlike. Then the symptoms: the heart shaking, the voice gone, the tongue broken, a thin fire running under the skin, the eyes seeing nothing, the ears drumming, cold sweat, trembling, greener than grass, and the sense of being a little short of dying.

What makes it new is that it is a clinical report. Homer’s characters have emotions described from outside; this is a body described from within by the person inside it. Catullus translated it into Latin, Longinus quoted it as the example of how to select and combine details, and it has been rewritten ever since. It breaks off unfinished, and nobody knows whether the last stanza is lost or whether the break is the poem.

Fragment 16. The most argued-over. It opens with a priamel: some say cavalry is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, some infantry, some ships, but I say it is whatever a person loves. Then the argument: Helen, the most beautiful of all, left the best of husbands and sailed to Troy, and was led by love. Then the turn to the particular, to Anactoria who is absent, whose step and bright face Sappho would rather see than all the chariots of the Lydians and armed infantry.

It is worth noticing how the poem is built. It states a general thesis, supports it from myth, and lands on one absent woman, which is the opposite of the epic movement from a person to a war.

The Tithonus poem. Recovered in 2004 and now the clearest thing we have on Sappho and age. She tells the girls to take the gifts of the Muses and the lyre, and says her own knees no longer carry her, that once she danced like a fawn, and that her hair has gone white. Then the myth: Eos took Tithonus, asked for him to be made deathless, forgot to ask for youth, and he aged forever at the edge of the world. There is no consolation offered.

The rest. A few hundred pieces. Wedding songs, sometimes bawdy, with the bridegroom compared to a war god and the bride to a quince left on the highest branch that the pickers could not reach. Addresses to named women: Atthis, Gongyla, Anactoria. Quarrels with a rival called Andromeda. Short things of a line or two that are among the best: the moon and the Pleiades set and the speaker lying alone; a description of desire as a sweet-bitter creature nothing can be done about; the wind falling on oaks. Some are a single word.

How to read it

Read Carson’s If Not, Winter first. The bracketed gaps are honest and they force you to read what is actually there.

Read fragment 31 several times and then read Catullus 51, which is a translation of it, and notice what a Roman did with the last stanza.

Do not try to reconstruct a biography. Almost everything traditionally said about Sappho comes from much later sources with agendas: that she ran a school, that she threw herself off a cliff for love of a ferryman, that she was ugly. Ancient comedy invented a great deal of it. What we have is poems addressed to women, by a woman, in a society where women’s poetry was performed among women, and pressing beyond that is guesswork.

Take the fragments as fragments. A modern ear, trained on imagism, finds a two-word scrap beautiful in ways Sappho did not intend, and it is worth being aware that some of the effect is the accident of loss.

Read her against Homer, who is the other thing Greek poetry was. Fragment 16 is a direct argument with the epic scale of value, and it wins on its own terms.

Questions it raises

• Is fragment 31 about jealousy of the man, desire for the woman, or the experience of desire as such? The poem does not say, and the man is never mentioned again.
• Fragment 16 argues that beauty is whatever one loves. Is that a theory of value, or a refusal to have one?
• How much of Sappho’s modern effect comes from the fragmentation? Would complete poems be better?
• The poems are addressed to named women in specific circumstances. What is lost by reading them as universal love poetry?
• The biography is almost entirely invention by later writers. Why has so much been invented about her in particular?
• Nine books became one poem and some scraps. What does it mean to call someone a major poet on this evidence?