“Taking Back Sappho: Poetic Adaptors, Translators, and Her Legacy of Control”
“Taking Back Sappho: Poetic Adaptors, Translators, and her Legacy of Control”
Siobhan Claire Hodge 20146976 B.A. (Hons), The University of Western Australia, 2010
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia
School of Humanities Discipline of English
2014
1 Thesis Abstract
Title: “Taking Back Sappho”: Poetic Adaptors, Translators, and her Legacy of Control
The fragmentary works of the ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos have occupied a privileged place in the English-language literary canon since the recovery and translation of some of her work in the sixteenth century. However, she has been subjected to a range of appropriations and constructions, including clumsy English translations, heterosexualised pronouns and myths, and “socially acceptable” reinventions as a schoolteacher and supportive maternal figure. Despite this, Sappho’s poetry can be seen as retaining its persistent, subtle focus on self-control and how to exercise control over others. Contrary to visions of Sappho as a gentle poetic speaker, a consistent portrayal of a much more cunning and manipulative figure in her poetry can be identified.
Subtle hierarchies of voice and space have not gone unnoticed. Some women poets, writing across a range of centuries and contexts, have recognised and adapted Sapphic themes and techniques to articulate similar needs and desires. In this dissertation, I closely examine the works of some of these poets in order to illustrate not only the scope of Sappho’s influence on later writers, but also the diverse ways in which Sappho’s own poetry presented these influences.
Presented in six chapters, the investigation begins with examinations of three of Sappho’s most well known texts: Fragment 31, Fragment 1, and Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus. These are related to smaller, less frequently studied fragments of Sappho’s poetry, and also aligned with later women poets not typically associated with Sappho. Poetry by Lady Mary Wroth, Louise Labé, Grace Schulman, Judith Wright, Carolyn Kizer and M.T.C. Cronin will feature in later chapters, and their connections with Sappho’s body of work discussed in detail. In all chapters, a consistent focus on subtle plays for control and influence will be demonstrated, across Sappho’s poetic oeuvre and beyond, into the works of her literary successors and even some of her most restrictive translations, supporting the theory that Sappho’s poetic legacy has not been wholly preoccupied with sentimentality and beauty, but also strongly hostile and possessive emotions.
2 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank several people for their invaluable assistance, patience, and support in my writing of this thesis.
Many thanks to my supervisors John Kinsella, Robert White and Shalmalee Palekar for their constant dedication, enthusiasm, and support throughout the entire project.
Thanks to Van Ikin for helping with the considerable amount of accompanying paperwork, and thanks as well to Michael Champion his assistance with the Greek translations.
Finally, thanks and love to my family, partner, and friends for their continued support and impromptu proof-readings over this time.
3 Contents
Introduction 5
Chapter One 20 Control and Equivalence in Sappho’s Fragment 31
Chapter Two 78 Love, Subversion, and Fragment 1
Chapter Three 104 Controlling Bodies: Ovidian Sappho and Lady Mary Wroth
Chapter Four 126 “I used to wear crowns”: Identity and Hierarchy in Sappho and Louise Labé
Chapter Five 186 Subversive Spaces: Lacunae, Nature and Setting in Sapphic Poetics
Chapter Six 237 Taking Back Sappho: Cronin, Kizer, and Wright
Conclusion 258
Bibliography 270
Appendix 288 Picking up the Pieces
4 Introduction
Summary The works of ancient Greek Lesbian poet Sappho have occupied a privileged place in English-language literary canon since the recovery and translation of some of her work in the sixteenth century. Despite her controversial sexual preferences and unrepentant self-assertion, which in both her own lifetime and in those of many of her early translators would have been deemed socially unacceptable for women, she has not been lost. However, she has been subjected to a range of censorship attempts, including clumsy English translations, heterosexualised pronouns and myths, and “socially acceptable” reinventions as a schoolteacher and supportive maternal figure.
Interestingly, despite censorship efforts in translation, popular mythology and pseudo- biographical details, Sappho’s work has largely retained its subtle focus on self-control and how to exercise control over others. Contrary to visions of Sappho as a strictly emotional, loving and gentle poetic speaker, there is a consistent portrayal of a much more calculating and manipulative figure in her poetry. This is apparent upon close analysis of the original Greek and translated English versions of Sappho’s poetry, as well as the most prevalent of her myths. Contrary to the views of some scholars, Sappho’s poetry consistently and subtly articulates an obsessive, emotionally engaged view of the speaker’s and poet’s own abilities, insisting on control over her settings and poetic figures. Even in some of her most “loving” poems, Sappho’s speaker articulates strong self-interest and elevates herself to a high social position, without necessarily extending the same courtesy to beloved personae.
These subtle hierarchies of voice and space have not gone unnoticed, at least on creative levels. Women poets, writing across a range of centuries, contexts and individual beliefs, have recognised and adapted these Sapphic themes and techniques to articulate similar needs and desires, unified by some unconventionally feminine foci and articulations of authority. In this investigation, I will closely examine the works of some of these poets in order to illustrate not only the scope of Sappho’s influence on later writers, but also the diverse ways in which Sappho presented these influences.
Introduction The ancient Greek poet Sappho, born between 630 and 612 BCE, has had a long and sometimes turbulent relationship with translators, scholars, and poets in
5 English over the centuries. In part this can be attributed to the fragmentary state of her work, largely lost, partially degraded, or recovered “second-hand” via questionably direct quotations in others’ works. Her poetry has been preserved in two main states: quoted in certain ancient texts; and on papyri dug up from an Egyptian archaeological site in Oxyrhynchus, now called Behnasa. The physical deterioration of these excavated pieces, and the questionable authority of versions recorded by Longinus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, make reading Sappho’s poetry a suspicious process. Legends and scant biographical details, proliferating in light of bawdy Attic comedies, Ovid’s fiction of Sappho, and literary fictions produced by Italian, French and English- speaking authors, have also complicated this matter.
Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, off the coast of Turkey, to a distinguished family. The Byzantine encyclopaedia, the Suda, describes her as Lyric poetess, active in the 42nd Olympiad [612-608 BCE], when Alcaeus, Stesichorus and Pittacus also lived. She had three brothers, Larichus, Charaxus and Eurygius. She was married to a very wealthy man called Cercylas, who traded from Andros, and had a daughter by him who was called Cleis. She had three companions and friends, Atthis, Telesippa and Megara, and acquired a bad reputation for her shameful friendship with them. Her pupils were Anagora from Miletus, Gongyla from Colophon, Euneica from Salamis. She wrote nine books of lyric poetry. She invented the plectrum. She also wrote epigrams, elegiacs, iambics and solo songs.1 However, Margaret Williamson notes that all this information is all disputable.2 Sappho appears on ancient artwork and is consistently portrayed in poetic settings, holding a lyre and plectrum, and labelled with her name.3 Despite this, Sappho later became a caricatured figure in bawdy comedies in Athens, and much of her poetry was also physically lost when copies housed in the libraries
1 Quoted by Margaret Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, p 1-2. 2 Williamson notes that the Suda’s list of possible names for Sappho’s father is just one ‘open admission of ignorance’. The proposed name for Sappho’s husband is also an obscene pun, translating to ‘Prick from the Isle of Man’: Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 2. 3 Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 6.
6 of Constantinople, which succeeded Alexandria, were subjected to sackings and burnings, including that by the Crusaders in 1204.4
This project examines some of the complexities of reading Sappho in light of such uneven transmission. The investigation does not intend to promote a definitive edition of Sappho’s poetry, nor to compare the merits of one translator over another, but to examine those translations that best present a controlling, manipulative vision of Sappho. More general translations available to early women poets, whose works will be compared to Sappho’s and their similar foci analysed, will also be examined in detail. For clarity of analysis, this thesis will commence with an assessment of Sappho’s poetic structures and imagery, demonstrated in three of the most prominent texts associated with the poet: poems Fragment 1 and Fragment 31; and Ovid’s version of the Phaon legend. Later chapters will then closely examine later poets’ engagements with these, with close reference to Sappho’s poetry.
Central to the exploration are ideas of “subversion” and “control”, both of which have not historically received much attention in Sappho scholarship. Traditionally Sappho’s poetry and legends have been aligned with expressions of love and celebrations of beauty, rather than any manipulative traits. More recently, Anne Carson has acknowledged that Sappho was the first to call eros “bittersweet”: Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two…We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious.5 This tension between control and freedom of desire, self-expression and oppression, appears in several, subtle forms across Sappho’s oeuvre, particularly in her depictions of other women. Her approach can be likened to Adrienne Rich’s definition of relationships among women, which are especially exploitative in Sappho’s poetry:
4 Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion, New York: Palgrave, 2001, p 82.
5 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998, p 3.
7 The woman who tells lies in her personal relationships may or may not plan or invent her lying. She may not even think of what she is doing in a calculated way… [she] lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.6 Rather than lying or acting unthinkingly, Sappho’s speaker appears to consciously manipulate settings and deified images to assert control over other figures in her poems. Such gestures subvert traditional readings of Sappho’s poetic motivations and techniques as expressing love and communal feelings for a group of women or a few, beloved figures, and also subvert some of the contextual beliefs about women at the times of production for some translations and creative adaptations. In addition, many of these poetic manoeuvres are associated with “control”, manifested as emotional manipulation and direct or indirect forms of dominance over other figures’ bodies, in her work.
Both subversion and control are encoded with historical and linguistic contexts. Sappho’s poetry, and even the heterosexual myth of her love for a man named Phaon, all contain potentially “subversive” content, in that these privilege the thoughts, emotions and desires of an active female speaker, rather than male, which in the poet’s own context were neither conventionally solicited nor celebrated. Later poets engaging with Sappho can also appear to “subvert” gendered conventions, or promote such subversions, varying between contexts. This project engages with a very wide geographic and temporal span of women poets, spanning from sixteenth-century France, to late sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth century Britain, and then twentieth and twenty-first century Australia and the USA. There is no uniform standard for “subversion” across these contexts, but the poets are linked via application of Sapphic techniques and imagery, primarily where a female speaker emphasises the importance of her own thoughts and desires, exercising power over other figures and settings in poetry. The results of such expressions include poetic themes that can be
6 Adrienne Rich quoted in [eds.] Elizabeth Frazer, Jennifer Hornsby, Sabina Lovibond, Ethics: A Feminist Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p 329.
8 interpreted as feminist, in that they articulate female desires at the expense of patriarchal, conservative expectations for women.
Two major terms will recur in this investigation’s discussion of Sappho’s representations of her speakers, focal personae, listeners, deities, and excluded figures: “subtle feminism” and “proto-feminism”. Since it is not possible to fully glean Sappho’s stance on the rights and roles of women from existing sources, nor compare these to contemporary or earlier understandings of feminist theory, her poetic engagements with control, voice, and agency in relation to women cannot be simply assessed under current understandings of the field. However, Sappho’s obvious interest in articulating and achieving particular self- orientated goals in her poems, often in spite of or subtly counter to external religious and societal values, indicates that she may well have engaged with some form of feminist thinking, though may not have known or identified it as such.
Consequently, the definition to be applied and expanded on in this investigation is “proto-feminist”. This term is also attached to “subtle feminism”, which is applied descriptively to Sappho’s poetic manoeuvres, referring to the fact that these have been strategically applied to garner further influence and agency for her female or feminised speakers, often in situations that would deny or limit such moves. “Subtlety” also reflects the fact that many potentially feminist, or proto-feminist reflections in Sappho’s work, have not been critically examined and therefore may have escaped attention, or have been intentionally ignored for ideological reasons, including perhaps the belief that an ancient Greek woman would not have held such views, nor would have covertly encoded these in her poetics. The various manifestations of this “subtle feminism” will be examined in the chapters to follow and their analyses of Sappho’s technical manipulations and their ultimate accumulations of further influence and agency for her highly individualistic, active and desiring female speakers.
In addition, such reflections on Sappho emphasise the potentially proto-feminist implications of her work, and as a result, its subversive qualities. Whether or
9 not Sappho considered herself “proto-feminist”, or any other sense of term, is uncertain. However, the independence and demanding nature of many of her poetic speakers indicate an active, desiring presence that would have been considered “unfeminine” in light of traditional ancient Greek expectations of female romantic passivity, and therefore at least slightly unorthodox in Sappho’s own time. These views will be discussed further, and in relation to multiple poetic scenarios, in the investigation.
“Subversion” and “violence” are also linked in the investigation, as both relate to Sappho’s subtle plays for power within the settings of her poems, and also over her listeners. Violence in Sappho is not strictly bloodshed, although war-related imagery does appear and contributes to her poetic plays for control over other figures. Interestingly, these images have been downplayed or ignored in much early scholarship. Sappho’s primary poetic acts of violence are: emotional manipulation and duress, such as in Fragment 1; imagined bodily destruction in Fragment 31; and reduction of other figures to silent or passive roles, exclusion and insults, and reduction of people to body parts in many of her other fragments. Emotional dominance is imagined or psychological, rather than physical, and is consistently enacted to ensure that the Sapphic speaker maintains a position of authority and poetic primacy, even in the face of rejection as in Fragment 31. This investigation will demonstrate that these varieties of violence, not typically recognised in Sappho’s poetry, in fact dominate much of her oeuvre, and have also been afforded much creative attention in the works of poets inspired by Sappho’s legends and poetry.
Sappho has been alternately presented in scholarly and creative works as poet, lesbian lover, wife, mother, sister, schoolmistress, cult leader, prostitute, suicide, political exile, literary critic, and more. Different visions have been popular in different time periods and geographical locations, shifting between cohesion with popular morality, and running entirely counter to this. Due to the lesbian themes in her work, Sappho has alternately been censored, shunned and celebrated, even while her poetic prowess has been largely unchallenged. Arguably, it is not only the sexuality of her speakers that is controversial: their
10 strong sense of self, desires for control and influence, and exclusionary processes, all create an atmosphere far from the kind of harmony and idealism promoted in some scholars’ interpretations. To grapple with these mixed images and present a “unified” Sappho, most palatable to public opinion and social norms of the time, has sometimes led to sweeping generalisations and almost wilful blindness to her subtly subversive content.
In this study, I examine fragments of Sappho’s work and legends, and negotiate issues of integrity and authority stemming from such scant remains. Sappho is, in every sense of the word, a second-hand transmission (or more). However, much scholarship has been dedicated to identifying her as an ‘originary’ figure - the ‘first’ lyric poet, the ‘first’ woman poet – and also to determining the validity of sources to which we currently, and historically, have had access. For the purpose of this study, it is not essential to discover which of these sources, varied and fragmented as they are, is the most ‘factual’. Instead I am considering the nature of Sappho’s reception in English, the ideological implications of this reception, and what kinds of work this has inspired later poets to produce. The fragmentary state of Sappho’s body of work and imagined, physical body as a person, are in fact a source of much poetic value, offering lacunae through which other voices may emerge, and strategies by which other, comparatively marginalised poets, may speak and not be silenced.
While Sappho the human figure has been intermittently admired and scorned, approaches to her poetry have been more consistent. Scholars have identified in Sappho’s work a particular appreciation for love, beauty, and certain beloved individuals. Some of her poems have been categorised as epithalamia, others as set pieces for worshipping Aphrodite. More generally, her work has been labelled definitively “feminine”, representative of a communal, women-only setting, and potentially proto-feminist agendas. This in turn has been instrumental in creating an image of Sappho as a gentle, nurturing figure, which does not entirely complement the content of her poems.
11 Issues Involved when Reading Sappho Sappho, as poet and a body of creative work, is composed of many fractured and fragmentary poems, myths, supposed biographical details, and translations. There is no one clear image of her. However, some interpretations can be more readily supported than others with evidence available. Some of these particularly passive, demure and conventionally “feminine” interpretations will be reviewed and contrasted with findings in this investigation. Her poems are not entirely “trustworthy” in that none of the recovered texts were written in Sappho’s own hand, nor have they been found in sequential order, or even as entire poems for the most part. Arguably, only two “complete” poems have been recovered: Fragments 1 and 31, but even the latter has come under recent suspicion. The lacunae in Sappho’s work are considerable, but potentially intentional in some cases, although this is impossible to verify, barring future discovery of further Sapphic poetics.
Margaret Reynolds succinctly asserts that Sappho’s poems are about desire, and loss, and the memory of desire. The pattern is always the same, and the function of the poem is always to re-light desire – through words. The original desire – as something bodily felt by the subject may have disappeared. But the shadow of desire – as something re- enacted through the skill of the poet – is communicated to the object: the listener, the beloved, the audience, the reader of the poem.7 I firmly support Reynolds’ statement that Sappho’s work also uses techniques of layering, engaging not only speaking voices, but times and places, and will examine this in relation to Sappho’s Fragment 31, and in the works of later women poets inspired by this approach.8
Guy Davenport is a “positivist” with regards to Sappho’s nature, describing her as a sweet natured and highly artistic woman. The latter definition is not in question. Davenport remarks that ‘Sappho’s art…belongs to the cultural springtimes and renaissances. Something of its sweetness can be seen in Hilda
7 Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho History, Cambridge, Mass.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, p 1. 8 Reynolds, The Sappho History, p 4.
12 Doolittle’s conscious imitation’.9 At the same time, Davenport recognises a ‘Euclidean terseness and authority of the encounters of the loving heart’ in Sappho’s work, describing her imagery as ‘stark and mattered as the vase painting of her time’.10 His description of Sappho’s home, the isle of Lesbos, is equally emotive: ‘Sappho’s island, for all the awakening of a new world [in comparison to Sparta and Athens] dreamed on in antiquity, in touch with the rest of Hellas yet facing the rich and gaudy Lydian empire on the mainland nearby’.11 While not excessively loaded with romanticism, Davenport’s interpretation of Sappho’s tone and lifestyle constructs the poet and her work as symbolic of a gentle, artistic, and loving tradition. Similarly, Podlecki asserts that Sappho’s poetry is empty of political allusions, but vivid in use of ‘instinct and attitude’.12 Podlecki emphasises Sappho’s emotional range without considering the possibility that political imagery can and does exist in her work, or that poems lost due to degradation may well have contained political commentary. This approach is much too reductive, not only in terms of Sappho’s poetic content, but also in her motivations for use of such “vivid” language.
Progression of Chapters The investigation has been broken into six chapters. The first three chapters establish the primary foundations from which the following three chapters progress, examining in detail three of the texts best-known for their association with Sappho: Fragment 31, Fragment 1, and Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus. The three chapters afterwards are orientated more strongly on particular imagery and themes in Sappho’s work, and their reflections in later women poets’ works. All chapters are linked by a focus on imagery and techniques through which Sappho’s speakers, or Sapphic speakers, are able to derive power and influence in a range of settings, ultimately promoting poets’ self-interests and desires.
9 Guy Davenport, Archilochos Sappho Alkman: Three Lyric Poets of the Late Greek Bronze Age, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980, p 5. 10 Davenport, Archilochos Sappho Alkman, p 6. 11 Davenport, Archilochos Sappho Alkman, p 8. 12 Anthony J. Podlecki, The Early Greek Poets and their Times, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984, p 82.
13 The first and second chapters individually address the two well-known poetic fragments, and the third chapter will then address the most prominent myth of Sappho’s life, that of her love for a man named Phaon, as interpreted by Ovid in the Epistula Sapphus. All three early chapters are linked by their focus on persistent, control-orientated themes and techniques across Sappho’s oeuvre. Several images and technical aspects used in the Aphrodite Ode appear in other, much more fragmentary poems, which will also be assessed in Chapter Two, and further on in the investigation. Chapters One, Two and Three foreground issues such as bodily and emotional violence, obsession with control, self- deification, and creation of hierarchies that do not strictly promote mutual support or empowerment for all female characters. Chapter Two’s close readings of Sappho’s “first” poem and Chapter Three’s assessment of her most prominent myth, will lay the foundations of further analysis of smaller poems and other myths and theories, developed further in Chapter Two. Control- orientated images and ideas exist in all three of these major texts, meaning that later writers may have explored these alongside or instead of more broadly recognised Sapphic poetics, and ultimately may not have been considered to have been inspired by Sappho at all, or perhaps only in part.
The focus on control and emotional dominance prominent in Sappho’s smaller fragmentary poems and myths offers thematic and technical foundations for later poets to adapt. A form of écriture féminine can be identified, and will continue to be identified in Sappho’s poetry and the works of those inspired by her, in later chapters. In particular, Sappho’s references to deities, including Aphrodite, will be assessed for their manipulative and selectively empowering potential for the Sapphic speaker. Issues of layered perception, loss and exchange are critically examined in response to this, observing that Sappho’s poetry is entrenched with issues of controlling perception not only of the poems, but the speakers, settings and themes, and ultimately the readers themselves. In this investigation, the readers to be examined are a selection of female poets “taking back” Sappho from a demure, supportive and loving interpretation, recognising her control-obsessed elements, and then making these same elements features of their own poetry.
14
In the first chapter, an example of some of the issues inherent in reading Sappho’s English translations, mindful of the implications of translation theory as well as Sappho’s contentious poetic and biographical legacies will be presented. My own creative translation of Sappho’s Fragment 31, another of her most physically complete poems, and the methodological processes used to create this translation, will be dissected. The notion of controlling bodies will be further examined as images in Chapters Two and Three, and extended to include the physical structure and “body” of Sappho’s poems, demonstrating the pervasive presence of authoritarian imagery across Sappho’s oeuvre. The role of lacunae, as open access spaces, will be given much critical attention, and how these lacunae have been treated by early and later translators will be assessed in terms of their impact on perceptions of Sappho as an empowered or passive poetic figure. This part of the investigation illustrates how, despite a range of sometimes conflicting translated versions being produced, there are still some essential elements to Sappho’s poetry that would have been available to readers from a range of time periods. Logically speaking, these readers would then have been equipped to respond to Sappho’s poetry in what are currently critically unconventional ways, in that their works would reflect on control and desire as a potentially destructive but in fact empowering state of affairs.
The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters further develop the earlier chapters’ establishment of opportunity and access to subtly subversive Sapphic themes and ideas for two other women poets, writing between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. In Chapter Four, parallels will be drawn contextually between Sappho and maligned sixteenth-century French poet Louise Labé, and also in comparisons to their usages of speakers, and combinations of weaving and crown imagery. Recent controversy over Labé’s identity and the question whether or not she was a poet or merely a name attached to a body of work written by men, will be compared to the controversial reception of Sappho at points in history. Even though Labé wrote in French, this investigation will refer almost exclusively to English versions of her poems. In both versions, Labé refers to her speakers and invokes images of deities, crowns and the act of
15 weaving in very similar ways to Sappho. The consistency with which this takes place indicates not only that the same poet wrote all of the pieces examined, substantiating my investigation’s assertion that Labé was the author of the works attributed to her, but also that Labé intentionally engaged with Sappho as a means of justifying her own expressions of desire. However, Labé also shares similarities with Sappho in that this is achieved with a simultaneous placement of her speaker in a position of authority, and accompanied by a subtle but persistent anxiety about old age.
In Chapter Five, Sappho’s selective use of lacunae and setting is compared to that of later American poet Grace Schulman, whose representations of breakage and restricted access create strikingly similar implications of authority and exclusivity. Sappho not only referred to gods in order to create a sense of supremacy over other characters, but also to privileged spaces, enacting control over geographies described in her fragments. There are no previous scholarly studies that focus on such Sapphic geographies and their potential adaptation in later women’s poetry. These spaces can be understood to also include the fragmentary nature of her poems themselves: were these broken by Sappho herself, or by other means in the process of receiving these in English thousands of years later?
A much more self-conscious image of Sappho arises when these questions are addressed in Chapter Five. By referring to her use of deities and religious spaces in her work, combined with her treatment of characters in her poems, an image of Sappho as a poet preoccupied with not only her contextual control, but also being able to exercise control over her poetic legacy, emerges. Chapter Six will continue this process of thought by closely examining Sapphic imagery, specifically treatment of bodies and voices, in the works of twentieth and twenty-first century women poets not traditionally associated with Sappho. American poet Carolyn Kizer is read alongside Australia’s M.T.C. Cronin and Judith Wright. These poets’ subtle engagements with Sapphic techniques and themes represent a facet of her obsessive, dictatorial legacy; adapting Sappho’s
16 own, manipulative techniques and themes in order to promote openly feminist poetics and explorations of female bodies and desires.
“Subtlety” is one of several key terms in this thesis, referring to two specific theoretical strains. Sappho’s poetry is stylistically subtle in that she applies, or is translated as applying, layers of imagery, tone and structural techniques to criticise particular figures or ideologies, and also to emphasise the control and influence of her speakers. These potentially subversive agendas are not always overt, but can be clearly identified when the full, technical implications of her work are considered. In addition, despite writing in a mode now considered acceptable for women writers to pursue, this was not necessarily the case for Sappho. By giving full consideration to the poet’s context, further subversions, made subtle by shifting societal conceptions of poetry and its creation, can be identified.
Contextually speaking, Sappho’s decision to compose poetry, considered a masculine pursuit in her own lifetime, and to use a first-person speaking voice to make demands and assessments, was not a subtly subversive move. However, later poetic engagements with Sappho, in times where women writing about love, desire and beautiful scenery were considered acceptable, can still be perceived as controversial, even subtly feminist, in that they are still reflecting on this initially unorthodox tradition. By applying “typically” feminine motifs, layered with control-orientated Sapphic imagery, settings and language, later women poets access a means of subtle criticism of gendered modes for writing, as well as historically heavy-handed categorisation and treatment of Sappho’s work.
In all chapters, the subtlety and self-consciousness with which Sappho’s speakers, settings and key images are presented will be analysed, with particular reference to the later theories of écriture féminine and bodily fragmentation. Some of Sappho’s later analysts, writing creatively in response to her work, are likely to have been aware of these theories and to have engaged with these specifically. However, these ideas are still relevant to Sappho herself
17 and early women poets, who may have anticipated if not the full extent of these theories’ implications, then at least some suggestion of their meaning, capable of being gleaned from contextual views of women, female means of expression, and the importance of the physical body. I would suggest that the fragmentary status of Sappho’s poems does not impede her poetic focus on control, but in fact promotes it. In addition, there are hints that some of this breakage may have been intentional. In addition, her engagement with devices employed by her literary predecessor, Homer, indicates that she views human bodies in a particularly sensitive manner, and demonstrates this in her poetry. The implications of Sappho responding in such a manner to a male literary predecessor will be considered in light of Sappho’s treatment at the hands of her literary heirs and heiresses.
Essentially, each chapter of this investigation will examine key parts of Sappho’s work as it appears in translation, identify subversive elements in each, assess how these have been transmitted, and consider the theoretical, creative and contextual implications of each. Comparisons will be made with works of later women writers, not all of whom have traditionally been associated with Sappho, but all of whom show clear signs of being familiar with not only Sappho’s work, but also its most subtle images, tones, structures and terms of address. By doing so, the full scope of Sappho’s influence on the poetry of other women, including poets whose themes have not been deemed “traditionally” Sapphic, in that they are not focused on beauty, love, community and emotional displays, will be highlighted. At the same time, the sophistication and merit of these women’s poetry will be emphasised, but also recognised as part of Sappho’s obsessive legacy. This should not be construed as a reductive move, but recognition of a conscious interaction with the ancient Greek poet, and part of a broader movement to “take back” Sappho from centuries of much more conservative scholarship.
This thesis is not intended to identify who Sappho the poet may have been, nor to say that one interpretation of her poetry and its figures is more correct than another. Instead, the investigation will highlight some subtle threads, focused
18 on self-control, control of others, self-interest and control over one’s own destiny, that appear in Sappho’s poems. To evidence the prevalence of these themes and their importance, I will refer directly to Sappho’s poetic fragments, scholarly opinions, and the works of later women poets, writing in response to Sappho or in response to identifiably Sapphic themes and ideas. Attached in this thesis in the appendices is also a copy of my own poetry, written in response to these same themes, as a further example of these later poetic interactions with Sappho’s themes and techniques, beyond the scope of wholly gentle love and celebrations of beauty. It is my hope that readers of Sappho’s poetry will be encouraged to see her as a critic as well as a lover, and also as a cunning and occasionally merciless individual, who wanted to preserve her name after death.
19 Chapter One
Control and Equivalence in Sappho’s Fragment 31
Introduction One of Sappho’s most famous poems, Fragment 31, presents the heartfelt turmoil of Sapphic speaker as she witness a beloved woman sit beside a deified man in what appears to be a wedding ceremony. The speaker articulates intense feelings of pain and ironically silent suffering in the face of this occasion, yet all bitterness is internalised rather than directed towards the man who now draws the woman’s affections. While the couple take solace in one another, the speaker imagines herself as dying, wracked by loss. The fractured structure and imagery of Fragment 31, as with much of Sappho’s remaining work, provides structural symbolism that parallels the ideological “breaking” and reassembling of Sappho’s body of work, and imagined personal identity. By “filling in the gaps”, translators introduce new perspectives to Sappho’s poetry, and in so doing, can create issues of voice and authority in her work. The poem is inherently vulnerable to imposition of others’ views and ideas, since this is exactly what is taking place in the body of the poem, structurally and prosodically. Fragment 31 engages with imagined and idealised bodies: the deified male body, beloved female body, speaking narrator’s body, and the narrator’s imagined body. By closely reading Fragment 31 in a variety of translations, possibilities for slippage and power struggles become apparent in Sappho’s oeuvre, and later, literary interactions.
It is possible to read subtly feminist interpretations of even some older translations of Sappho’s fragments, produced with reference to conservative views of women. These readings are based on the prevailing presence in almost all examined translations of a female speaker or speakers, grappling for control over an emotionally painful and apparently hopeless situation, and finally managing to subtly assert bodily, narrative, and metonymic control. Bryan Turner’s claims that the usefulness of the human body in critical analysis stems from the fact that the human body ‘is at once the most solid, the most elusive,
20 illusory, concrete, metaphorical, ever present and ever distant thing – a site, an instrument, an environment, a singularity and a multiplicity’ is valuable here.13
In this chapter, creative translations and translation theories will be assessed with regards to Fragment 31, including contextual views historically included in these interpretations and their impact on the original content of the poem.
Translating Fragment 31 To demonstrate the importance of intent and context in translating Sappho, I will present a series of three of my own translations of Sappho’s Fragment 31, and compare these with ten other translations. Particular attention will be paid to syntactical and prosodic shifts, changes to imagery and tone, and contextual reasons for these. This first translation has no title, and is composed in an extreme form of formal equivalence in that it is almost literally word-for-word with the Greek: He appears to me that one equal to the gods φάινεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν to be man, whoever opposite to you ἔμμεν’ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐναντίος τοι sits and nearby pleasant [word] speaking ἰσδάνει και πλάσιον ᾆδυ φωνεί – listens σας ὐπακούει
and laughing charming, the my doubtless truly καὶ γελασίας ἰμέροεν, τό μ’ ἦ μὰν heart in [my] breast was agitated καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν when for upon you I look upon you briefly, then for me to speak ὠς γὰρ ες σ’ ἴδω βρόχε’, ὤς με φὠναι –
13 Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory: revised edition, London: Sage, 1996, p 7-8. Barbara Duden also comments that in the late 1900s, the body constituted ‘a new kind of discrete object’, and at ‘the end of the nineteenth century, an alternative to the objectification of the body appeared, resulting in the body-in-pieces becoming integrated into a body concept based on developments in psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and cognitive science. Bernadette Wegenstein attributes psychological discussion of the body in the twentieth century to the increasing medical interest in sexuality as part of the human psyche, and acknowledges the rise of the idea that the body can be a psychological entity: Barbara Duden, [trans. Thomas Dunlap] The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, p 4; Bernadette Wegenstein, “Making Room for Body: From Fragmentation to Mediation”, in [eds.] Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth, Re: skin, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006, p 83.
21 not still it is possible σ’ οὐδ’ ἔν ἔτ’ εἴκει,
but on the one hand the tongue
with my eyes and nothing I see, with pounding ὀππάτεσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἔν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμ – and, I hear βεισι δ’ ἄκουναι,
down and me sweat is poured trembling and καδ δε μ’ ιδρως κακχεεται, τρομος δε the whole it takes, greener and than grass παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωτἐρα δὲ ποιας I am, and to have died I lessen lacking ἔμμι, τεθνἀκην δ’ ὀλἰγω ’πiδεύης I seem to myself φαἰνομ’ ἔμ’ αὔτ<α.>
but all can/must be endured, since
14 Page’s text has ἄκαν (silence) for κὰμ (= Epic for κατά before μ) The dot under the alpha is not an alpha subscript; it says that the editor is guessing the letter. If the guess for με is right, με might be governed by kata, but I think kata (kam) is just intensifying the verb. Literally something like ‘but on the one hand the tongue has really broken (in) me’. Many thanks are extended to Dr Michael Champion for his help with this translation. 15 Jim Powell, Sappho: A Garland, New York: Harper Collins, 1993, p 41. 16 Derrida’s suggestion, based on a Heideggerian expression, that ‘One must read in a text only that which is visible and present but also the nontext of the text, the parentheses, the silences. Silence is needed in order to speak, to write. One phoneme differs from another phoneme, and in speaking, a voice traces, spaces, writes. There is no true beginning; writing is always already
22
The absence of Sappho’s voice and original, intended tone and rhythm of this poem, have been shaped not only by the passage of time and physical deterioration of her work, but also by the fact that Sappho was an oral poet. It is not clear whether she wrote down her work. Sappho’s intended speaking voice is potentially missing, and the poem itself is full of physical pauses due to missing text. But it is possible to read these lacunae as symbolic withholdings of poet and speaker from the reader, affording Sappho even more control by preventing full knowledge of the text from being obtained. To remove “silences” from Sappho is to impose a new order on her work, and simultaneously to reveal this new order when translations are compared with one another, and with the original fragments. In Fragment 31, silence is enacted consciously by the poet and her translators, and unconsciously through the poem’s incomplete final line.
Derrida uses the term ‘silence’ to mark the opening of historicity and Peter Fenves suggests that, for Derrida, the ‘meaning of silence cannot be determined according to its context, nor can any effort of contextualisation determine whether silence is in fact meaningful’.17 Fenves quotes Derrida’s claim that [I]f madness is general, beyond any factitious and determined historical structure, is the absence of work, then madness is indeed, essentially and generally, silence, stifled speech, within a caesura and a wound that break open [entament] life as historicity in general. Not a determined silence, imposed at one given moment rather than at any other, but a silence essentially linked to an act of force, a prohibition that opens history and speech. In general. 18 Such uncertain motivation affects Sappho’s poetry in general, suggesting an essential “unknowable” quality to the poet’s work, and also, importantly, locating control over understanding of her poetry entirely in Sappho herself.
there’ is helpful in this context. Derrida speaks of all communications, of which Sappho’s poem is a particularly extreme example, since lacunae here have been caused by transmission, or may have been intentionally created by the poet: Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p 7-8. 17 Peter Fenves, “Derrida and history” in [ed.] Tom Cohen, Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p 279. 18 Jacques Derrida, trans. Alan Bass, Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, p 54, quoted in Peter Fenves, “Derrida and history”, p 279.
23 Presumably only the poet knew her own motivations for intentional silences, which of these were encoded intentionally, or created by transmission. Ambiguous silences operate as symbolic reminders of Sappho’s enduring evasion of complete control and understanding by her translators and critics, as well as the unexpected primacy of the narrator in Fragment 31, despite apparently miserable circumstances.
Silence is the space through which history and speech can be made apparent, and in the case of Sappho’s translations, decisions by some translators to fill these structural or intended “silences”, her lacunae, speak of contextual poetic conventions and social anxieties. The fact that much of Sappho’s work is alternately physically evasive and emotionally stark, devoted to goddesses and women, and consistently (though subtly) dismissive of men, would have challenged some patriarchal translators.19 Since the relationship between a heterosexual man and woman would be favoured over that between two women, homosexual or otherwise, in ancient Greece and most translators’ contexts, Sappho’s speaker and beloved female subject assume a disadvantaged position, despite the speaker’s voice and the subject’s favoured state.
According to Derrida, an important feature of Foucault’s text is its use of broken-off dialogue, through which ‘all determined opposition between reason and unreason’ can appear and be stated, in the impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of Foucault’s narration, as well as of the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded. It is the point at which the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded.20 The absence of dialogue between Sappho and the other two figures in Fragment 31, broken tongue, and layers of dialogue between Sappho and herself in the poem, represent a form of “totality”. Even though the text is characterised by a fragmented physical body and lack of communication, all of which imply distance, destruction and lack of connectivity, the poem essentially focuses on
19 Sappho is not only politely dismissive of the godlike man in Fragment 31, she also scolds her brother in Fragment 5, and critiques Mytilean politician Pittacus in Fragment 98b. 20 Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”, Writing and Difference, p 68.
24 control. This can be seen in the strict structure of Sappho’s original Greek, and even in the arbitrary rhyme schemes imposed by early translators. Despite the poem’s lacunae, ironic silence and imagined physical disintegration, recognises and celebrates the Sapphic speaker as an individual, capable of dividing herself as an image and in speech to better demonstrate her control over herself, the setting, and other figures.
Considering this subtle focus on control, and the relationship between silence and broken speech, this second translation renders the Greek-to-English version more syntactically accessible from an English-language standpoint. The same layout as the original Greek is used, but lines are longer and connectives added for syntactical smoothness: He appears to me equal to the gods That man who opposite from you sits and to your pleasant speaking nearby listens and to your charming laughter, doubtless truly my heart in my breast became agitated for when I look upon you briefly, then for me to speak it is not still possible but conversely, my tongue has broken, a light fire has straightaway run up beneath my skin, and with my eyes nothing I see, pounding also I hear and down me sweat is poured [sic], trembling takes the whole of me, greener than grass I am, and I lack little from dying I seem to myself But all can be endured, since even a poor man… The poem is still too clumsy to be considered ‘correct’ English, or poetically the best use of Sappho’s text. However, this version is structurally similar to those produced by later translators, including David Campbell and Mary Barnard.
25 Translators from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to elaborate on the Greek framework outlined above: imposing rhyme schemes, breaking the poem artificially into numbered sections, and adding more florid descriptions. Some of the poets drew heavily on one another for inspiration when dealing with structure and imagery. My third translation now reconciles the second with my reading of Sappho in Fragment 1 as a self-publicist, asserting control over the emotions and actions of others as well as herself, which will be discussed in detail in Chapter Two. Unlike some twentieth and twenty-first century translators, I have not broken this poem into stanzas, but have left line breaks to signify roughly where the original text would have stopped: To me that man appears as the gods’ equal, he whoever sits opposite to you and to your sweet speaking nearby listens, and to your charming laughter, doubtless my heart in my breast did become agitated, truly when I look upon you, even briefly, it is not possible for me to speak, my tongue has broken, a swift fire has raced up immediately beneath my skin, with my eyes I see nothing, I hear only pounding sweat has poured down me, trembling takes the whole of me, greener than grass I am, and I seem to myself to be only a little way from dying but all must be endured, since even a poor man… I have made deletions to convey a stronger sense of urgency, increasing the poem’s fluency, and have included more possessive terms to suggest desperation to regain control. Metrically and prosodically the poem is not faithful to Sappho’s original line and syllable counts, nor is it a literal interpretation of the text. A middle ground is broached; incorporating Sappho’s strict structure and original language, and appropriate English-language equivalents, emphasising control as a theme, but not always overtly maintaining
26 this, in keeping with the turbulence of the speaker’s imagined physical dissolution. I would argue that such a process of translation, in which all steps of decoding and rewriting the original poem are shared with the reader, is an appropriate way of addressing and presenting Sappho’s work to readers. The three poems, despite being arranged in a hierarchy of grammar and meaning, are all essentially poems in their own right, but best read in sequence.
Marilyn Skinner argues that Fragment 31 is ‘no anguished confession, but instead a virtuoso display of seductive poetic control’, but this does not preclude the presence of such urgency.21 In my third poem, anguish does not linger, but emphasises the speaker’s later triumph. Dolores O’Higgins recognises that Sappho is both victim and aggressor, wielding ‘her voice[as] a splintered weapon’, which supports my speaker’s duality, exercising control through her poem, while bemoaning her silence.22 The activity of the piece contrasts starkly with its professed helplessness.
The Sapphic speaker focuses on physical transformations and sensations, shifting between present and past tenses to convey inner turmoil. I have left the final line in the poem unaltered, giving reprieve to the speaker and closure to the imputed narrative. The persona resigns to carrying on, comparing herself to “a poor man” in almost mocking terms. The poem begins and ends with a male figure being gently dismissed, and the passion felt by and for a woman being highlighted. In accordance with my own views of Sappho as a poet, as well as of her speakers in this fragment, the tone of the poem is triumphant in the face of defeat, regaining primacy over the deified male figure, and over her despairing, crumbling body.
21 Marilyn Skinner, “Women and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?” in [eds.] Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Amy Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics, London; New York: Routledge, 1993, p 134. 22 Dolores O’Higgins, “Sappho's Splintered Tongue: Silence in Sappho 31 and Catullus 51” in [ed.] Ellen Greene, Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, California: University of California Press, 1996, p 72, 74.
27 Issues of Translation Translators impose not only perspectives of Sappho as an individual, but also opinions on tonal, syntactic and linguistic, emotional equivalence. Their relative competence as poets and Greek scholars is also revealed through decisions to embrace popular poetic conventions from their own time and acknowledgment of Sappho’s poetic innovations. Translators’ varying views on the rights and values associated with women during the times of production are also revealed, often problematising female sexual desire, or desire for control over bodily actions.
“Creative translations” can draw accusations of infidelity to the original texts. Mary Barnard claims that I could hardly expect to reproduce all the virtues of a poem by Sappho in an English translation. The flexibility of Greek allows complicated tense structure and swift movement at the same time. The ambiguities which enrich her simplest lines, the overtones and undertones, the occasional puns, which are not quite puns and seem right instead of ridiculous, are almost impossible to convey in another language.23 Edwin Arnold similarly complains of loss of Greek subtlety in English translations.24 Barnard demonstrates sensitivity to the terse, stark nature of Sappho’s lines, without trying to impose more elevated language or rhyme schemes, fashionable with earlier translators. This perhaps can be attributed to fashions of Barnard’s own times, including the crisp and deeply encoded works of Imagist and Modernist poets such as H.D. and Ezra Pound. John Addington Symonds, a nineteenth century translator of Sappho, opines that when we read the work of Lesbian poets …we seem to have the perfumes, colours, sounds and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse… The voluptuousness of Aeolian poetry is not like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically and sublimely
23 Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958, p 102. 24 Edwin Arnold, The Poets of Greece, London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1869, p 111.
28 ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.25 He complained that it was beyond even the literary prowess of Catullus to translate Sappho’s lyrics adequately.26 Whether or not Symonds’ professed “sublime order” can be replicated in English is debatable, and the impressionistic nature of his comments is equally in question. A highly subjective hierarchy of translators has emerged over the centuries. Paul de Man for instance asserts, problematically, that The silvery sweetness of Herbert’s simple style is exactly like Sappho’s. If you want to know how Sappho sounds in Greek, don’t read her pedestrian translators; read Herbert. Herbert discourages anything abrupt or emphatic – that is, masculine. Climatic speech is often ignored, restrained, or expelled. Herbert’s world of contemplative serenity and whispery intimacies is androgynous. Its divine male presences have internalised femininity, so that real women are unnecessary and de trop.27 de Man reveals his own gendered perceptions of poetic language, as well as clear favour for a translator who characterises Sappho as a mellow, feminine speaker, but also demonstrates the highly subjective marketability of translations. His aversion to anything “abrupt” in Sappho clashes with later translators’ works.
Comparing Translators In this chapter, all of the translators examined wrote in English, and many appear to translate Fragment 31 as an intellectual rather than creative exercise, despite most of these individuals being professed poets. These writers also worked in different historical periods and geographical locations. The rise of neoclassicism in the seventeenth century informs some translators, while others are more overtly informed by the rise of Romantic, Imagist and other movements. Ostensibly all translations of Fragment 31 draw their inspiration first from the primary text, but these are then rendered “contemporary” by
25 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets Volume I (3rd edition), London: Adam and Charles Black, 1902, p 292. 26 Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, p 294. 27 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, London: Methuen & Co, Ltd, 1983, p 228.
29 translators’ decision to apply fashionable poetic styles, structures, language, and even to direct the poem’s foci, tone and atmosphere to ascribe to contemporary sexual, gender or religious conventions.
John Hall (1627-1656) wrote poetry, essays and political pamphlets, as well as translating Latin and Greek texts.28 While Hall’s own poetry is generally written in strict rhyming couplets, he does not impose this same structure on his translations of Sappho, suggesting linguistic as well as stylistic fidelity.29 Another seventeenth century translator, William Bowles, had his translation of Fragment 31 published by Nahum Tate as part of a larger anthology, Poems By Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, in 1685.30 Bowles also translates a Latin piece, “Cynisca, or the fourteenth Idyllium of Theocritus imitated” in this collection.31 The tones in both poems are remarkably similar, particularly in one stanza of Aeschines: You sir, are merry; but alas! I find No Cure, No Ease, to my distemper’d Mind. I rave, am by a thousand Furies tost, An call in vain my Reason in my Passion lost.32 Bowles imposes an arbitrary rhyme scheme here, just as he does in translating Sappho, and presents very similar imagery in his Fragment 31, suggesting restrictive poetic practices.
John Addison’s 1735 translation of Fragment 31 is included at the end of a larger work on Anacreon’s poetry. In his commentaries, Addison hopes that his renditions ‘won’t be altogether unacceptable, however short an Attempt of this
28 John Hall’s name and some brief biographical details can be found in the records of Cambridge University students, in which he is described as a ‘Poet and pamphleteer’: [complied by] John Venn, J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses; a biographical list of all known students, graduates and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922, p 286. 29 A clear example of this style is “A Satire”, a highly referential syllabic poem comprising rhyming couplets and allusions to Greek and Latin literature, the Bible and the role of a poet in Hall’s eyes,: John Hall, Poems, London: R. Daniel for J. Rothwell, 1647, p 25-37. 30 [ed.] Nahum Tate, Poems By Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, London: for J. Hindmarsh, 1685, p 85. 31 William Bowles, “Cynisca, or the fourteenth Idyllium of Theocritus imitated” in [ed.] Nahum Tate, Poems By Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, p 80-85. 32 Bowles, “Cynisca, or the fourteenth Idyllium of Theocritus imitated”, lines 11-14, p 81.
30 Nature must necessarily fall of the inimitable Graces and Beauties of the Originals’, revealing admiration for the source texts, as well as neoclassicist sentiments .33 Addison briefly recognises lesbian desire in Sappho’s poetry, but counters this with greater attention to the Phaon legend, which he claims is true.34 His version of Fragment 31 has been given a strict rhyme scheme, identifiable in his other translations of Sappho and Anacreon. Addison imposes regular four-line stanzas with rhyming couplets on both Fragment 1 and 31, and even turns some of Sappho’s smaller fragments into rhyming couplets.35
Ambrose Philips (1674-1749) was an English poet and politician who wrote pastorals and epistles, and translated Sappho, Anacreon, and Pindar.36 His poetry, in translation from Greek as well as English, consistently uses rhyming couplets, regular syllabics, and beautiful imagery.37 Francis Fawkes (1721- 1777), another Cambridge poet and translator, translated Anacreon’s works as well as Sappho’s, and published his original work in John Nichols’ text, Literary Anecdotes of the XVIII Century.38 Eighteenth-century translator Edward Burnaby Greene (c.1740-1788) translated both Greek and Latin texts, producing a number of publications, including original poems in English.39 These translators’
33 John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, translated into English Verse; with Notes Explanatory and Poetical. To which are added the Odes, Fragments, and Epigrams of Sappho. With the Original Greek plac’d opposite to the Translation, London: John Watts, 1735, p A5. 34 Addison claims that Sappho’s homosexual desires were only expressed after the death of her husband, Cercolas; ‘…but he leaving her a widow very young, she would never accept of any second Match; not enduring to confine that Passion to one Person, which, as the Ancients tell us, was too violent in her to be restrain’d even to one Sex’. However, he also asserts that ‘no one seems to have been the Object of her Admiration so much as the lovely Phaon’, and that Sappho leapt from the cliffs of Leucas in despair over his lack of love for her. Addison claims that Ovid imitated Sappho’s works directly, particularly in the Epistle to Phaon: John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, p 251, 252, 253, 254. 35 See John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, p 256-279. 36 These translations were published separately and then compiled into a collected version along with Philips’ other creative words, published in 1748. 37 See for example “The Stray Nymph” and ‘The Happy Swain” in Ambrose Philips, Pastorals, Epistles, Odes and Other Original Poems with Translations from Pindar, Anacreon, and Sappho, London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, 1748, p 51-52; p 53-54. 38 John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the XVIII Century (1812-15), Volume 8, London: Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1815, p 88-93. Francis Fawkes’ entry in the record of Cambridge students states that he was a ‘poet and translator’ and attended Jesus college: [complied by] John Venn, J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, p 127. 39 Edward Burnaby Greene published his translation of Sappho’s work alongside those of Anacreon in Works of Anacreon and Sappho, with pieces of ancient authors (1768). John Nichols notes that Greene ‘was well known in the regions of Parnassus’ for his own poetry and many essays: John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the XVIII Century (1812-15), Volume 8, 1815, p 89-90.
31 independent and translated works are strongly influenced by fashionable eighteenth century poetic styles and structures. Ricardo Quintana characterises eighteenth century poetry as having an ‘anomalous style… in which descriptive words, especially… verbs turned into adjectives, and long periodic passages of description’, which feature prominently in these translators’ versions of Sappho.40
Conversely, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was an English poet and literary critic focused on Renaissance studies, and an early supporter of free expression of homosexual desires.41 Symonds’ translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, in which the painter refers to his lover, Tommaso Cavalieri, openly use the original male pronouns ordinarily censored by earlier translators.42 This recurs in his translation of Fragment 31, in which the original genders of the female beloved, male lover, and female narrator are left unstated, rather than heterosexualised. Symonds produced essays in defence of homosexuality, privately published and circulated, one of which recognises that ‘Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave this female [homosexual] passion an eminent place in Greek literature’.43 Symonds’ caution in openly practising or speaking supportively about homosexual desires and lifestyles in such a society informs his translation of Sappho.44 Its frank acknowledgement of Sappho’s lesbian
40 [eds.] Ricardo Quintana, Alvin Whitley, English Poetry of the Mid and Late Eighteenth Century. New York: Knopf, 1963, p 16.
41 Symonds’ homosexuality caused a scandal when letters on the subject of beloved choirboys, exchanged between himself and Shorting, a Fellow at Oxford, were circulated. Symonds suffered a nervous breakdown, which he attributed to repression of his desires: A. L. Rose, Homosexuals in History: A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts, USA, Dorset Press, 1983, p 150-151. He married and had several daughters, but wrote to his wife the morning after their wedding that ‘I felt all through the day that I was acting a part’: A. L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History, p 152. 42 See [trans.] John Addington Symonds, The sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti, London: Smith, Elder, 1904. 43 John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, in Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion, London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897, p 249. Symonds collaborated with Ellis in writing this text, and the young doctor was persecuted the year after it was published, and left for the USA: A. L. Rose, Homosexuals in History, p 154. 44 In predominantly Christian, Western societies, from which the translators examined in this chapter originate, the draconian decrees of Leviticus, in which homosexual acts are strongly condemned, have had much influence. These decrees assert that ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination” and “If a man also lie with mankind, as he
32 desire for the beloved woman in the poem is unusual for the period, and signals Symonds’ personal investment in articulating such support.
Twentieth and twenty-first century translators Mary Barnard (1909-2001), Gig Ryan (1956-), Willis Barnstone (1927-) and Anne Carson (1950-) come from several different countries, and all focus on the poetic qualities of Sappho’s work. Homosexuality in the fragments does not appear to fluster these translators.45 Treatment of lesbian themes in Sappho’s works as something to be embraced, rather than shunned, traverses the conventional binary between “heterosexual” and “homosexual”.46 Symbolically, their translations push the borders of published and unpublished content in the fragments, recognising excluded and overemphasised sections, reworking the pieces while maintaining contact with their long history of structural and linguistic negotiation.
lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them”: Leviticus 18:22; 20:13, King James Bible. However, Rowse observes that in the Victorian period, there was often discrepancy between reality and the period’s moral pretentions: A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History, p 148. The nineteenth century, in which Symonds writes, witnessed the trials of Oscar Wilde and his persecution under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 for “gross indecency”: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 6.0, 10 April 2012), May 1895 (t18950520). At the same time, ‘in public schools the classics were the be-all and end-all, the Alpha and Omega, of education. They portrayed the relaxed and natural attitude of the Greeks and Romans…towards sex. Intelligent boys, and not they alone, were introduced to all-round facts of sex life, between the sexes or between persons of the same sex, in Plato or Theocritus, Virgil or Juvenal, or whoever’. Symonds himself struggled with this, challenging Jowett, who translated Plato, and his insistence that all loving references to male youths were ‘a matter of metaphor’: A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History, p 148. 45 The 1950s witnessed harassment and persecution of homosexual individuals, countered by movements for tolerance and human rights. In the USA, the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society were set up in many cities, and in Britain similar organisations, such as the Homosexual Law Reform Society, founded in 1958, were set up. Major changes to Western perceptions of homosexuality were witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s, with the emergence of women’s and gay liberation movements, and new sociological approaches to homosexuality as something neither normal nor abnormal: Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman, “Introduction”, Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies, London: Sage Publications, 2002, p 1-2. These translators’ works have been produced during or in the aftermath of these movements, which may explain their comparatively frank acceptance of lesbian content. 46 Diana Fuss identifies a philosophical system of opposition in constructions of homosexuality and heterosexuality, noting that this is based ‘on the foundations of another related opposition: the couple “inside” and “outside”. In both Fuss’s definition and Sappho’s poetry, ‘[T]he metaphysics of identity that has governed discussions of sexual behavior and libidinal object choice has, until now, depended on the structural symmetry of these seemingly fundamental distinctions and the inevitability of a symbolic order based on a logic of limits, margins, borders, and boundaries’: Diana Fuss in [ed.] Diana Fuss, inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, New York: Routledge, 1991, p 1. This series of distinctions, borders and barriers have occupied the thoughts of Sappho’s translators, negotiating with theories of literal and dynamic equivalence as well as the texts’ lacunae.
33
Gig Ryan is an Australian poet with a number of collections of poetry published, and Anne Carson is a Canadian poet and professor of Classics. Both poets apply crisp language and strong intellectual engagement with a variety of subjects. Barnard was an American poet and translator who wrote predominantly original poetry, publishing several chapbooks, and was mentored via mail by Ezra Pound, to whom she was distantly related.47 Her Modernist poetic style appears in her translation of Fragment 31, focusing on personal and intellectual content, clarity, and concise presentation. Willis Barnstone is also an American poet, biblical scholar, anthologist, and translator, with a particular focus on Greek and poetry, and an extensive range of publications on these. He advocates ‘pushing the imagination’ when translating Sappho, since the difficulty of extracting meaning from wonderful fragments, that is huge. I loved these problems… Difficulty always helps a poet, and everyone in the arts. Imagine a ballet dancer without form. Form if the obstacle that liberates.48 Barnstone is optimistic in his endeavours to render translations poetic, and states that ‘the best possible guide to literary translation is seek the literary, not the literal’, suggesting desire to produce a sensitive translation, rather than one that is literal but poetically clumsy.49
Broken Bodies, Broken Texts Increasing sophistication of medical science and the rise in phenomenology, the study of the distinction between ‘the subject of perception and the socially constructed body’, may contribute to later translators’ treatment of Sappho’s images of bodily destruction.50 Clinical, almost medical diagnoses of her suffering can be seen in later translations, contrasting with “feminised”, relatively elegant images of pain in earlier versions. Destruction of the narrator’s body is deceptive because it is imagined, but in some earlier
47 Mary Barnard’s online biography: http://marybarnard.com/biolong.html accessed 20th March 2012. 48 Willis Barnstone, “Understanding the “art” of translation”, Willis Barnstone’s Journal, Sunday, January 30, 2011: http://www.willisbarnstone.com/Willis_Barnstones_Journal/Entries/2011/1/30_Understandin g_the_art_of_translation.html accessed 20th March 2012. 49 Ibid. 50 Wegenstein, “Making Room for Body: From Fragmentation to Mediation”, p 86.
34 interpretations, the layering of speaking voices is absent, and the narrator appears to actually experience death or near-death. Jean Bertrand Pontalis remarks that such experiences can become “death works” when the ego becomes involved in a face-to-face movement: The fundamental process of unbinding [of the ego], of fragmentation, of breaking up, of separation, of bursting, but also of enclosing – [a] process that has no aim but its own accomplishment and whose repetitive nature brands it as instinctual – it is here that the death instinct operates. This is a process that no longer has anything to do with conscious death anxiety, but that mimics death in the very kernel of being.51 In many translations of Fragment 31, the narrator recognises that she must continue living despite her pain and imagined destruction. In others however, the poem is an actual death or near-death scene.
Sappho imagines a “disabled” body, with a broken tongue, even as she speaks, in a further act of deceptive perception. Davis asserts that The subject looks at the disabled body and has a moment of cognitive dissonance, or should we say a moment of cognitive resonance with the earlier state of fragmentation. Rather than seeing the whole body in the mirror, the subject sees the repressed fragmented body; rather than seeing the object of desire, as controlled by the Other, the subject sees the true self of the fragmented body.52 Sappho’s celebration of a disintegrating, “speechless” body draws power from this otherwise dismal image, emphasising the speaker’s emotional sophistication and eloquence in a situation that would appear to be a display of feminine or even lesbian helplessness and lack of self-control in contrast to deified male and idealised female heterosexuality.
Fragment 31 challenges the ancient Greek belief that women were ‘silent patients, reluctant to tell male iatroi [Hippocratic doctors] about what they feel’
51 Lennard J. Davis, “Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality” in [eds.] David T. Mitchell, Sharon L. Snyder, The body and physical difference: discourses of disability, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1997, p 61; Pontalis quoted in Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of psychoanalysis, Kent: Croom Helm Ltd, 1986, p 72. 52 Davis, “Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality”, p 60.
35 when sick.53 Supposedly women were prevented ‘from knowing what is wrong with them, and from speaking to an iatros if they do know, by their youth, inexperience and embarrassment’.54 However, Sappho’s narrator knows the cause of her dismay and destruction, and to administer a cure in the form of resolution to endure pain. This is similar to the Ovidian Sappho’s self-diagnosis and cure for her despair, leaping from the rocks of Leukas as Aphrodite did, to be discussed in Chapter Three. Ancient Greek medical knowledge was influenced by social understandings of differences between men and women; Aristotle posed the suggestion that a woman is in fact ‘a deformed male’.55 In this poem, the speaker self-consciously “deforms” herself, through physical destruction, and then “reassembles” via revelation that this is an imagined process, signalling a potentially masculine unity and sense of self-control.
Broken bodies were not uncommon in ancient Greek myths, poems and histories, and even in Sappho’s own time may have had gendered significance. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts a myth of how the human race comprised double-bodied beings that were male, female, or androgynous, and were punished by being split into two halves by Zeus, for their hubris in trying to conquer Mount Olympus.56 Peter von Möllendorff asserts that ‘man has been driven by the desire for his other half in varying combinations of homo- and heterosexuality’.57 Desire to unify with another, idealised individual can be seen in Fragment 31, but because the Sapphic speaker cannot actualise this unification, further breakage ensues. Möllendorff observes that union is desirable because it ‘puts an end to desire’, abolished through ‘its permanent satisfaction’, but the speaker in Sappho’s poem is left only to “endure”, perhaps to desire again.58 Interestingly, the poem’s resolution makes no mention (or at
53 Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece, London: Routledge, 1998, p 47. 54 Ibid. 55 [translated by A.L. Peck] Aristotle, Generation of Animals, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942, lines 737a25-28, p 175. 56 Plato, Symposium 189c-193d5 in [translated by] W.B. Lamb, [ed.] G.P. Goold, Plato III: Lysis, Sympoisum, Gorgias, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925, p 133-147. 57 Peter von Möllendorff, “Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium” in [eds.] Thornsten Fögen, Mireille M. Lee, Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, p 88. 58 von Möllendorff, “Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium”, p 94.
36 least, no mention has been preserved) of any need for another individual to assist or facilitate this endurance. It is possible, though ambiguous, that the speaker may moved from a state of broken dependency and division to a more resolute, independent, and individualistic state, outside the scope of marriage and romantic love as depicted in Fragment 31.
Comparing Titles The name of Sappho’s original poem has not been preserved, leading to a number of scholars and poets imposing substitutes for ease of record keeping, and also to highlight individual interpretations. I refer to the poem as “Fragment 31” since this is its most common title in critical sources. However, “Fragment 31” does not refer to the poem’s content, but reflects a legacy of scholarly struggles to control Sappho’s body of work. The poem is physically fragmented and ambiguous in origin, but the title suggests that it must and can still be categorised. Smaller sections of Sappho’s work are frequently only assigned numbers, rather than names, while larger pieces can be identified by number, origin, their first line, or some description of the translators’ own creation.
A recent translation by Aaron Poochigian, published in 2009, avoids the need for a title by placing the poem in a section of his translation titled “Desires and Death-Longing.”59 Even though this is technically still categorisation of the poem, an indirect approach is perhaps better suited to Sappho’s body of work, since desire and “death-longing” are readily identifiable in this particular piece, and use of the first line of the poem as the title can place undue emphasis on particular aspects of the piece. A number of English-language translators use the first line of Fragment 31 as a title, meaning that the deified man is given a prominent position. Rather than being quickly dismissed, this godlike man occupies the poem more distinctively from the outset, and threatens to skew the translation entirely towards his role in the poem. John Hall’s 1652 version is titled “He that sits next to thee…”, similar to Francis Fawkes’ 1760 “More happy
59 Aaron Poochigian, Sappho, Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments, London: Penguin, 2009, p 23.
37 than the gods is he,” John Addington Symonds’ 1883 “Peer of the gods he seemeth”, and Mary Barnard’s ‘He is more than a hero’, published in 1958.
This approach has been relatively popular in English from the seventeenth century onwards, emphasising lingering concern over the roles of male and female figures in the poem.60 The reason for using the first line as a title may have been simply been convenience, but the move creates competition between the Sapphic narrator and deified man as the prominent figure in the text. This issue will be discussed in detail later, but it is important to observe that despite the favoured position of the man in this poem’s opening, it is his elevated, divine state that renders him an unsuitable presence that must be dismissed quickly. To focus on him in the title, when this is not the apparent intention of the original poet, challenges formal equivalence, and suggests some translators’ intentions to heterosexualise the poem. John Addison’s 1735 title, “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, is more appropriate since the title openly recognises the sex of the desired figure and devotional content of the piece.
William Bowles titles his 1685 translation “Sapho’s Ode Out of Longinus”, directing readers’ attention to the origins of the poem rather than its content. Issues of transmission inherent in reading this poem are reflected, suggesting need for discretion in reading. Bowles’ title openly cites Longinus’ Treatise on
60 This contrasts with versions produced in the French Renaissance by two male poets. One is created by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585) in 1560, in which the speaker is referred to as the privileged, divine individual: ‘Je suis un Demidieu quand assis vis-à-vis / De toy, mon cher souci’ (lines 1-2). Curiously, the first-person speaker here is assigned a masculine description ‘un Demidieu’, as is the beloved ‘mon cher’. It is possible in this context that the term ‘un Demidieu’ was thought to more appropriately address the state of being “like a god”, rather than to use the feminine “une Déesse”, which is not used in the original Greek version. Alternatively, this poem could be seen as a likely unintentional inversion of the lesbian original into a gay adaptation: Pierre de Ronsard, Le Second Livre des Amours, La Pléiade, p 228, lines 1-2. Another member of the Pléiade group of young poets, Rémy Belleau (1527-1577), translated and published the same poem in 1556. Unlike Ronsard, Belleau does not liken the first person speaker to the gods, but a nameless man (line 3), and genders in the poem are ambivalent, although it is likely that the speaker is female, due to Belleau’s use of feminine adjectives such as ‘palle’ and ‘blesmie’: “Traduction d’une Ode de Sapphon”, line 23, in Petits Inventions, 1556.. Joan DeJean observes that at the dawn of the Enlightenment, French translations of Sappho veered off-course by French Hellenists’ refusal to acknowledge German breakthroughs in Sappho scholarship, and eighteenth-century French editions in particular became increasingly popularised and editors took increasing textual liberties, not even publishing the Greek text alongside the French translations in new texts: Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p 121-122.
38 the Sublime as the source, suggesting readers peruse it independently. Transmission from Longinus is, in itself, an unstable process. There are arguments to this day over the identity of the author of Treatise on the Sublime, with some claiming that it was Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 60 BCE-7 CE), Cassius Longinus (c. 213-273 CE), or some other unknown author, and also precisely when the piece was written.61 In addition, there are physical lacunae in the treatise itself, including one ‘equivalent in length to about three printed pages’.62
Edward Burnaby Greene titles the poem “Ode II”, following on from his translation of “Ode I”, the Aphrodite Ode, imposing an artificial chronology and narrative on the poems. The Aphrodite Ode can be read as Sappho’s plaintive call to Aphrodite to win the love of this female subject, and “Ode II” may represent eventual failure and despair. The problems inherent in this move are numerous, since we cannot accurately say whether or not Sappho intended for these works to be part of a longer narrative. To link the control and power of the speaker in the Aphrodite Ode to the misery and imagined death in ‘Ode II’ of the Sapphic speaker, undercuts demonstrated authority in the former, and threatens to overshadow the subtle power-play taking place in the latter.
Philips’ 1711 “A Fragment of Sappho” and Ryan’s 1998 “after Sappho” recognise the origins of the poem, but do not impose a particular focus on when the poem
61 Francis Robortello in 1554 issued the edition princeps of the Treatise, attributing the work to ‘Dionysius Longinus’ and this set the fashion for the majority of early editions. However, the absence of the Treatise’s title from accredited lists of Longinus’ works caused uneasiness in 1808, when Italian scholar Amati discovered that a Vatican MS. (no. 285) of the De Sublimitate contained the following inscription: Διονυσιου η Λογγιου περι υψους, meaning that it could be ‘Dionysius or Longinus’ : W. Rhys Roberts, Longinus On the Sublime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899, p 1-3. Roberts suggests that the best course of action may be ‘to regard the first century as the period of composition and an unknown author as the writer. An ‘unknown author,’ because the various attempts at identification have failed to carry conviction; they still remain conjectures, nothing more. With regard to Longinus, indeed, the issue is the simple one of the adoption or rejection of a single claimant, no other Longinus than the Longinus of history having been at any time suggested as a possible author of the treatise. It is different with Dionysius, the optional name given in the manuscript inscription. This name has produced a plentiful crop of guesses: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Aelius Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Dionysius Atticus of Pergamus, Dionysius of Miletus. But the claims advanced on behalf of these writers are advanced either without evidence or in the face of evidence.’: W. Rhys Roberts, Longinus On the Sublime, p 16. 62 [ed.] D.A. Russel, ‘Longinus’ On the Sublime, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964, p xi.
39 should be read. Nor do these translators emphasise a particular element of the piece. Ryan’s “after Sappho” openly acknowledges Ryan’s place as a translator, speaking quite literally “after” Sappho, and not directly for her. Willis Barnstone’s 2006 translation, titled “Seizure” also potentially offers more open interpretations of the poem. The use of a general theme or emotion as title for Sappho’s works has risen in popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Arguably this is less intrusive than use of the poem’s first line as a title. “Seizure” can be interpreted as a potential feeling for any figures in the poem, depending on readers’ views, while reiteration of the deified man’s presence offsets the hierarchy created in the poem’s body, across the range of translations examined.
Structural Innovations The original Greek text of Fragment 31, as shown earlier, is presented in a series of long lines, without line breaks or set stanzas, and a few gaps where words have been lost or guessed by scholars. Despite this, many translators, including myself, have imposed new structures on the poem, as well as rhyme schemes. Symbolically this reflects Sappho’s chequered history in translation, as subject and object to be manipulated and altered to fit different marketable images or mythologised qualities. Despite its fractures, it is still possible to identify a strong basic framework to this poem: commencing with the image of a happy couple, then detailing the physical and emotional despair of the persona, ending in a perceived or actual death.
The final line of Greek is often omitted by translators, perhaps due to concern that it does not belong to the poem, due to some subjectively perceived irregularity in its tone compared to the rest of the piece, and sometimes in order to present more physically and narratively complete poem. The uplifting tone of this line is important, but not strictly necessary in identifying an empowered, hopeful, or perhaps resigned conclusion for the speaker. Like the physical structure of the poem, it is instead an indication of the individual translators’ levels of fidelity to the original Greek at the expense of ideologies that they may have otherwise intended to impose on the piece.
40
Hall arranges Sappho’s poem into a strict rhyme scheme and breaks the text into regular four-line stanzas. The move is strongly reminiscent of the desire to model Sappho into a marketable image. Bowles’ version of the poem is broken into numbered sections of uneven lengths of his own division, and is an interesting move when the fragmentary body of the poem itself is considered; not only in the physical degradation of the original Greek text, but also the physical and emotional dissolution of the focal character. The decision to break the poem in such a way is more likely to have been intended for ease of reading for Bowles’ contemporary audience, but it also emphasises the “broken” qualities of poet, poem, and personae. Ambrose Philips' 1711 version, titled “A Fragment of Sappho”, also extends the poem artificially in order to include a strict rhyme scheme and four numbered sections of the same length, rather than three uneven sections used by Bowles.
John Addison's 1735 translation, “An Ode on a YOUNG MAID whom she lov'd,” removes the numbering scheme used by both Bowles and Philips, but maintains their rhyme schemes and elongation of the original fragment. Unlike Bowles and Philips, Addison may be acknowledging the lesbian focus of the poem in his titular reflection on the beloved woman. If so, this would signal an intention to focus more closely on the original Greek text than either of these predecessors. In an article on Sappho in The Spectator, Addison was remarkably frank in his assessment of Sappho’s passions, commenting She married one Cercolas, a Gentleman of great Wealth and Power in the Isle of Andros, by whom she had a Daughter nam’d Cleis; but he leaving her a Widow very Young, she would never accept of any second Match; not enduring to confine that Passion to one Person, which as the Ancients tell us, was too violent in her to be restrain’d even to one Sex.63 Considering the extreme homophobia of Addison’s context, such recognition would ordinarily be very unlikely and its publication even more so. Since the final line of the fragment has been left out, it likely that the title may have been
63 The Spectator no. 223, 1711, quoted in [ed.] Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p 250.
41 interpreted as a nod to the prevailing fictions of Sappho in the eighteenth century and despite the title's recognition that this ode was written for a “young maid”, the poem itself is curiously devoid of references to this woman. However, in a translation of Fragment 130, titled by Addison “Dire Love, Sweet-Bitter Bird of Prey!”, Addison stated openly that ‘this Ode was written by Sappho upon two favourite Maids, of whom she was jealous’.64 Addison’s approach is therefore particularly unusual, but his work has survived intact despite its controversial content.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Sappho’s poetry has remained relatively fashionable due to her emotive poetic content and ‘spiky’ prosodic style. Annie Finch reflects that in contemporary free-verse poetry, there is a focus on anecdote, personal experience, and an apparent ‘free-verse’ prosodic form, which may be echoed in Sapphic fragments, or in translations that do not preserve the poet’s original stanza styles, fetishising the ‘apparent sincerity of the individual self, or soul’ which becomes ‘the central transcendent poetic criterion’.65 At the same time, Sappho also fits within Finch’s definition of much avant-garde poetry, examples of which include the works of Fanny Howe and Ann Lauterbach, in which ‘the spontaneous shapes of an increasingly disjointed poetry are conjured as a means to invoke the transcendent-inexpressible, a grace that defies and overwhelms language’.66 Such a view has been taken of Sappho’s work, specifically by those women poets who respond to Luce Irigaray’s assertion that there must be a ‘women’s language’, and which has been identified in Sappho’s work by Ellen Greene, in the form of homosocial, women-only communities and links between feminine beauty and desire.67 I do not interpret Fragment 31 as entirely transcendent, but rather, the poet (or
64 The Spectator no. 223, 1711, quoted in [ed.] Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p 250; see also John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, Translated in English Verse; with Notes Explanatory and Poetical. To Which Are Added the Odes, Fragments, and Epigrams of Sappho, London, 1735. 65 Ron Silliman quoted by Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005, p 25-26. 66 Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self, p 26. 67 Ellen Greene, ‘Subjects, Objects, and Erotic Symmetry in Sappho’s Fragments’ in [eds.] [eds.] Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Lisa Auanger, Among Women: from the homosocial to the homoerotic in the ancient world, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002, p 96-97.
42 translators and poet) self-consciously fetishises an individual voice, and then reflects on the implications of such an act, moving beyond the scope of individual influence to shape or splinter the voices and figures of other personae within the poem.
Gig Ryan’s main innovations occur in her poem’s title, as well as in the final stanza, in which the poem ceases to be a near-identical rendition of David Campbell’s Fragment 31, and takes on additional reflective imagery. Morbid tones are not unusual in translations of this poem, but Ryan’s version dismisses the relatively optimistic decision that the speaker must move on, which can be found in the Loeb and Page collection of Sappho’s work. Ryan negotiates with classical male translators, including Campbell, problematizing their interventions, displacing optimism and directing the reader’s attention to the conflicted status of the female or feminised speaker, and by extension, translator. The full version of the poem reads as follows: He seems to me to be like a god him, if it’s fated, to be above a god who talks softly with you bending close and smiling easily
This tears me at whose sight my tongue dries and my voice catches
Straight through a thin flame twines down my limbs My eyes are fixed and the air thuds and breathed extinguished
And sweat runs down my limbs, fever shimmers paler than glass I feel myself changed and turned
43 towards death68 Fever that ‘shimmers paler than glass’ causes the ambiguously gendered persona to feel, presumably herself changed and turned towards death, invoking a sense of personal reflection, beyond physical symptoms, resulting in a loss of control and new focus on death, rather than the physical demonstrations of affection that initiated the poem.
Even though her ‘voice catches’, the speaker remains in control of the poem, peppering the piece with possessives, personal engagements, and physical reactions. The result of this is that the speaker wrests control of the poem from the couple in the first stanza, instating herself as the main focus. Despite the morbid ending, in which the persona claims to ‘feel myself changed and turned’, this moment of passivity is not enough to subvert the motif of control that surrounds the piece. The speaker seems to take a voyeuristic pleasure in describing her own body being reduced to pieces, and showcases her suffering with emphatic relish.
Gig Ryan’s intentions appear to be ironic, problematizing previous male translators’ engagements by revelling in the female speaker’s process of dismemberment. In these kinds of ‘performances’, according to Bernadette Wegenstein, ‘the body is no mediator’, but a deceptive act: the body here is not raw material, although it may appear to be so, but in fact can ‘merge, bend, and by inhabiting it, we – the viewer participants – can become part not only of its phenotype, but also of its genotype’.69 The Sapphic speaker’s performance of her fragmentation achieves an ideological “wholeness” by revealing the interrelation of various body parts, in keeping with Wegenstein’s assessment, in the sense that it is always the speaker who has control of the situation. She deceptively destabilises her body, only to bring it back to life in the final line of the poem, revealing an obsession with control that has subtly existed since the beginning of the poem. A biological fixation with the body also signals an obsession with understanding and controlling bodily functions, not just
68 Gig Ryan, Pure and Applied, New South Wales: Craftsman House and Paper Back Press, 1998, p 65. 69 Bernadette Wegenstein in [eds.] Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth, Re: skin, p 91.
44 emotions. In addition to this physical, thematic control, the premise of Ryan’s translation is essentially that of putting words in Sappho’s mouth, via creative translation, or taking words from Sappho, and putting them into a sequence of Ryan’s own preference or interpretation, creating another level of subtle control. In such an exchange meaning is not necessarily being lost, but selectively articulated, and the interests of another speaker merged into the original Ur-text, taking possession of the text, but still recognising its source and preserving its overarching tone, speaking voice and images.
In Ryan’s translation, Sappho is presented as a kind of mentor, in that she provides the basic framework from which Ryan advances her own ideas. Sappho’s original text is essentially preserved, but another voice is incorporated and other ideas pushed forward. Ryan’s translation pessimistically directs focus towards notions of women’s control over biological and literary bodies, in that her poem is essentially a subversion of Sappho’s own voice in order to admit another voice, that of Ryan’s speaker, taking control from the mentor figure in order to express her own sentiments. Even though Ryan’s ending is considerably bleaker than that of Sappho in some translations, it is still a reworking that demands agency over the piece, titled “after Sappho”, perhaps in reference to the sequential nature of the writing, or alternatively, of the historical imposition of different, predominantly male translators’ control over the piece.
Indeed, this title strongly suggests that rather than being a close translation, Ryan’s title is suggestive of a meditative process in the aftermath of reading Sappho’s Fragment 31. The destructive potential of this meditation is foreshadowed in the problematic idea of the speaker feeling herself ‘changed and turned / towards death’. Ryan foreshadows this change by her incorporation of reflective imagery, unique to her version, claiming that ‘sweat runs down my limbs, fever / shimmers paler than glass’. Even though Ryan’s persona is captivated by the affectionate display of the first stanza, it is indicated that she is more stricken by the idea of this display and her own resulting emotional and physical disintegration. Her ‘voice catches’, but she
45 remains in control of the poem, detailing how ‘My eyes are fixed / and the air thuds / and breath extinguished’ and ‘my tongue dries’ while ‘a thin flame / twines down my limbs’. These images continually direct the reader’s attention to the persona’s physical suffering, rather than the beauty of the couple mentioned in the opening stanza. The change that these images and the overall experience bring about is unclear, but the idea of “turning towards death” but not actually dying is suggestive of a fixation on mortality, and perhaps also on the role of Sappho as an inspirational figure centuries after her death.
Translating Sexuality The lesbian love-triangle depicted in Fragment 31 has been addressed in three different ways by poets between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, in order to demonstrate fidelity to the text, or to bring the poem into line with prevalent societal perceptions of sexual norms. Unsurprisingly, the majority of translations produced in the earlier period of study tend to avoid overt references to lesbian desire. John Hall’s 1652 translation, “He that sits next to thee”, taken from his translation of Longinus’ Treatise on the Sublime, suggests a heterosexual interpretation, due to added reference to pleasing attributes of the ‘beauteous’ man. The opening of the poem has been inscribed with additional references to the deified male figure, turning attention away from the female beloved: He that sits next to thee now and hears Thy charming voyce, to me appears Beauteous as any Deity That rules the skie. How did his pleasing glances dart Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart70 The increased number of affectionate descriptions towards the deified man indicates the translator’s readiness to heterosexualise Sappho as poet and speaker. In Western literature, women’s bodies have been consistently portrayed as ideally passive, beautiful, and in need of control and guidance by a patriarch, be it father, brother, uncle or husband. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Keller
70 John Hall (1652) “He that sits next to thee…”, lines 1-6.
46 and Sally Shuttleworth claim that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been an increasing focus on control over female bodies: for Sir Francis Bacon, ‘the pursuit of scientific knowledge was figured rhetorically as the domination of the female body of nation, illuminated by the light of masculine science’, and at the same time the rise of medical theories to medicalise childbirth and pregnancy have all called into question women’s bodies and their reproductive role.71 Ironically, women were still not generally perceived to be capable of independent sexual desire until much later. Hall’s descriptions of the godlike man may have been conscious recoiling from the lesbian relationship in the poem, and reflect a desire to control the speaker’s desiring body. Alternatively, this would simply not have been an option that Hall would even consider, due to the lack of popular societal acceptance of such relationships. However, this is not the case for William Bowles in his 1685 “Sapho’s Ode out of Longinus”. There is a homosexual angle in Bowles’ use of ‘thy’ and ‘thee’ to distinguish between the deified man and beloved, implicitly female figure, emphasising the desirable traits of ‘thee’ while describing the passion of the man. After detailing these traits, the Sapphic speaker clearly states that But when with kinder beams you shine, And so appear much more divine, My feeble sense and dazl’d sight, No more support the glorious light, And the fierce Torrent of Delight. Oh! then I feel my Life decay… [own emphasis]72 This subtle interpretation has been applied by several other poets, including Edward Burnaby Greene in his 1768 ‘Ode II’ and Mary Barnard’s 1958 ‘He is more than a hero’, in order to gently preserve the lesbian orientation of the piece, despite publishing these poems in contexts in which there was no widespread acceptance of homosexual relationships.
In the Renaissance and Reformation periods, the resurgence of Greek and Roman thought included some minimal acceptance of same-sex desires, but the
71 Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth, “Introduction” in [eds.] Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sally Shuttleworth, Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, New York and London: Routledge, 1990, p 2-3. 72 William Bowles (1685) “Sapho’s Ode Out of Longinus”, lines 9-14.
47 general atmosphere was one of condemnation, intolerance, and violence.73 Any form of sexual activity that did not lead to procreation was believed to be unnatural in the eyes of Protestants, and laws condemning homosexuality were introduced in 1533 under King Henry VIII.74 These laws did not apply to women, who were considered ‘sexually invisible’ entities until well into the twentieth century.75 Between 1700 and 1900 sex slowly became viewed as a pursuit for pleasure and a personal choice, rather than being purely for reproductive purposes, and this in turn began to shape social views on what could or could not be deemed socially acceptable.76
Twentieth and twenty-first century attitudes towards homosexuality are increasingly less restrictive than those of earlier centuries in western societies, but Chris Cuomo observes that despite the fact that many public, cultural and intimate spaces have been transformed or informed by ‘a queer-friendly revolution’, homophobic beliefs and violent actions are still quite common.77 The translations of Carson, Ryan, Barnstone and Barnard are indicative of this rising popular support for expressions of homosexual desire, irrespective of the persistent homophobic actions of some groups in their different geographical contexts, as well as their desires to creatively and intellectually respond to Sappho’s poetry. In contrast, earlier translators are likely to have conformed to
73 Carol Thorpe Tully, Lesbians, gays, & the empowerment perspective, Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000, p 22-23. 74 Henry VIII’s 1533 “Buggery Act” made sodomy a felony punishable by death. 75 Carol Thorpe Tully, Lesbians, gays, & the empowerment perspective, p 23. 76 John D’Emilio, Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988, p 40: the authors examine changing approaches towards sexuality in the USA, linking economic developments to rising freedom for young people in choosing the marriage partners, courtship rituals, and defining sexual deviance. New concepts of religion and politics, the rise of science and other philosophical theories, as well as civil rights movements, also contributed. 77 Same-sex marriage rights, or civil partnership equivalents, are being slowly introduced in several Western countries, though these are often contested or are yet to come into effect in the USA, UK, and Australia. Chris Cuomo observes that even though in the USA ‘there are 30 or so laws and nearly 300 municipal and county ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in the United States, new and legal roadblocks against gay rights continue to arise’: “Dignity and the Right to be Lesbian or Gay”, Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition (1.132, 2007), p 75-76. Similarly, David M. Rayside observes that institutionalized homophobia in England intensified between the 1980s and 1990s, and has been linked to pervasive conservative attitudes articulated by tabloid newspapers and traditional interpretations of Christian teachings: “Homophobia, Class and Party in England”, Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue canadienne de science politique (1.25, 1992), p 121-124.
48 a traditional, strict reading of the Bible that indicates that homosexuality and homosexual acts are forbidden among Jewish and Christian people alike.78
In the eighteenth century, female chastity was viewed to be of utmost importance if a woman was to hope to be married favourably, but interestingly, ‘dalliance between women was overlooked or even smiled upon, because these encounters were not considered quite “sexual.”’79 Carolyn Woodward explains that one predominant fiction of this time was that ‘all sexual desire began with the phallus: thus, desire between women was hardly imaginable’.80 This may account for John Hall’s decision not to heterosexualise the poem, as well as the ambivalent approaches of other early translators. However, Fawkes’ overtly heterosexual interpretation is indicative of his lack of acceptance of lesbian desire as valid, or that he simply would not think to recognise its existence.
Problematically for conservative translators, the image of a desiring, lesbian body in Fragment 31 also correlates to disruption of masculinity, in some conservative eyes, and the empowerment of women and female sexual desire. The image of Sappho’s speaker as a sexually desiring woman, speaking of a sexually desirous woman, at the expense of an apparently oblivious but deified man, removes the masculine presence and privileges a space in which only female sexual desire is articulated. It is likely that this expression of intense desire, causing physical destruction was not understood as sexual by early translators, since women were not generally thought capable of having sexual desire, in the eyes of some patriarchal groups and individuals. The admiration expressed by the narrator may have been interpreted as friendship, heterosexual jealousy, or pure appreciation of a feminine, beautiful woman, adhering to popular processes of objectification of female bodies.
78 Harry A. Woggon recognises this interpretation, but contrasts this with modern scholarship and interpretations of Scripture: “A Biblical and Historical Study of Homosexuality”, Journal of Religion and Health (2.20, 1981) p 157. 79 Carolyn Woodward, ““My Heart so Wrapt”: Lesbian Disruptions in Eighteenth-Century British Fiction”, Signs (4.18, 1993), p 843. 80 Ibid.
49 Many translators use a third strategy to translate desire in this poem, in which the translator balances references to both the masculine and feminine figures, permitting either a homosexual or heterosexual reading. Ambrose Philips’ 1711 “A Fragment of Sappho” epitomises this by affording two lines of the first stanza each to the deified man and desired woman, and then stating that ‘twas this’ that caused the Sapphic speaker to undergo her emotional turmoil: I Bless’d as the Immortal Gods is he, The Youth who fondly sits by thee, And hears and sees thee all the while Softly speak and sweetly smile.
II Twas this depriv’d my Soul of Rest,81 John Addison follows a very similar path in his 1735 “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, even though the title itself could be interpreted as focused on the young woman, and therefore hint towards the speaker’s lesbian desires. These poets’ ambivalence indicates their perception that this was grammatically the most accurate means by which to translate the poem, but also signposts a need to be culturally sensitive to their heteronormative societies. The similarities between Addison’s and Philips’ versions are clear: Happy as a God is he, That fond Youth, who plac’d by thee, Hears and sees thee sweetly gay, Talk and smile his Soul away.
That it was alarm’d my Breast,82 Francis Fawkes’ 1760 ‘More happy than the gods is he’, conversely, is a more heterosexual piece, despite emphasises an ambiguous ‘This, this, alas! alarm’d my breast’, instead of a set figure.83 Fawkes’ repetition of ‘His’ at the beginning of lines in the first stanza downplays the fact that he refers to the feminine ‘thee’ and ‘thy’ just as often. The man called ‘More happy than the gods’ occupies a
81 Ambrose Philips (1711) “A Fragment of Sappho”, lines 1-5. 82 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, lines 1-5. 83 Francis Fawkes (1760) “More happy than the gods is he”, line 5.
50 prominent position in the poem, and is more likely to affect the Sapphic speaker, due to his location in the opening lines.84 In addition, Fawkes applies much more passive descriptions of the Sapphic speaker, suggesting an inclination to bring the poet into line with popular eighteenth century perceptions of femininity and female sexuality.
The third balancing strategy is also used by later translators Anne Carson, Gig Ryan and Willis Barnstone, even though these versions were published in contexts in which there is a much more permissive attitude towards overt expressions of lesbian desire. There is a balance of ambiguity in Gig Ryan’s 1998 ‘after Sappho’, evident where He seems to me to be like a god him, if it’s fated, to be above a god who talks softly with you bending close and smiling easily
This tears me at whose sight my tongue dries85 but it is not clearly stated exactly at the sight of whom this reaction takes place. This ambiguity may indicate historical standardisation of Sappho. Treatment of the male and female figures in modern translations suggests that heterosexual or homosexual readings of the poem are equally invited, following a long history of poetically negotiating this relationship. In this sense, Ryan’s, Carson’s and Barnstone’s versions essentially layer different historical perceptions of the love-triangle depicted in Fragment 31, creating modern renditions that offer space for all of these possibilities.
Suffering and Desire Irrespective of the orientation of Fragment 31’s romantic desires, central to all ten translations is the emotional and physical hardship endured by the Sapphic speaker due to lack of reciprocation. In all versions, the first-person speaker
84 References to ‘His’ occur at lines three and four, and ‘he’ at the end of the first line, while ‘thee’ is at the end of the second line, and ‘thy’ after ‘His’ in the third and fourth lines. 85 Gig Ryan (1998) ‘after Sappho’, lines 1-6.
51 describes her agony when the beloved figure is out of reach and enjoying the company of another, while the speaker is ironically silent. Suffering is either imagined or actual, depending on the version. In Ambrose Philips’ poem, the speaker claims that For while I gaz’d, in Transport toss’d, My Breath was gone, my Voice was lost:
III My Bosom glow’d; the subtle Flame Ran quick through all my vital Frame; O’er my dim Eyes a Darkness hung; My ears with hollow Murmurs rung:
IV In dewy Damps my Limbs were chill’d My Blood with gentle Horrours thrill’d; My feeble Pulse forgot to play…86 There is a distinctly medical tone to this list of symptoms. The same analysis can be applied to John Addison’s descriptions of ‘Chilling Damps’, ‘Gentle Tremors thrill’d my Blood’ and ‘Life from my pale Cheeks retir’d’.87 Francis Fawkes takes this medical tone even further, suggesting that ‘Quick through each vein the poison flows’, while the speaker suffers similar ‘dewy chillness’, ‘losing colour, sense and breath’, as her ‘whole frame pale tremblings seize’.88 John Addington Symonds uses a similar approach, stating that ‘Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ears sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love trance.89
86 Ambrose Philips (1711) “A Fragment of Sappho”, lines 7-15. 87 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, lines 13, 14, 15. 88 Francis Fawkes (1760) “More happy than the gods is he”, lines 10, 13, 14. 89 John Addington Symonds (1883) “Peer of the gods he seemeth…”, lines 10-16.
52 Unlike Fawkes, Addison, and Philips, Symonds refers to these symptoms as part of a ‘love trance’, suggesting a desire for diagnosis that can be given by the speaker, but which has otherwise only led to death or the semblance of death in other versions. In earlier versions too, there is a tendency to downplay the physicality, if not the severity, of the symptoms to present a more feminine, elegant image of suffering. While Barnard describes the speaker as hearing only my own ears drumming, I drip with sweat; trembling shakes my body90 John Hall instead claims that ‘like a wither’d flower I fade’, and Ambrose Philips’ speaker is plagued by ‘gentle Horrours’.91 John Addison’s Sapphic speaker is troubled with ‘Gentle Tremors’ rather than the ‘a sickly languor’ or ‘icy chillness’ of Greene’s later translation.92 This shift towards less gentle images of a woman’s suffering shows desire to recognise the intense, destructive nature of the speaker’s pains, rather than to depict an elegant, feminine experience. Later versions readily present Sappho’s speaker as a woman in the throes of a passion of exceptional physicality, rather than purely drawing on her emotional reserves.
The tension between metrical freedom and constraint, created by Sappho in her original version of Fragment 31, suggests that within Sappho’s work in general, despite its fragmented state, it is likely that the poet engaged consciously with issues of control and freedom in her poetic structures. John Landels observes that even though both Sappho and Alcaeus eventually had forms of stanzas named after them, the poets did not confine themselves to ‘their own’ rhythms, but used a range of metres and line lengths.93 By ignoring the structure of the poem and imposing an arbitrary rhyme scheme, conscious tension between emotion and strict structure risks being completely lost. Of the earlier translators compared in this chapter, only John Hall did not force this poem to
90 Mary Barnard (1958) “He is more than a hero”, lines 14-16. 91 John Hall (1652) “He that sits next to thee…”, line 14; Ambrose Philips (1711) “A Fragment of Sappho”, line 14. 92 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, line 14. 93 John G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p 12.
53 rhyme. Anne Carson, Willis Barnstone, Gig Ryan and Mary Barnard show more sensitivity to metrics, but focus on making the poems “sharper” by shortening lines and metre. Sappho’s metrical choices reflect a focus on control and regulation, and her Sapphic stanza structure and metre can be identified in Fragment 31 as well as in Fragment 1, both of which, on face value, appear to be confessional and highly emotional poems. Subtle structural and metrical instatement of control is symbolic of Sappho’s and her narrators’ control over these poems, despite their focus on turbulent emotion and even physical pain.
The Sapphic narrator’s emotions are not gentle in Edward Burnaby Greene’s translation. In her veins there is 'a throbbing ardor' and 'a jealous Love’, indicative of an active sexual desire not characteristically associated with a demure, socially acceptable woman.94 As a result of her frustrated desires, the persona is gripped by sickness, disrupting her senses, and she dies: A sickly languor clouds my sight; A hollow murmur wounds my ear, I nothing but confusion hear.
With current cold the vital streams Trill, slowly trill along my limbs; Pale as the flow'ret's faded grace An icy chillness spreads my face; In life's last agony I lie, - Doom'd, in a moment doom'd to die.95 Not only is the beloved woman considerably more powerful in this interpretation, but the Sapphic character's feelings and the repercussions of not being able to realise these are foregrounded. Loss of voice is not problematic in this version, nor are body parts emphasised. Instead, sickness and death result from frustrated desire, which is described in comparatively explicit terms. Even though the persona here is 'doom'd' to soon die, she can also be considered triumphant in that she is able to declare her desire and suffering, rather than languish in silence.
94 Edward Burnaby Greene (1768) ‘Ode II’, line 13, 14. 95 Edward Burnaby Greene (1768) “Ode II”, lines 16-24.
54
Francis Fawkes’ translation does not create the same image of a powerful suffering, but instead presents a powerfully wronged Sappho. Fawkes' strict rhyme scheme also employs repetition and exclamation, lending a sense of urgency to the ode: 'This, this, alas! alarm'd my breast’.96 Descriptions of the Sapphic narrator's decaying body are noticeably more aggressive as well, as she is 'robb'd' of 'my golden rest' and her 'voice died faltering on my tongue’.97 Fire and poison are mentioned, and 'Dark, dimming mists my eyes surround' while My limbs with dewy chilliness freeze, On my whole frame pale tremblings seize, And losing colour, sense and breath, I seem quite languishing in death.98 Sickness and violence are implied far more strongly than in the other versions so far discussed, indicating that while this particular version of Sappho is not capable of exercising much control over her own life, she is still far from silent. Although robbed and wronged, her desires denied, the Sapphic persona still articulates these issues with an urgent tone, assisted by Fawkes’ use of repetition and an exclamation. The injustice of her situation reiterates the righteous nature of the persona’s struggle to fulfil her romantic desires and to assert control over her body, as well as over her emotions.
Use of possessive pronouns in Fragment 31, asserting ownership by the persona over her own body and her suffering, indicates desire to control her own fate. ‘My’ is one of the most popular terms to occur in these versions, assisted in no small part by the poem’s use of the broken body as a site of conflict. Of the translations examined, only Anne Carson’s 2002 version avoids these. All of the other texts liberally apply possessives. This fixation on ownership can be illustrated by Ambrose Philips’ dissection of the distraught and dying persona into pieces, drawing attention to deprivation and trauma experienced by 'my
96 Francis Fawkes (1760) “More happy than the gods is he”, line 5. 97 Francis Fawkes (1760) “More happy than the gods is he”, line 6, 8. 98 Francis Fawkes (1760) “More happy than the gods is he”, lines 9-10, 11, 13-16.
55 Soul’, 'my Breast', 'my Breath', 'my Voice', 'My Bosom’, 'my vital Frame’, 'my Eyes', 'My Ears’, 'my Limbs', 'My Blood' and 'My feeble Pulse’.99
Repetition of ‘my’ distracts from the first stanza and its focus on the relationship between a man likened to the gods and sweetly speaking woman, directing the audience’s attention back towards the speaker. Even though this poem, in all of these translated forms, focuses on the impossibility of love due to this relationship, or a sense of unrequited love, in all of the examined versions the vast majority of the poem is dedicated to the Sapphic speaker’s suffering and the injustice of this, rather than the happiness of the couple. Some translators, in keeping with the original Greek text, insert a reference to the Sapphic speaker in the first line of the poem, so that the man seems ‘to me’ like the gods. John Addington Symonds observes that ‘Peer of the gods he seemeth to me’, Mary Barnard says ‘He is a god in my eyes’, and Gig Ryan uses ‘He seems to me to be like a god’, all of which place the perception of the man’s favour in the speaker’s control. 100 Even though the persona seems gripped by despair, in these versions she maintains control at least over her ability to perceive others and to shape how others view them through her speech, even though this has allegedly been lost.
Anne Carson and Fragment 31 Conversely, Carson manages to achieve the same effect by using very few possessive pronouns. Also, the male figure in her poem is almost instantly dismissed in the introduction, as he is referred to as 'whoever he is' who sits opposite you and 'listens close / to your sweet speaking’.101 The decision to call the man 'whoever' implies not only a sense of casualness, but also a lack of respect. 'You’, the female love object, forms the entire focus of the poem, which is shown in the narrator's declaration that '...when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking / is left in me' and the character's surprisingly passive position
99 Ambrose Philips (1711) “A Fragment of Sappho”, lines 5, 6, 8, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. 100 John Addington Symonds (1883) “Peer of the gods he seemeth…”, line 1; Mary Barnard (1958) “He is more than a hero”, line 1; Gig Ryan (1998) “after Sappho”, line 1. 101 Anne Carson, “31”, lines 2, 3-4
56 throughout this entire version.102 Pragmatically, Carson may also have chosen to refer to the man as 'whoever' in order to avoid having to address the centuries-old scholarly dispute over whether or not the man is a bridegroom, lover, or some other figure who is entitled, over and above Sappho, to sit with this admired woman. The narrator's feelings for the love object are the focus of the poem, but Carson's Sappho uses fewer personal pronouns than some other translated versions, preferring to refer to general feelings of pain before presenting a concerted, intense, and possessive effect at the poem's end. This Sappho claims that ...when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all103 While gazing upon the cherished woman, Sappho's speaker is struck dumb and loses all sense of self. The symptoms of her bodily breaks are listed, but no possessive pronoun is attached, presenting an almost out-of-body sensation. The speaker is subject to her body, as sweat and shaking hold her, while her senses fail and her eloquence is apparently lost. However, the experience is revealed to be false, as the final lines reclaim power: I am dead – or almost I seem to me.
But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty104 Despite the intensity of her suffering and its resulting dissociative, almost impersonal state, the Sapphic narrator reclaims the experience of suffering, establishing her voice in the end as well as her possession of it. Not only does
102 Anne Carson, “31”, lines 7-8. 103 Anne Carson, “31”, lines 7-14. 104 Anne Carson, “31”, lines 15-17.
57 she acknowledge her suffering, imagined or remembered, she also reminds the reader of the importance of her own existence as 'I' and that she seems dead 'to me’, rather than anyone else. Despite her professed admiration of the beloved figure, Sappho’s “victory” is to regain consciousness and re-establish control over her body, the loved woman now all but forgotten. The end line promotes perseverance against the odds, comparing the speaker to 'a person of poverty’, which is an interesting move considering Sappho's aristocratic background and documented pride in this fact. 'Poverty' in this sense is then perhaps emotional poverty; lack of reciprocity, or perhaps temporary lack of control over another individual may fill this category in the Sapphic speaker's eyes. The idea is also implicated in Barnstone's translation of the final line as 'Yet I must suffer, even poor’, encouraging an interpretation of this line as a reference to emotional disorder or pain. 105
Anne Carson’s background as both a poet and Classics professor contributes strongly to her rendering of Sappho’s fragments, with attention not only to the original Greek text, but also to the poetic content of the work. Carson’s critical and creative body of work signals willingness to apply not only her knowledge of Greek, but also her poetic abilities to create a depiction of Sappho in Fragment 31 that is multi-layered and aggressive.106 This is not the first time that Carson has poetically engaged with a famous woman writer in such a way. “The Glass Essay” (1995) depicts a similar effort when engaging with the recorded memories, experiences and imagined feelings and dreams of Emily Brontë and her novel Wuthering Heights.107 In this thirty-eight page poem, Carson experiments with a range of structures, including individual lines, short passages of prose, one word or numbered subheadings, three-line stanzas, and a combination of quotations (imagined or actual), locations and figures.
105 Anne Carson, “31”, line 17. 106 Carson’s terse, relatively plain language and layered imagery in Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse are excellent examples of her poetic skills that can apply to Sappho translation. See for example “Lava” in Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, New York: Vintage Books, p 48. 107 Poem published in Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, New York: New Direction Books, 1995, p 1-38.
58 The variety in this text evidences not only sophistication on Carson’s part as a poet, but also an intention to critically examine the lives of other literary figures through her creative works. Carson’s examination of violence in Wuthering Heights and the imagination of Emily Brontë is similar to that in Fragment 31, since both poems imagine the physical components of the speaker and adopt a confessional tone that belies more critical intent. Structurally the poems are also similar, shifting between speakers and perceptions while still focusing on the narrators’ senses of self, dichotomies between self and nature, and the importance of self-control in order to instate order at the end of both poems. In the final stanzas of “The Glass Essay”, the speaker describes a ‘human body / trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off the bones’, but the wind ‘was cleansing the bones’ and ‘there was no pain’. In the end, ‘It was not my body, not a woman’s body, it was the body of us all. / It walked out of the light’.108 In the aftermath of the speaker’s recognition, the sisters are also at peace.109 Nature and mind are divided for the Brontës, but not for Carson’s speaker, who instead observes a purifying, restorative property in destruction of the human body and the reclamatory properties of the natural. It is likely then that Carson’s reading of imagined bodily disintegration in Sappho’s fragment may have been informed by this earlier poem, published seven years before If Not, Winter.
Carson’s critical works on Sappho and other ancient Greek writers, including Plato and Simonides, tend to examine issues of control and power, making it likely that these aspects of Sappho’s writing would be observed and engaged with in her translation.110 In Eros the Bittersweet Carson examines depictions of sexual desire in ancient Greek literature, comparing Sappho’s portrayal of Helen
108 “The Glass Essay”, Part “Thou”, lines 195-204. 109 See “The Glass Essay”, Part “Thou”, lines 181-182. 110 Anne Carson has produced several texts and chapters focused on ancient Greek writers, including Eros the Bittersweet and Economy of the Unlost, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Her chapters specifically focusing on Sappho include “Sappho Shock” in [eds.] Yopie Prins, Maeera Shreiber, Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997 and “The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho I” in [ed.] Ellen Greene, Reading Sappho: contemporary approaches, California: University of California Press, 1996.
59 with that of Homer.111 In addition, Carson comments directly on Fragment 31, claiming that in this poem On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. If we look carefully at a lover in the midst of desire, for example Sappho in her fragment 31, we see how severe an experience for her is confrontation with the beloved even at a distance. Union would be annihilating. What the lover in this poem needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed, that is, she needs to attain the condition of “the man who listens closely.” His ideal impassivity constitutes for her a glimpse of a new possible self.112 Carson’s Sappho requires distance in order to articulate herself. If she were to succeed in this poem, attaining favour with the beloved woman, she would be destroyed. However, in this interpretation, the deified man is construed as an ideal figure for Carson’s Sappho, and is not someone to be dismissed, but potentially envied and construed as a future role model. In light of the poem’s predominant focus on the experiences of the Sapphic speaker and beloved woman, with only minimal attention being given to the godlike man, this is a difficult interpretation with which to agree. Carson’s comments on the split between desire as both a ‘friend and enemy’ are helpful here.113 The ‘sweetbitter’ sensation of desire, called ‘glukupikron’ by Sappho, implies its ambivalence, and a resulting dividing of the mind, which in turn would permit the Sapphic speaker to both idolise and dismiss the godlike man, just as she adores and despairs over the beloved woman, and celebrates and destroys her own body.114 Such duality would structurally mirror the poem’s depiction of multiple Sapphos speaking at once, and compound Carson’s focus on the narrator’s desire to regain control of the situation, even if this would mean, in Carson’s own interpretation, becoming more like the deified man.
Willis Barnstone's version of Fragment 31, titled “Seizure,” is exceptionally different from Carson's interpretation, since possessiveness is never an issue. Barnstone’s Sapphic narrator asserts that everything is “mine”: 'my ribs’, 'my voice is empty’, 'my tongue / cracks’, 'slender fire races / under my skin', 'My
111 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p 5. 112 Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p 62. 113 Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p 5. 114 The term ‘glukupikron’, spelt γλυκυπικρον, is used by Sappho in fragment 130.
60 eyes are dead’, 'my ears / pound’, and 'feel my mind slip’.115 Even in the throes of her emotional turmoil Barnstone's Sapphic narrator never forgets what she can and cannot control, glorifying her suffering. This reads as an almost defensive manoeuvre on the speaker's part as she simultaneously describes how her body falls apart and goes 'close to death' as a result of hearing the loved woman's voice but not being able to go to her, and how she 'must suffer' and endure.116 She is a Sapphic speaker aware of her inability to change the situation, and rather than critiquing it as Barnard's Sappho appears to do, Barnstone instead establishes the identity of those last vestiges of power left to her. Even though 'my voice is empty / and can say nothing’, this is proven to be ironic, as the narrator not only speaks, but maintains her voice even where those of the loved girl and deified man are absent. 117 It is through suffering, and recognition of this suffering, that the speaker is able to make her desires known, and even though they cannot be fulfilled, she can still present an image of self- control and emotional sophistication in the process.
Transient Bodies: Deification and Denial Fidelity to the Greek text in these translations offers room for a subtly feminist interpretation of the Sapphic narrator’s imagined body. The contrast between the ‘fire’ that races under the speaker’s skin and the ‘sweat’ or ‘damps’ that cover it set up a revision of ancient Greek perceptions of male and female bodies. Anne Carson observes that according to these views, ‘physiologically and psychologically, women are wet’, citing the ancient Greek physician Hippokrates’ (460BCE-c. 370BCE) claim [T]he female flourishes more in an environment of water, from things cold and wet and soft, whether food or drink or activities. The male flourishes more in an environment of fire, from dry, hot foods and mode of life.118 This contrast between dry/wet, heat/cold and male/female can be identified in the works of Heraklitos, Homer, Aristophanes, Arkhilokhos and Aristotle, and it
115 Willis Barnstone (2006) “Seizure”, lines 6, 8, 9-10, 10-11, 11, 12-13, 15. 116 Willis Barnstone (2006) “Seizure”, line 16. 117 Willis Barnstone (2006) “Seizure”, lines 8-9. 118 Hippokrates Vict. 27; quoted by Anne Carson in chapter “Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire” in [eds.] David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990, p 137.
61 can be inferred that Sappho would also be familiar with this theory.119 Mireille Lee comments that because men’s bodies were thought to be naturally hot and dry compared to women’s, different diaita were prescribed for men than for women by the Hippocratics, including roasted meats and vigorous exercise for men, and the opposite for women.120 This would have shaped Sappho’s life and the lives of women around her. The fact that Sappho’s narrator imagines a dual experience of fire and cold sweat, though not inherently a controversial image in terms of gender in a twenty-first century western context, may have been unexpectedly challenging for the poet’s early audiences. Sappho’s speaker imagines both the heat and cold of the fire and sweat, and does not privilege or naturalise one over the other. It could be argued then that this combination of experiences represents an amalgamation of both perceived feminine and masculine qualities.
This is not the only instance of Sappho subtly pressing the boundaries of socially expected qualities of male and female bodies in the eyes of an ancient Greek audience. G.I.C. Robertson observes that for the ancient Greeks, beauty without bravery was inexcusable: ‘courage is the deciding virtue – it can excuse the lack of good looks, but possession of the latter cannot excuse a lack of the former’.121 He refers to Homer’s Iliad and the scene between Hector and Paris in which Hector reproaches his brother for being handsome but lacking the valour to match those looks.122 The godlike man is “beautiful” in that he is godlike, just as the beloved woman is “beautiful” because she is capable of inspiring such
119 Anne Carson cites these examples: ‘It is the consensus of Greek thought that the soundest condition for a human being is dryness, provided it is not excessive dryness. “A dry soul is wisest and best,” Heraklitos asserts (B118 VS). Mature men in a sound and unafflicted condition are dry. In Homer, the efficiently functioning mind of Zeus is characterised as “dry” (Iliad 14.165). Wetness of mind is an intellectually deficient condition, as we may infer from a passage of Aristophanes where a man speaks of the need to “dry his mind” if he wants to “say anything smart” (Eq. 95-96)’… ‘And the archaic poet Arkhilokhos summarises the female threat in two iambic verses… (fr. 184 W)…She came carrying water in one hand / the tricky-minded female, and fire in the other.’: in [eds.] David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, p 137; p 141-2. 120 Lee, “Body-Modification in Classical Greece” in [eds.] Fögen, Lee, Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, p 156-7. 121 G.I.C. Robertson “The Andreia of Xenocles: Kouros, Kallos and Kleos” in [eds.] Ralph M. Rosen, Ineke Sluiter, Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003, p 66. 122 Robertson “The Andreia of Xenocles: Kouros, Kallos and Kleos” in [eds.] Rosen, Sluiter, Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity Leiden, p 65.
62 emotion and imagined destruction in Sappho and in elevating the status of the man to that of divinity in Sappho’s eyes. However, the only “valour” in the poem can be seen on the part of the narrator’s resignation to endure in the face of imagined physical destruction and even death in some translations.
Sarah Harrell highlights a concern that in the Greek imagination, masculine women are often considered to be barbarians, and that these women imply effeminate men as corollary.123 Consequently, any desire or imputed desire on Sappho’s part to challenge constructs of ideal masculine and feminine attributes is likely to have only been exercised with exceptional delicacy. In Fragment 31, Sappho deifies a male body and mentions the idealised state of this man first in the poem. However, she also likens herself to this man through her inflection of a Homeric scenario in the Odyssey, speaking on the behalf of this individual and merging this perspective with that of her own female narrator, imagined female body, and the beloved female figure. The deified man and beloved woman are both “beautiful”, but only in Sappho’s narrator is bravery readily identifiable. Arguably, bravery is simply not called for in either individual’s case in this poem. Implicitly however, the man occupies an ideologically prominent role in the poem, since he is likened to the gods and may therefore be considered exempt from mortal standards, including any need for bravery. Marguerite Deslauriers examines Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which Aristotle concludes that the lives of gods are so different from those of mortals, they cannot possibly be held to the same moral standards: they cannot have the virtues associated with such actions, the moral virtues: the gods cannot be just or courageous, generous or moderate in physical pleasures. Neither, of course, can the gods be vicious in any way; the point is not that the gods have some incapacity for exercising virtue. It is rather that the issue of virtue or vice does not come up for gods in the way that it does for us, because their lives are so radically different from ours that no opportunity presents itself which requires the moral virtues.124
123 Sarah E. Harrell, “Marvellous Andreia: Politics, Geography, and Ethnicity in Herodotus’ Histories” in [eds.] Rosen, Sluiter, Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, p 86. 124 Marguerite Deslauriers,”Aristotle on Andreia, Divine and Sub-Human Virtues” in [eds.] Rosen, Sluiter, Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, p 203.
63 Sappho’s elevation of the male figure to a godlike status exempts him from socially expected standards of masculine behaviour, but also creates a vacuum in the poem for a “masculine” figure. As a result, her enduring narrator is a logical candidate, demonstrating bravery and also a masculine “heat”, along with feminine “wetness” in her dissolute state.
Resistance and Ritual Fragment 31 invokes a godlike figure in a ritualised setting, but curiously, does not appeal to any other deity, nor does the poem reflect on ritual processes, even though the poem’s supposed setting at a wedding invites such interaction. Anne Carson details the traditional processes involved: The ancient wedding begins in the house of her [the bride’s] father with preliminary rites carried out by the bride, including a formal farewell to her girlhood and a nuptial bath. After the bath she is dressed in nuptial attire and veiled in a veil that must cover her face. Sacrifices are offered to the divinities of marriage (Zeus, Teleios, Hera Teleia, Aphrodite, Artemis, Peitho), and then a feast is spread where all the wedding guests share with the bride her last meal in the house of her father. During this feast the women all sit together on a special couch on the right side of the doorway, facing the men, who sit together to the left of the door… and the climax of the ceremony is the lifting of the bride’s veil, which is considered official consecration of the marriage, symbolised by this penetrating gaze of the groom upon his bride.125 However, none of these events are referred to in the poem, suggesting that the ritual aspects of the wedding itself are considered unimportant, but the absence of any kind of call for divine assistance is striking, considering Sappho’s professed favour with Aphrodite. There is a tone of abandonment in the poem, but the layering of Sappho’s voices, and the speaker’s commitment in some translations to ‘endure’ despite disappointment, displace this. Fragments 1 and 31 both indicate an initial need for divine assistance, but then prove it to be unnecessary.
125 Anne Carson in [eds.] Halperin, Winkler, Zeitlin, Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, p 162-163.
64 The role of the male figure extends beyond mere foil to Sappho’s desire for the beloved woman. In all of the versions examined, there is a consistent, interestingly peaceful dichotomy between the Sapphic speaker and the favoured, deified man. In none of these translations, nor in the original text, does the speaker seem to harbour any ill will towards the man or the beloved woman, but instead she internalises all of the depicted pain so that her frustration is taken out on herself. It could be argued that this poem therefore symbolises a reinstatement of supposed heterosexual superiority over lesbian desire, or the imposition of a man’s desires at the expense of a woman’s, but this is not strictly the case. Sappho’s treatment of the deified man is nothing less than flattering, but it is this flattery that calls into question the role of the man in this poem.
The level of deification varies from translation to translation: Gig Ryan describes the man as ‘like a god / him, if it’s fated, to be above a god;’ Mary Barnard claims ‘He is a god in my eyes;’ John Addington Symonds states ‘Peer of the gods he seemeth to me’.126 In all of the versions examined, the man is either on par with the gods, or outstrips them due to his happiness at being beside the beloved figure. Occasionally the beloved woman is also given divine qualities, such as in William Bowles’ description of ‘thy Angel Face’, but this is quite uncommon.127 In all of the versions though, the man’s happiness and supposed immortal characteristics are starkly contrasted with the female, Sapphic speaker’s misery, pain, and mortality. It would appear that this is a self- destructive gesture from the first, in keeping with the illustration of agony that follows in the rest of the poem, but this is not strictly the case. The inability of the man to die, or to feel the same intensity of emotion as the Sapphic speaker is an empowering image, since he cannot hope to experience the same level of pain and devotion to the beloved figure. His innocence and obliviousness, as well as his silence in the process, is far less compelling than the eloquent plight of the speaker.
126 Gig Ryan (1998) “after Sappho”, lines 1-2; Mary Barnard (1958) “He is more than a hero”, line 2; John Addington Symonds (1883) “Peer of the gods he seemeth…”, line 1 and title. 127 William Bowles (1685) “Sapho’s Ode Out of Longinus”, line 8.
65 Even though the speaker is not immortal, she is not as simple a creature as she may first appear. In none of the versions examined is she a lone speaker, rather she consists of at least two different layers: the speaker who claims to die and the speaker who does not die. This ties in again to the notion of metalepsis highlighted earlier: there is conflation and even intrusion between these layers of record and event, subverting the idea that each layer has a specific function. Her layering of voices therefore gives her the chance to compete with the deified man, in the sense that even though she claims to die, she does not. At the same time, she asserts that she cannot speak, but continues to do so in the poem. The speaker is an ironic and evasive presence, offering contradictions in the process of asserting her emotional superiority and sophistication, as well as control over her rebellious body. The gentleness of the Sapphic persona’s suffering in some versions does not downplay the severity of coming close to death. In John Addison’s version, although he avoids raw or harsh images of suffering, these still result in 'Breathless, I almost expir'd’.128 Addison has shown that this is not an actual death, but near death. This reservation may have been motivated by any number of reasons: fidelity to the original Greek; to symbolically divide the persona’s physical and imagined experiences; or to end the poem on a triumphant note, since she manages to evade death. Use of the word ‘almost’ questions the process of death itself, and how the persona was able to escape her fate. Similarly, Francis Fawkes leaves his speaker to ‘seem quite languishing in death', but without answering the question as to whom she seems to be in such a state, or whether she is in fact dead. Evasion of death brings to mind the perceived godly nature of the man in the beginning of both Fawkes’ and Addison’s translations, subtly indicating that the Sapphic speaker has the same, favoured qualities as the man, and therefore would be as deserving of the beloved figure’s attentions.
The beloved woman is frequently identified only by her sweet voice and gestures, rather than by a name or definitive physical characteristics. Bowles’ reference to her ‘Angel Face’ is an unusual, deifying approach to this figure, whereas references to her captivating moves and speech are far more popular.
128 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, line 16.
66 Edward Burnaby Greene's “Ode II” is one of the longest versions of the poem in English, full of embellishments on the virtues of both the loved woman and admired man. In his version, the beauty of the loved woman is emphasised, rather than the worthiness of the deified man, and Greene adds a series of interactions between Sappho and the woman to his version, not part of any other translations or the original text: Thy smiles, thy voice with subtil art Have rais'd the fever of my heart; I saw Thee, and unknown to rest, At once my senses were oppress'd; I saw Thee, and with envy toss'd, My voice, my very breath, was lost.129 The male youth is not mocked or derided, but there is a strong sense that he is innocent and largely unaware of the extent of the loved woman's charms; he is described as 'Happy...free from care’, 'Not Gods his ecstasy can reach’, 'Who views entranc'd the dimpled grace, / The smiling sweetness of thy face’.130 This image is vital to understanding this poem as open to feminist readings, due to its subtle destabilisation of male figures of authority or privilege. The image of a male youth in ancient Greece was considered one of the most important symbols of physical beauty.131 For Sappho to challenge this idea, and to instate and celebrate the figure of a beloved woman instead, while also focusing on the destruction of her own female body, means that she was essentially subverting this core focus. The male body in this poem is nameless, scarcely described, and quickly dismissed; it is admired and admirable only insofar as it has contact with the beloved woman, in which case it is deified and considered something not entirely human, comprehensible, or capable of comprehending the situation.
129 Edward Burnaby Greene (1768) “Ode II”, lines 7-12. 130 Edward Burnaby Greene (1768) “Ode II”, lines 1, 3, 5-6. 131 Mireille M. Lee observes the elite male was the ideal individual in Greek society, therefore his body was the ideal. The nude male body was not natural: it was achieved by modification in the form of exercise, grooming, bathing and other practices, many of which took place in a public area such as the palaestra and barbershop, demonstrating the importance of public display and performance to maintain this ideal: Lee, “Body-Modification in Classical Greece” in [eds.] Fögen, Lee, Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, p 177; 172.
67 In his version, the beloved figure is like a siren, her voice and smile stirring the speaker to physical extremes, without the need for any deified descriptions. Rather, it is the beauty of her smile and her voice that have so stirred the speaker, making the persona’s loss of voice and undignified suffering all the more anxious. Both beloved figure and Sapphic persona are linked in this focus on fairness and voice, but while the desired woman is able to exercise both over the speaker, the speaker portrays herself as hopeless. This is not the case. Essentially, the beloved figure is wholly subject to the speaker’s treatment of her, and despite her ignoble, almost medically defined suffering, the persona is able to assert a form of linguistic control and to emphasise the relative purity and dignity of her emotional turmoil.
John Addison's translation also portrays the beloved woman in a slightly more authoritative stance, as she is capable not only of winning over Sappho and sending her into a dismayed emotional display, but also of mesmerising a man, who is not only deified, but reduced to a childlike and naïve status as a result of listening to her. The first stanza is taken up entirely with references to 'That fond Youth', who is 'plac'd by thee’.132 The loved woman is mentioned only obliquely through her impacts on the youth, described as 'Happy as a God' while he 'Hears and sees thee sweetly gay, / Talk and smile his Soul away'.133 Even though this description is less openly flattering than those proffered by Hall, Bowles or Philips, this is perhaps one of the more subversive depictions of the loved women produced during this period. Although nameless, the woman possesses a voice and smile capable of charming not only the narrator's soul, but also that of a deified man. The Sapphic narrator, despite controlling the poem, is as much a victim as the 'fond Youth' is to the love-object's wiles, placing this nameless woman in a position of considerably more power than that in which she has been customarily found.
The rest of the poem is taken up with images of bodily decay, but these are relatively docile and less confrontational than those shown by Barnard, Carson
132 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, line 2. 133 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, line 1, 3-4.
68 or Barnstone: the persona's heart is deprived of rest, her voice is lost, 'soft Fire with flowing Rein, / Glided swift thro' ev'ry Vein’.134 Her ears are full of 'faint Murmurs' and 'Gentle Tremors thrill'd my Blood’, while 'Chilling Damps my Limbs bedew'd’.135 This version shows close adherence to the translation presented earlier by Ambrose Philips, and manifests the same desire to depict Sappho in a gentle, respectable, and feminine light, contrary to some of the more hostile approaches taken toward her by writers such as Alexander Pope. The Sapphic speaker is entirely caught by the charms of this woman, and is helpless. The descriptions chosen are remarkably passive and non-confrontational, as the narrator appears to undergo these processes involuntarily, but with great peace. The dignity of such a process is a tribute to Sappho in the context of Addison’s contemporary audience, which is likely to have been unimpressed with frank descriptions of overt female sexual desire or physical disarray.
Comparing “Sapphos” Sappho is one of the Greek lyric poets and as a result, is often read alongside Pindar, Bacchylides, Anacreon, Stesichorus, Simondies, Ibycus, Alcaeus, and Alcman. Charles Bowra claims that these poets may have been grouped together because of aesthetic reasons, or simply because their works made it to Alexandria.136 Alcman and Sappho have been compared due to their poetic focus on women, and Bowra claims that Sappho was bound to her maidens by ties which were at least half religious. The service of Aphrodite and the Muses was not a finishing school or a college of music. It was primarily an association of young women under a leader who devoted themselves to the cult of the goddess…the girls of Alcman’s Maiden- Song certainly seem to live in an atmosphere of emotional intimacy, and there may well be parallels between the two cases.137 Here, categorisation of one Greek lyric poet has simultaneously conscripted another. Translators’ access to critical assessments of other Greek lyric poets may influence their approach to Sappho’s writing and in the case of Fragment
134 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, lines 6, 8 10-11. 135 John Addison (1735) “An Ode On a YOUNG MAID whom she lov’d”, lines 12, 14, 13. 136 Charles M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: from Alcman to Simonides, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961, p 2. 137 Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p 188.
69 31, may have encouraged “wedding song” interpretations. Bowra uses the above logic to state that Sappho’s ‘followers’ prepared themselves for marriage and that when their time came, ‘Sappho wrote their Wedding Songs for them and then severed her relations with them’.138
Margaret Williamson observes that a number of Greek poets, including Alcaeus, have been incorrectly cited as contemporaries and even lovers of Sappho.139 Alcaeus wrote overtly on political intrigues and aristocratic plotting, while Sappho’s political criticism is much more subtle.140 Both were public poets, but their focal subjects vary greatly and it may erroneously appear that Sappho’s work is comparatively apolitical and self-referential. Susan Jarratt observes that Alcaeus and Sappho both ‘urge a particular ideologically influenced attitude or action in a communal setting’, but Alcaeus, unlike Sappho, calls upon ‘the “literary” tradition of the epic warriors’ as well as ‘a succession of fathers who have fought and died and must not be dishonoured’ when discussing memory, in contrast to Sappho’s memories of named women who have otherwise been forgotten by ancient Greek history.141
Fragment 31 is not an apolitical, wholly emotional piece of writing. Sappho debates with Homeric discourse through her portrayal of death and dying, and her justification of desire.142 Her layered perspectives and voices in the poem, in its original and translated forms, problematize perception and transmission, enacted by later English versions of this work. In addition, Sappho works within
138 Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p 188. 139 Margaret Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 1-2. Williamson observes that Anacreon, who lived in the late sixth century (some two hundred years after Sappho) has been called a rival for her love, and the satiric writers Archilochus and Hipponax, who lived respectively before and after Sappho’s time, and all but Alcaeus came from different parts of Greece: p 7. Despite her lack of contemporaneity with Anacreon, Sappho’s work has been anthologised with his, including in one of the earliest compilations, made by Henri Estienne in 1554, which may have contributed to theories of their attachment. 140 Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 65; see Alcaeus, fragments 129 and 332. 141 Susan Jarratt, “Sappho's Memory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (32:1, 2002), p 25-26. 142 For example, Sappho’s use of Helen of Troy in Fr. 16 does not portray Helen as she was celebrated by the Spartans, but Homer’s figuration of her as the woman “doubly disgraced” by entering a foreigner’s bed and then being returned to that of her husband: Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994, p 2. However, Sappho justifies Helen’s behaviour as swayed by desire for beauty. Sappho also does not portray death as inflicted during war and physical conquest alone, but by emotional suffering and the result of thwarted, intense desire.
70 her own context to push the boundaries of perception and transmission, applying similar language and imagery to that in Homer’s Odyssey. Leah Rissman compares Fragment 31 to the encounter between Odysseus and Nausicaa, likening the exchange between the beloved woman and deified man in Sappho’s poem to that in Homer’s scene.143 Odysseus speaks to Nausicaa: That man is far and away blessed beyond all others who plies you with dowry and leads you to his house; for I have never seen with my eyes a mortal person like you, neither man nor woman. A holy dread grips me as I gaze at you.144 Similarities in description are immediately apparent. Rissman focuses on a sense of ‘equality in excellence of Odysseus and Nausicaa’, claiming that ‘just as Nausicaa overcomes the natural reaction to Odysseus’ fearful appearance, so too he masters his awe of her. At vi 160 he tells her that wonder seizes him when he beholds her’.145 However, Rissman overemphasises perceived deification of the beloved woman in Sappho; an interpretation inconsistent with a majority of translations, including my own.146 Rissman asserts that Sappho must adopt the role of a “lesser warrior” to be bested in this contest, since only ‘remarkable heroes who enjoy the favour of a god (or the gods) are able to withstand a divine presence’.147 Not enough emphasis has been placed on the poem’s final line, in which the speaker resolves to endure. Rather than being one of the “lesser warriors”, Sappho’s narrator demonstrates the Greek masculine ideal of andreia, defined in Plato’s Laches by the titular General as, simply, ‘not running away in the middle of battle’.148
143 Leah Rissman, Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho, West Germany: Verlag Anton Hain, p 69. 144 Odyssey 6.158-161 in [translated by] A.T. Murray, [ed.] G.P. Goold, Homer The Odyssey in Two Volumes, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919, p 217-219. 145 Rissman, Love as War, p 69. 146 Compare this with Rissman, Love as War, p 79: ‘The divinely beautiful, tremor-inducing woman of fr. 31 is equated with a fear-inspiring warrior, who has been distinguished by comparison to a deity’. The beauty of the woman is not in question, but there are no adjectives in the original poem nor any examined translations that equate this with divinity. 147 Rissman, Love as War, p 76. 148 Plato, Laches 190e4; quoted in by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen’s “General Introduction” in [eds.] Ralph M. Rosen, Ineke Sluiter, Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2003, p 6.
71 Despite similarities between the deified man and beloved woman in Sappho’s poem, and Homer’s Odysseus and Nausicaa, Rissman’s interpretation of the Sapphic speaker does not do this portrayal complete justice: [T]he man’s heroism in the war of love is revealed not only in his willingness to take on a woman of divine beauty, but in his imperviousness to the effect of that body…In the Iliad, Diomedes survives his run-ins with the gods because Athene has endowed him with special powers, just as, aided by the same goddess, Nausicaa retains her composure before naked Odysseus and as Odysseus later on derives strength from the aegis.149 However, the deified man explicitly reacts to the beloved woman in all translations examined. His deification stems from association with the woman. Interestingly, it is through this association that he gains most influence; the deified man is only as powerful as the female figure’s presence “allows” him to be, and arguably, she has this in common with the Sapphic speaker.
J. J. Winkler claims that ‘Sappho as reader of the Odyssey participates by turn in all the characters’.150 Here, Sappho embraces the roles of Odysseus and Nausicaa, as well as standing outside them both, seeing herself as Odysseus admiring the nymph-like maiden, and Nausicaa cherishing her own complex emotions.151 Layering of perspective and adaptation of a Homeric passage showcases Sappho’s familiarity with Homer’s work, engaging with his device, and adding to it by imbuing her despondent, female speaker with resolution to endure. In contrast to Rissman’s assessment that Sappho’s speaker is reduced to fear and failure, rather the ending reflects Nausicaa’s and Odysseus’ resolve to confront one another, subtly alluding to ideal, manly bravery espoused by Homer and Plato. Sappho combines male and female perspectives in a scenario in which a female voice is strategically disadvantaged, but capable then of manifesting a resolute conclusion, despite (imagined) physical trauma.
149 Rissman, Love as War, p 85. 150 J.J. Winkler, “Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics” in [ed.] Laura K. McClure, Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p 57. 151 Winkler “Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics”, p 57-58.
72 Ambiguity in Translation Issues of “adequacy” in translation, ‘the measurement of semantic and stylistic fidelity to the original literary text’, are not truly at issue in Sappho’s work.152 It would be impossible to encapsulate the original poetic intentions of Sappho in any later translation, since there is so little of her other works and context left. The poems are ideologically bound up in their inaccessibility; their inability to be rendered into a completely knowable form, due to their fragmented state, has been a major appeal to readers of Sappho for centuries.
Denys Page comments that even though Fragment 31 has often been interpreted as a wedding song, there are no references to a bride or groom. He condemns the theory that this poem is a ‘love-triangle’ between Sappho, her beloved, and the beloved’s fiancé: what sort of wedding-song would this appear to bride and bridegroom – this unabashed recital, not of the merits of the groom and the virtues of the bride, but of the intensity of physical passion which overwhelms Sappho when she looks but a moment at the ‘bride’?153 Conversely, Bowra claims that the poem is set at the wedding of one of Sappho’s beloved girls, and that she is there as the trainer and leader of the choir to sing for the wedding, but privately feels the pain of losing the girl.154 André Lardinois suggests that wedding laments were socially permissible, and that Fragment 31 was a highly stylised “protest” for female performers to articulate anxieties about marriage.155
It is intriguing that this poem, which focuses on thwarted female sexual and romantic desire in such an intense, passionate fashion, is set during a ceremony in which societal, gendered conventions are at their strongest in ancient
152 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, p 5. 153 Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, p 32- 33. Margaret Reynolds in The Sappho Companion persuasively asserts that Fragment 31 is important in Western poetry because it depicts a love-triangle, an image which has now become commonplace: p 21. 154 Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p 216. 155 André Lardinois’ chapter “Keening Sappho: Female Speech Genres in Sappho’s Poetry” in [eds.]André Lardinois, Laura McClure, Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001, p 88.
73 Greece.156 In this space, where bride and groom are confronted with their reproductive roles and a new, patriarchal hierarchy in their lives, it is a series of layered Sapphic speakers that narrate events, articulating romantic desire that is neither heterosexual nor reproductive, but based on exclusion of male presence and assertion of control over female bodies by female voices. The challenging nature of such a portrayal is echoed in Page duBois’ recognition that the Sappho we receive in postmodernity… speaks of longing for women, is caught up in the worship of Aphrodite, the fertility of pleasure as opposed to reproduction, corporeal or intellectual. This Sappho has not yet complied with the demand of the classical city that women become instruments of the polis or city-state, that they perform their reproductive duties for the sake of the perpetuation of citizen bodies, nor has she complied with the philosophical demand that material pleasure be subordinated to a philosophical engendering.157 Sappho speaks in and out of death, privately and to an audience, feeling herself ripped apart, and yet apparently stunned into numbness and silence.158 These series of contradictions and ambiguities offer fertile ground for imposition of later poets’ and translators’ own values, but interestingly, many of these versions still portray Sappho in control of herself, her audience, and other personae, rather than simply bemoaning her fate.
In dealing with the poem’s physical lacunae and inherent ambiguities, many Sappho translations are dynamically rather than formally equivalent.159 Maria Tymoczko succinctly details the issues central to this, observing that some appealing characteristics of formally equivalent translations are that
156 Of the translations to be examined, five of these are heterosexual renderings, one is ambiguous, and five homosexual. The heterosexualised versions originate from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, while lesbian versions span the entire time period covered, suggesting a period of particular concern to “sanitise” Sappho’s image according to homophobic societal values. 157 Page duBois, Sappho is Burning, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995, p 80. 158 Yopie Prins, “Sappho's Afterlife in Translation” in [ed.] Ellen Greene, Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, California: University of California Press, 1996, p 38. 159 In Sappho’s work, lacunae appear in two states: the physical decomposition of her poems, resulting in loss of vital words, lines and stanzas; and the poetic technique of consciously withholding or leaving out words, lines and stanzas. In both cases, issues of control are created, since the poet essentially “evades” readers and threatens to destabilise readers’ certainty of the poem’s messages and meanings.
74 They are prima facie obvious, that they are logically direct or logically simple, and that they are somehow more objective than dynamic-equivalence translations.160 These attributes ideally minimise interaction of the translator with the text, but do not prevent ‘interference’ where literal translation would be nonsensical and substitution of a logically synonymous equivalent appropriate.161 Tymoczko asserts that in some poems there may be evidence that the poet aims for a certain logical construction, in which case the translator may be inclined to emphasise particular ideas in order to reveal such constructions.162 This is not dynamic equivalence, since a consistent thread has been identified and articulated in the closest linguistic equivalent. Tymoczko persuasively argues that formal equivalence sometimes must become dynamic in order to accommodate for linguistic turns of phrase that would be incomprehensible if translated literally.163 In Fragment 31, due to Sappho’s relatively obscure and difficult Aeolic dialect, this is very much the case. However, efforts to give Sappho’s work a more contemporary edge threaten to make each piece essentially “disposable”.
Tymoczko reflects that ‘every telling is a retelling’, quoting Lord Albert’s summary that the picture that emerges is not really one of conflict between preserver of tradition and creative artist; it is rather one of the preservation of tradition by the constant re-creation of it. The ideal is a true story well and truly retold.164 When reading translations of Sappho’s poetry in the twenty-first century and referring back to earlier versions, this process of contextual and textual linking as a means of informing later versions is evident through structural and linguistic discrepancies and fidelities between translations. However, according to Tymoczko’s reasoning, Sappho must be doubly linked in this fashion, since
160 Maria Tymoczko in [ed.] Theo Hermans, The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985, p 63. 161 Tymoczko in [ed.] Hermans, The Manipulation of Literature, p 66. 162 Tymoczko in [ed.] Hermans, The Manipulation of Literature, p 73. 163 Tymoczko [ed.] Hermans, The Manipulation of Literature, p 79. 164 Lord Albert B., The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964, p 29.
75 she claims that since every telling is a retelling, ‘there are no stories for which this is more true than myths, for which there are no “originals.”’165
In Sappho’s translations, each retelling may amount to a new poem entirely, in terms of tone, ideologies, and metrical and syntactical content. Her “known” biographical details are attributed to different sources. For this reason, Sappho’s English-language translations are metonymically layered; translators undertake multiple levels of reading, engaging not only with their own values and context, but with Sappho’s fragmentary body of work, literature, and history attached to the work, and the mythologised status and treatment of the poet. Sappho’s poems offer multiple access points, but despite this potentially complex agglomeration of meanings and interpretations, a tendency to portray the poet as a defiant individual, articulating her own desires and exercising control over these, her own body, and the bodies of others, persists despite contextual beliefs and myths that would otherwise encourage an opposite construction.
Conclusion Sappho’s poetry exists in English translations today as a series of layered voices, broken into pieces, incorporated into one another or exchanged altogether for another reader’s version. As a result, her texts offer multiple points of access for readers, made available by this multiplicity of translators’ voices, pseudo- biographical details, shifting contextual values regarding women’s voices and permissible feminine activity, and values held by individual readers. Fluidity of ideals and linguistic expression assists in the “breaking” of Sappho’s body of work, physically through fragmentation and prosodic alterations, and metaphorically through selective emphasis and articulation of the poet’s originary points in each recorded piece of work.
Fragment 31 is a complex reflection on hierarchies of voice and perspective, the generative power of these being continued into the works of later English translators. Much appeal in translating Sappho’s work into English has been its
165 Maria Tymoczko, “The Metonymics of Translating Marginalised Texts,” Comparative Literature (1.47, 1995), p 14.
76 crisp and open invocation of emotions, with an almost confessional tone, combined with its fragmentary state; both accessible and mysterious, canonised yet unstable. In a sense, she has been “too accessed” for there to be stability in her work, but these “gaps” have provided ample material for other poets and translators from which to draw inspiration. Despite their range of ideological backgrounds, all of the translators examined acknowledge a strong individual speaking voice on the part of the Sapphic persona. Even though this sophisticated, empowered image of thwarted female speaker(s) may not have been intended by some of Sappho’s more conservative translators, regarding women and women’s poetry, this image has nonetheless endured and offered opportunities to other poets, some of whom will be discussed later in this investigation. Fragment 31 is not the only poem to have received such treatment, nor to encode such images, as will now be demonstrated in Chapter Two.
77 Chapter Two Love, Subversion, and Fragment 1
Introduction Sappho’s legacy, as a poet and a body of work, is fraught with instability. No existing poems can be confidently presented as “whole”, original pieces of work, and it is even questionable whether some of these were intended to be read as poems at all. Her biography is punctuated with legends and pseudo- biographical details. Some larger, preserved Sappho poems have historically been afforded more critical attention than the smaller fragments. The “Ode to Aphrodite”, also called “Fragment 1”, the “Hymn to Aphrodite”, or the “Hymn to Venus” in some English-language translations, is one of only two poems written by Sappho which have been preserved almost entirely intact. It has been translated into English more than four hundred and fifty times.166 Many of these versions have been described as 'fantastically inappropriate', due to their infidelity to the original Greek text, or liberal incorporation of the interpreters' own values into the poem.167 However, some consistent features have endured in translation. Among these features is a surprisingly strong focus on bodily violence and manipulation.
This chapter will demonstrate, through close references to Fragment 1, as well as several smaller Sapphic fragments, that such a focus on control and physicality is not unique to one poem. Despite a legacy of conservative translations, including heteronormatised pronouns, even some of the most “feminine” and vulnerable renderings of Fragment 1 showcase the importance of being able to express romantic and sexual desire, as well as to maintain control over situations and characters. These images, not canonically associated with Sappho for much of her English-language reception, have nonetheless been
166 John D'Agata, "Stripped-Down Sappho," Boston Review (October/November, 2002), accessed at http://bostonreview.net/BR27.5/dagata.html on 31 October 2010. 167 Kenneth Rexroth, Classics Revisited, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968, p 30.
78 embraced in the works of several later poets, including twentieth and twenty- first century publications to be examined in a later chapter.
Love and Violence: Fragment 1 Fragment 1 is essentially a poem focused on problematic “love”. The desired woman (or man, in some translations) will not return the Sapphic figure's affections, so Sappho appeals for support from the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, as well as her human audience. A Sapphic narrator recounts the process of events, and paraphrases Aphrodite’s reply. The opening section describes the goddess's departure from the heavens, heeding the narrator's calls for attention, and her arrival on earth to speak to the Sapphic figure. Aphrodite speaks directly to the persona, but appears amused by her plight. She claims that Sappho ought not fear rejection; the desired individual will be forced even against her will to respond to Sappho's desire. The poem is deeply encoded with inegalitarian, controlling relationships, revealing the persona’s obsession with power, not only over the beloved man or woman, but also over the deity. As a result, it should not be interpreted as a conventional devotional poem, but a subtle manifesto on Sappho the poet, and persona, as an empowered figure, despite situations that would suggest otherwise.
The Aphrodite Ode is constructed in a traditional Greek religious format, featuring flattering dedications to Aphrodite and considerable space devoted to describing Aphrodite's arrival, necessary for this style.168 However in most English-language translations of this poem, the narrating voice dismisses Aphrodite's presence and assistance as unnecessary: the persona is capable of winning over the reluctant beloved figure alone, and Aphrodite need not intervene on her behalf.169 However, the goddess is persuaded to descend from
168 Margaret Williamson observes that the presence of a religious element in Sappho’s work is not enough to make her a priestess. Prayer and worship were a regular part of life for both sexes and almost all poets of the period composed songs to the gods. Xenophanes’ poem shows that symposia routinely began with prayer and Alcaeus’ poems, sung to his drinking companions, include some calling on the gods for help against enemies.: Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 79. 169 This assessment has been reached after surveying a number of translations of Fragment 1, including those by Ambrose Philips (1711), John Herman Merivale (1833), Francis T. Palgrave (1854), Edwin Arnold, Thomas W. Higginson (1871), Moreton John Walhouse (1877), John
79 heaven to affirm this. Interestingly, the ominous tones of the poem, foreshadowing suppression of the beloved character's own wishes, as well as a curious lack of respect for the goddess herself, have been almost exclusively ignored by Sappho's critics. Most early commentators have instead focused on the “femininity” of Sappho’s focus in this poem, disregarding the more manipulative activities taking place in the poem’s structure and content. As this chapter will demonstrate however, several later female poets have not disregarded this content, and have in fact showcased it, along with material taken from myths of Sappho’s life and loves.
The central theme of love, in Sappho’s poetry and legends surrounding her life, can convey more unconventional ideas. Love poems that appear to deal with betrayal or thwarted love can be literary evaluations and celebrations of control. Instances in which a female persona appears to sacrifice herself for the sake of a male beloved can be construed as manipulative acts, undertaken to restore the distraught persona to poetic primacy and activity, in contrast to her unfaithful or unresponsive beloved. The Aphrodite Ode features love, dedication, and dismay. Such themes invite, but ultimately elude, creation of a utopian, egalitarian setting in which both lover and beloved can harmoniously exist as a solution. Instead, Sappho’s Fragment 1 creates an emotionally intense setting, focused on one individual at the expense of another, who is eventually subsumed. In such a setting, the Sapphic speaker is subtly shown to exercise ultimate control over the situation, rather than the goddess she invokes. Fragment 1 is not only a love poem, but also a poem of self-control and aggrandisement, at the expense of a beloved figure that is both nameless and featureless, in contrast to the speaker and Aphrodite.
Eva Stigers observes that Sappho wrote within a tradition of love poetry in ancient Greece, and that this necessarily forced on Sappho the problem of presenting the female as an erotic subject as well as object.170 The beloved
Addington Symonds (1893), Mary Barnard (1958), David Campbell (1982), Anne Carson (2002), Willis Barnstone (2006). 170 Eva S. Stigers, “Sappho’s Private World” in [ed.] Hélène P. Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity, New York: Gordon and Breach, 1981, p 45.
80 figure is therefore a multi-faceted tool; legitimising Sappho’s poetic voice, while also demonstrating its power. Stigers suggests that Sappho’s lesbian desire may well have been strategic; confining erotic impulses towards women and preserving traditional models, whilst also exploring what a woman may desire and offer erotically.171 This proposal is intriguing but does not necessarily apply to later Sapphic poets, such as Lady Mary Wroth who will be discussed in Chapter Three. Later love poetry, informed by the western tradition influenced by Petrarch and Sir Philip Sidney, is similar in that these works are characteristically spoken by a male poet celebrating the beauty and virtue of an unattainable women who is at once the object of his desire, the cause of his poetry and the mirror which defines his identity.172 Similarities between ancient Greek and later western poetics could have made Sappho’s subtle subversions appealing for women poets. Marilyn Farwell notes that courtly and Petrarchan love poems of the Middle Ages and Renaissance did not figure women as active participants in love poems: the female, the beloved, is acted upon, her usual response to the ardent declarations of her lover being “no”.173 However, this answer is not an expression of sexual choice, but reflects her role as a means by which the male speaker and poet is able to transcend physicality.174
Eva Stehle observes that for Sappho, love poems were ‘systems’ that served ‘to construct a speaker whose character then informs any one of the poems.’175 The speaker in the majority of Sappho’s fragments is distinctive, and aside from in Fragment 44, tone and language are relatively uniform throughout the fragments. In each text in which there is a distinct speaking voice, it is a first- person speaker. Stehle asserts, however, that the most striking aspect of Sappho’s self-creation as extraordinary is her treatment of the gods, with whom she frequently depicts herself as conversing. The erotic
171 Stigers, “Sappho’s Private World”, in [ed.] Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity, p 46. 172 Jan Montefiore, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing, 3rd edition, London: Pandora, 2004, p 96, quoted by Stigers in [ed.] Foley, Reflections of Women in Antiquity, p 44-45. 173 Marilyn Farwell, “Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination”, Signs (14.1, 1988), p 106. 174 Farwell, “Toward a Definition of the Lesbian Literary Imagination”, p 106-7. 175 Eva Stehle, Performance and gender in ancient Greece: nondramatic poetry in its setting, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p 317.
81 power that she claims by this strategy can be extended to all the love poems – something that readers of her collected poetry do easily...Sappho’s statements about the beauty and desirability of others gain their definitive quality from the authority of this aggrandized figure defined by writing.176 It can also be argued that Sappho’s self-aggrandised and consistent poetic voice intentionally emphasises power in her entire body of work. A recognisable, empowered and empowering voice indicates wider desire to give agency to certain women while operating within a poetic scope that traditionally only focused on male personae’s emotional and philosophical understandings of the world.
Love in the Aphrodite Ode is neither passive nor peaceful. It is an act of conquest, divinely ordained and situated within a poetic landscape in which the Sapphic speaker is in all places of prominence simultaneously. Anne Carson’s recent translation reads: Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart
but come here if ever before you caught my voice far off and listening left your father’s golden house and came,
yoking your car. And fine birds brought you, quick sparrows over the black earth whipping their wings down the sky through midair –
they arrived. But you, O blessed one, smiled in your deathless face and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why (now again) I am calling out
176 Stehle, Performance and gender in ancient Greece, p 317.
82
and what I want to happen most of all in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again) to lead you back into her love? Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?
For if she flees, soon she will pursue. If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them. If she does not love, soon she will love even unwilling.
Come to me now: loose me from hard care and all my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish. You be my ally.177 Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho into English will be used as bases of analysis in the chapters to follow, in light of the previous chapter’s discussion of her strong scholarly awareness of ancient Greek history, language, and writers, as well as her formidable and sensitive poetic abilities, producing dynamically equivalent but formally conscious interpretations. DuBois acknowledges the disruptive power of Sappho as a historical poetic figure, writing of lesbian love and desire for pleasure, rather than maternal or domestic duties. But her reading does not take this far enough. Sappho is disruptive and manipulative in the Aphrodite Ode; willing to crush the desires of the nameless woman and demand obedience from Aphrodite. Layering love with more manipulative content also appears in other fragmentary poems. DuBois claims that the Aphrodite Ode’s scenario of pursuit and flight, of subject and control, seems to me to give the lie to an essentialised, ahistorical version of passive or even reciprocal feminine sexuality; Sappho participates more in the aristocratic drive for domination, in the agonistic arena of Greek social relations, than in some projected vision of nonviolent eros…Sappho cannot readily be assimilated into some versions of feminist utopianism.178
177 Anne Carson, “1”, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, USA: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, p 2-5. 178 Page DuBois, Sappho is Burning, p 9.
83 Not only can Sappho not be assimilated into such utopian interpretations, but also her poetic settings are fundamentally antithetical to such visions. She promotes instead a cult of the individual at the expense of all others.
Performativity and Control Music and dance, as well as the narrator’s voice, would have been central to performance of Sappho’s poetry, and would likely have been directed by the poet herself. Unfortunately, nothing is left to guide studies of the former in Sappho’s work, and precious little remains of the latter.179 Steven Lonsdale comments that it has been ‘generally assumed’ that poetic celebrations of victors in athletic and musical contests would have been performed by a chorus of singers and dancers, ‘possibly with a poet or his delegate as leader’.180 However, this does not preclude their use in women’s rites and rituals. References in the poetry of Alcman, a Lydian poet who lived in Sparta in the middle of the seventh century B.C.E., to maiden songs and female singers, are helpful. Alcman’s work is unique among surviving choral lyrics in the degree and intimacy of detail in which they describe ‘the dramatization of the chorus as a character through self-referential language’ and how this ‘affords glimpses of the composition and dynamics of the chorus, its outward movements and inner emotions’.181 Alcman also describes the garments worn by these women, their jewellery, and the fact that ten of them are singing.182 Considering Sappho’s focus on beauty in many of her fragmentary lyrics, it would not be unreasonable to say that similar garb may have been donned in performances of her work. In
179 We can only make informed guesses to describe ancient Greek dances performed in the archaic and classical periods: Steven Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993, p 2. Greek dances were usually passed on by word of mouth, implying these would change over large periods of time, so even if these had been recorded in writing, the written versions themselves would be subject to ambiguities of transmission: F.G. Naerebout, Attractive Performances, ancient Greek dance: three preliminary studies, Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1997, p 262-263. 180 Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, p 4. 181 Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, p 5. 182 In Alcman’s long Fragment 1, the Louvre parthenion, from the 65th line onwards the poet describes an ‘abundance of purple’, ‘snake of solid gold’, ‘Lydian headband, pride of dark-eyed girls’ and then names the women Nanno, Areta, Thylacis, Cleësithera, Aenesimbrota, Astaphis, Philylla, Damaretam Ianthemis, Aotis and Hagesichora, speaking directly to the ‘Choir-leader’. Alcman states that ‘…this our coir of ten sings as well as eleven girls: why, its song is like that of a swan on the waters of the Xanthus; and she… her lovely yellow hair…’: [ed.] G.P. Goold, [translated by David Campbell] Greek Lyric II: Anacreon, Anacreontea Choral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988, p 361-369.
84 Alcman’s poetry too the role of the poet is made clear: not only did the poet rehearse and produce the choral performance, but was occasionally cast in performances.183
We can infer from the historical, cultural significance of dance and music, ritualistic, religious, or social, in ancient Greek performance that these areas would have been equally strongly encoded with control in Sappho’s own productions. Sappho is likely to have performed her poetry herself and also to have organised other dancers or singers. Despite the personal and apparently confessional tone of her work, it was clearly made for public performance, and layering of voices in Fragment 31, as well as her strong sense of self-interest in Fragment 1, plays an important role here. Not only is Sappho the poet, but also the narrator, Aphrodite’s speaker, the reluctant woman, and vindicated party. The multiplicity of voices in this poem is literally acted out in the form of the chorus, poet, and any dancers that may have been involved. However, all of these figures still focus on Sappho as a central point: she controls the entire scene both in the physical performance and in the body of the text.
Women would have comprised the body of the performance. Lonsdale observes that in many parts of Greece, girls of marriageable age were brought together to dance and sing in choruses, creating displays of female solidarity that often appeared to celebrate festivals for Artemis, the virgin goddess of the hunt (and, paradoxically, the goddess who overseas girls’ development, marriage, and first pregnancy).184 Sappho’s references to other women across her body of work make it highly likely that most of her time was spent with women and girls, and these women may have performed her work. This is a physical act of control over the bodies of those around her, in which Sappho directs other women to articulate her imagined or actual emotional experiences through choral singing and dancing. The culturally encoded place of dance and song in the lives of women in ancient Greece would facilitate and even necessitate this process, essentially naturalising Sappho the poet’s ability to direct the movements and
183 Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, p 6. 184 Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, p 170.
85 voices of these women. Performances of Sappho’s work actualise the manipulations prevalent in her poetry: based on the determined tone and triumphant ending of Fragment 1, it is likely that the dancing here may have been similarly charged; perhaps varying between slow and then turbulent in parts, with the Sapphic narrator directing these movements.
The musical accompaniment to Fragment 1, like any dancing that took place at its performance, is unknown. According to John Landels, for the Greeks in ‘highly evocative and atmospheric songs’, including expressions of desire, the ‘proper medium for this type of subject was the song, sung solo by the poet, who accompanied himself (or herself) on a lyre’.185 Sappho is famed for her use of a lyre, often depicted on Greek urns, making this the most likely instrument to have been used, and importantly, in the hands of the poet herself. M.L. West observes that Sappho would have used a harp called a paktis (Lesbian-Doric) or pektis (Ionic-Attic), and that this would have been ‘a plucked cordophone with many strings, characterised by the playing of octave concords, or the echoing of the melody at octave intervals’.186 Andrew Baker opines that even though in the sixth century private music was popular and many of the songs of Ibycus, Anacreon, Sappho, and Alcaeus were designed for reception by a small group of friends, music was still considered to be a predominantly public matter, used for religious, military and civic ceremonies.187 Considering the different moods expressed in Sappho’s fragments, a range of different sentiments could have been conveyed in her music, using very different patterns of notes for her laments compared to those for her invocations to Aphrodite.
In light of Sappho’s public prominence and fame in her own lifetime for her poetry, it would not be unreasonable to argue that Sappho performed to more dynamic groups than only a few select friends.188 Arguably, Sappho’s physical
185 John G. Landels, Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, p 11. 186 M.L. West, Ancient Greek Music, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1992, p 71. 187 Andrew Baker in [ed.] Andrew Baker, Greek Musical Writings: Volume I The Musician and his Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p 47. 188 Larger, generalised groups of girls are mentioned in her poems, and specific departures lamented, indicating fluctuation and change in her circle of listeners. Joan DeJean observes that
86 and poetic manifestations of control over the bodies and emotions of her listeners, singers and dancers would have been expressed to a large audience, facilitated not only by her imagery and layering of voices, but also in her music. Even in a larger setting, the tone of Sappho’s lyre would invite a personal interpretation. Baker recognises that the stringed instruments used by the Greeks in the sixth century would have produced quite different sounds from the kithara, invoking a more intimate tone due to their many strings and potential to produce complex melodies. For this reason he suggests that they would hardly ever have been used in public performance.189 However, this is difficult to prove, and does not displace the importance of Sappho’s role as the lead musician in control of the performance of the poem.
Later translations of Fragment 1 do not always reflect on the performativity of the piece, but this does not preclude its existence when considering the context of the original Greek text. Despite the confessional tone of the poem, it is likely to have been a public celebration of Aphrodite as well as Sappho’s speaker’s desires. Many translators have imposed new rhythms to the poem, through rhyme scheme, elongated stanzas or additional fragmentation, but this does not circumvent the fact that the piece is still performed with a strict focus on control over public perceptions and bodies, real or imagined.
Conservative Readings of Sappho The above reading of Fragment 1 and its context counters many prevailing theories about Sappho’s work and its motivations. Bruno Gentili’s characterisation of the relationship between Sappho and Aphrodite gives an example of the kinds of “gentle” interpretations that this chapter contrasts with a more assertive view. In Sappho’s poetry, Gentili asserts that Sappho transfers the divinities of myth – Aphrodite, the Muses, and the Graces – onto a plane more accessible to the daily life of the thíasos…Sappho’s goddesses know nothing of such separation and remoteness. Her Aphrodite, like the gods
‘Sappho portrays both the composition and the performance of her verse as an exchange among women, as the product of a female community whose members are united by bonds both personal and professional’: Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, p 47. 189 Baker in [ed.] Baker, Greek Musical Writings: Volume I The Musician and his Art, p 50.
87 of Homer, assists and protects, but her manner and attitude are more human, more gentle, more intimate – almost, one would say, those of a favourite friend in the thíasos rather than of a goddess.190 However, this proximity to divinity does not necessarily imply a level of friendly intimacy. In Fragment 1 this can be interpreted as evidence of skilled manipulation on Sappho’s part, inciting a goddess to do her bidding as ‘my ally’.
Ruth Vanita observes that later recipients of Sappho’s work, including the Romantics, drew on Sappho as a symbol for the triumph of emotion over reason: Valuing the ability to love and to suffer over the ability to make a rational or logical argument, the Romantics sought to extend significance and dignity to those commonly categorised as less “rational,” children, very old people, non- European races, the poor, and even the insane, criminals, and nonhuman species. The poetics of this attempt was premised on making the poetic persona vulnerable.191 In the Phaon legend, to be discussed in the next chapter, and Sappho’s Fragment 1, the speaker is decidedly at a disadvantage; she is the spurned would-be lover, driven to either suicide, as with the Phaon myth, or calls for divine support. Vanita’s comment on the importance of vulnerability in Sappho’s legacy is supported here, but at the same time, the “vulnerability” is highly staged, layered with additional implications. When compared with the rest of Fragment 1 and Sappho’s other, smaller fragments, an underlying focus on subtle forms of control and self-assurance become clear.
Similarly, Ellen Greene’s studies on Sappho’s expressions of love in women-only communities do not recognise the manipulative undercurrent in these spaces. Greene claims that in Sappho’s work, her gaze is desirous, but not possessive: … it is a gaze that although active, is neither controlling nor possessive, nor does it aestheticize the desired woman. Rather, the flexibility of subject positions in Sappho’s fragments emphasizes the nonobjectifying quality of the
190 Bruno Gentili, translated by A. Thomas Cole, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988, p 85. 191 Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-sex Love and the English Literary Imagination, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, p 37.
88 Sapphic gaze and, more importantly, offers an erotic discourse and practice that may constitute an alternative of the competitive and hierarchical models of eroticism common in male patterns of erotic discourse.192 However, clear evidence exists in several fragments to be discussed later in this dissertation that Sappho’s references to desired or desiring women are layered with clear inflections back on her own influence over these figures.
Violence among the Fragments Violence takes a variety of subtle forms throughout Sappho’s oeuvre, physical and emotional, remembered or imagined, enacted on the speaker and on others. Surprisingly, it has not been afforded much critical attention. In both this chapter and Chapter Three, violence appears most prominently as physical violence via suicide or as emotional violence, in the suppression of desires, and as the expression of sexual desires against an unwilling party. Linda Mizejewski articulates a popular perception when she claims that the only violence to be found in Sappho’s fragmentary poetry is “passive”, and that there is a stronger interest in flight from oppression, rather than outward aggression in her work.193 It is important to distinguish between Sappho’s representations of female passivity, characterised by ‘melting of limbs’ and twilight settings in which women melt ‘into not just any sky, but into the night’, and the poet’s representations of herself.194 Many women described are exceptionally passive, but Sappho’s own personae are aggressive. Sapphic speaking voices articulate a range of emotions, including anger, frustration and mockery when addressing other figures. Violence here is directed outwards, tying into the frequently self- absorbed natures of Sappho’s speakers.
A preoccupation with painful imagery and pride in other Sapphic fragments can be read alongside the Aphrodite Ode, revealing a trend of less-than-harmonious tones and thematic foci in Sappho’s work. While images of love and beauty do feature prominently in much of Sappho’s surviving poetry, it is important to also
192 Ellen Greene’s chapter “Subjects, Objects and Erotic Symmetry in Sappho’s Fragments” in [eds.] Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Lisa Auanger, Among Women, p 83-84. 193 Linda Mizejewski, “Sappho to Sexton: Woman Uncontained”, College English (3.35, 1973), p 343-344. 194 Mizejewski, “Sappho to Sexton: Woman Uncontained”, p 344.
89 examine these other images in detail. Despite the occasionally very small sizes of these fragments, they shape a broader portrait of Sappho as a vengeful figure, rather than pliant victim of injustice. Pain features as a concern in several fragments. It is not possible to identify what the initial inspiration or intention may have been, since extremely little of the poems remain. However, the pieces can be read alongside one another to inform a reading of Sappho as a self- conscious individual, not limited to abstract idealisations of beauty and love in her poetry. This takes place in Fragments 37 and 38: in the former ‘…in my pain...May winds and sorrows carry off the one who rebukes me’; and in the latter ‘you roast us’.195 Fragment 37 was recorded as an example of Aeolic Greek’s treatment of double sigmas in the Etymologicum Genuinum, and as a result, the intended context of this poem (possibly poems) has been lost. Regardless, the fragment contains evidence of pain, physical or emotional, as a recurring motif in Sappho’s poetry, as well as a resulting desire for revenge. The focus of Fragment 37, orientated around ‘my pain’ and ‘who rebukes me’, is the speaker’s hostile feelings. The curse, read in context with the Aphrodite Ode and control over the goddess that Sappho appears to exercise, becomes more ominous; the speaker clearly believes that she can actualise these threats.
Fragment 38 has also lost its poetic setting, only preserved in Apollonius Dyscolus’ Pronouns to demonstrate the use of “us” in Aeolic, but both fragments clearly show self-orientated experiences of betrayal, pain and indignation. However, Fragment 38 mentions “us”, not just the speaker. To be ‘roasted’ is an exceptionally painful image. Sappho figures herself not only as aggressor, but also victim of violence in a way that is far from passive and “pleasant”, exercised by unidentified figures and situations. The victimised image offers another opportunity for the Sapphic persona to reveal her eloquence, as well as her ability to prevail over adversity. The lack of specificity about the aggressor renders it anonymous, lessening its power over the speaker. The miserable situation here is a stylised stage upon which Sappho can enact painful experiences and foreshadow her eventual triumphs. Such a tone also privileges
195 Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 85.
90 Sappho’s emotional engagement with other figures, in contrast to the perceived baseness and featurelessness of her persecutors.
Fragment 37 calls for revenge, and in both fragments there is an accusing tone; the persona is unwilling to stay silent and passively accept the wrongs committed against her. Sappho is able to assert control yet again by silencing her aggressors or those who have slighted her, and subjecting these subjugated objects to poetic criticism. Fragment 26 promotes this view of a self-conscious Sapphic victim, detailed as follows: ‘...frequently(?)...For those whom I treat well harm me most of all...idle...and I am conscious of this’.196 The declaration ‘I am conscious of this’ is relatively ominous, and when read with the Aphrodite Ode, suggests intent to call for divine retribution, or alternatively, not to require any divine assistance in righting the situation herself. Some of the girls in Sappho’s fragments may be passive victims of violence, or passively aggressive themselves in keeping with Mizejewski’s interpretation, but the Sapphic speaker herself is far less passive. Vengeance is at the forefront of this poem, just as it was in Fragment 37, along with a sense that wrongs will be avenged and a “natural order” re-established.
Poetic depictions of physical and emotional pain appear in some of the most ritualistic Sapphic fragments, including Fragment 140(a).197 Sappho’s speaking voice is instructive and mindful of ancient religious rites, as she states 'Delicate Adonis is dying, Cythera; what are we to do?’ 'Beat your breasts girls, and tear your clothes198 The lament for the death of Aphrodite’s lover, Adonis, is associated with the cult of Aphrodite. Charles Bowra observes that this cult was particularly prominent
196 Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 77. 197 Susan C. Jarratt observes that while some of Sappho’s fragments evoke ritualistic practices, they are not ‘generally “religious”’ in the sense that they deal with specificities: “Sappho's Memory”, Rhetoric Society Quarterly (32:1, 2002), p 16. Sappho was not necessarily a priestess simply because she wrote of such rituals, since prayer and worship were routine among both sexes in… [ctd] …ancient Greece, according to Margaret Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 79. Such a view is contrary to that expressed by C.M. Bowra in Greek Lyric Poetry, p 188, who characterises Sappho’s connections with her circle of listeners as ‘at least half religious,’ placing much more emphasis on Sappho’s purported role as the leader of a cult of Aphrodite and the Muses. 198 Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 155.
91 in Lesbos, though much less important in the rest of Greece. He considers this lament to be cyclic in style, connected to the idea of passing of life from fields and gardens.199 In this piece an objectified, beautiful male Adonis is mourned by both Aphrodite, here called Cythera in reference to Aphrodite’s emergence from the sea at Cyprus, and the goddess’s female devotees. André Lardinois remarks that what is interesting about these fragments…is the close connection between the young women and the goddess: they engage in dialogue, and in their grief over Adonis the young women identify with the goddess, who herself displays a mortal weakness in her mourning for the dead.200 Implicitly, the fragment is a response song, in which the group of singers respond to Sappho’s orders, as she takes on the role of ‘Cythera’ in instructing the girls’ actions. Margaret Williamson interprets this to mean that here, unlike in the Aphrodite Ode, it is Sappho who assists Aphrodite, and not the other way around.201
Lardinois asserts that, when read in context with the Aphrodite Ode, Sappho appears to have moved from claiming an equal standing with the goddess, to actually taking on her role in the context of this cult worship. I would suggest that Sappho goes even further than this; her reflections on violent self-harm as a necessary part of the mourning process and a valid demand for the goddess to make justify the poet’s focus on the infliction of pain. While such self-mutilation is not unique to Sappho’s imagination, or evidence of aggressive feelings towards the devotees, the sanctified and ritualised nature of self-abuse may inform some popular critical acceptance of Sappho’s other, violent fragments. Pain features prominently in Sappho’s explorations of love, be it the imagined pain of self-destruction in Fragment 31, or emotional pain of separation from a beloved woman in Fragment 94. By aligning herself with Aphrodite as leader of worship, voicing Aphrodite’s pain as her own, Sappho promotes interpretations, within the context of ancient Greek readers and later English-language readers,
199 Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry, p 201. 200 André Lardinois’ chapter “Keening Sappho: Female Speech Genres in Sappho’s Poetry” in [eds.] Lardinois, McClure, Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, p 77. 201 Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 13-14.
92 of herself as an at least partially deified figure, capable and entitled to inflict pain on others to further her own goals.
Anti-Utopian Poetics in Sappho’s Poetry The prominence of pain and its justification suggest that Sappho’s settings were not intended to be utopian. Despite writing of idealised spaces and outwardly harmonious group gatherings, these do not always offer the Sapphic persona or her circle of listeners peace, equality, and harmony. However, some scholars have identified “utopian” language in Sappho’s translations, or poetry inspired by these. Primarily, it has been described as an idyllic version of lesbian love in which the women do not attempt simply to replicate heterosexual relations and take on male characteristics… but rather evolve a specifically feminine mode of erotic union within a utopian world that excludes men and which seeks to invent a language that will reflect its new ideology.202 But this is not necessarily taking place. Elizabeth Harvey observes that such a construction, based on ‘spectacular symmetry’ between the female parties, is a severe contrast to the Ovidian epistle, retelling the myth of Sappho’s love for Phaon, in which ‘the boundaries between self and other were more clearly delineated’ and frequently traversed by acts of aggressive penetration, evident even in the fact that ‘Ovid stole from Sappho’s poetry’.203 Visions of Sappho as the creator or inspiration for a safe, egalitarian sphere appear to be informed by Hélène Cixous’ advocacy of écriture féminine, and consequently risk the same criticisms of being excessively utopian and ahistorical.204 However, Cixous’ desire for a woman to ‘write herself’ is relevant in that this essentially takes place in Sappho’s fragments and the Phaon myth. Importantly, this is not an act intended to empower women as an amorphous generality, but one individual woman who pointedly traverses and transcends traditional gender roles.
202 Elizabeth Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts, London: Routledge, 1995, p 128. 203 Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, p 130. 204 Pam Morris identifies some of these major criticisms, and in particular makes reference to concerns of biologism or essentialism in Cixous’ urge that a woman ‘write herself’ through returning to the libidinal drives of the body. In addition, this demand for spontaneity can be seen as affirmation of ‘feminine’ emotionalism, irrationality and disorder: Pam Morris, Literature and Feminism: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p 124-125.
93 Sappho’s persona is not presented as universal by any means, but as isolated from the control of other individuals, and fixated on influencing their actions and emotions.
Cixous’ figuration of écriture féminine demands that the author come from a state of recognition of the other within their identity.205 This idea operates well as a description of some of Sappho’s poetic innovations, but is not entirely accurate since Cixous promotes the view that due to the phallogocentric state of language, women have been marginalised and as a result are more prone than men to let their unconscious free, and to ultimately recognise the presence of the “other” within themselves.206 Such an act ideally entails recognition of “otherness”, leading to utopic internalisation and reconciliation with this discovered subject, to present a unified front that ultimately modifies traditional identifications, in particular, those that define masculinity and femininity.
The “other” can be seen in Sappho in two main ways: her incorporation of “masculine” traits, values and behaviours in the actions and language of her personae; and also, problematically, in her construction and persecution of an “other” in her poetry. While Sappho may fulfil some of the criteria for Cixous’ écriture féminine, she does not permit the same process to happen for other female or male personae. She does not modify traditional identifications, but uses these to her own advantage, creating a new space in an ideological hierarchy for herself. In all of Sappho’s more physically complete fragments, there are a variety of figures and these are constructed as “other” in that they are actively objectified by the ambiguously gendered Sapphic speaker, but are also incorporated into the speaker’s identity. These figures are acted upon and responded to, rather than permitted to act and speak entirely as individuals, unlike the speaker. The manipulative tone and treatment of these beloved personae, spoken to directly or invoked in memory, suggests their essential role
205 Marta Segara in [ed.] Marta Segara, The Portable Cixous, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p 25. 206 Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 21.
94 in constructing the Sapphic figure’s sense of identity, orientated on control over desirable individuals.
In “The Laugh of the Medusa”, (1975) Cixous demands that Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.207 Control and coercion appear to be essential components in formulation of such writing, and the process takes place in many of Sappho’s fragments. The insistent tone of the opening and recycling of violence to induce writing recognises not only the extent of women’s historical struggle for self-expression, but lingering conflicts inherent to the process. Cixous also asserts, contrary to Sappho’s poems, that women should not ‘denigrate woman, don’t make of her what men have made of you’, in order to see beyond historico-cultural limits of sex roles.208 While these denigrations may initially read as self-serving moves toward individual power, through the oppression of another individual, this is not all that such moves can achieve. Cixous claims Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve- discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word “silence,” the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word “impossible” and writes it as “the end”.209 The possessive terminology is important when considering this idea in relation to Sapphic poetics. Why shouldn’t women poets write through other women’s bodies, or the bodies of men? Sappho’s fragments explore her own body and those of others, in far less detail. These other bodies show Sappho’s reclamation of authority in poems that would otherwise only show pain and dismay. Other individuals are silent or manipulated into speech, cutting through dismal
207 Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in [ed.] Marta Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 27. 208 Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 34-35. 209 Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa” in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 38.
95 atmospheres to reveal the shift from pain to power, confusion to situational control. Creation of a new language is possible without remaining within one body, but can also be stimulated from the foundations of the “old” language.
Reinvention, adaptation and reclamation of language, moving within existing canons and forms, twisting and subverting these originary roots, offer possibilities to question figurations of individuals along gendered lines, within a language familiar to both, but fractured along enough lines to stimulate questioning. This is “subtle” feminist discourse, contorting and destabilising existing, popularised poetic forms, genres and themes, to render these simultaneously accessible but uncomfortable, recognising the existence of the “other” and self, and their egalitarian entitlement to the same means of expression.
In “Love of the Wolf” Cixous imagines “love” as a threatening process that inspires both evasion and the commitment of an individual’s entire person to the experience: One day, I don’t know when, it was decided to call love a set of strange, indescribable physical phenomena, is it pain? – but from the moment that the name is given to that burning in one’s breast, the violence of the strangeness is interrupted and the ancient horror, hidden behind the new word, begins to be forgotten.210 Love is pinned behind language, but this move is not enough to control it, or to prevent it from inspiring fear and evasiveness: ‘let’s go back to that disturbing age, the age of myths and folktales… Before language there is a fire that bites but doesn’t kill’.211 Death and love are tightly bound together: The world-of-two depends for its survival on a single other person. The world- of-two is immediately surrounded and threatened by death. Death closes in around it tightly. Love immortalises me. Only that which gives me life can take it away from me…It is on the basis of love that one recalls mortality. We are mortal only in that high region of love. In ordinary life we are immortal…212
210 Hélène Cixous’ “Love of the Wolf” translated by Keith Cohen in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 119. 211 Cixous’ “Love of the Wolf” in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 120. 212 Cixous’ “Love of the Wolf” in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 120-121.
96 The fragility and dangerousness of love generate strife in this piece, capable of terrorising and entrancing those under its thrall. Cixous’ image of the wolf and the lamb echoes that of lover and beloved: The lover loves the beloved, which is the occasion for generous love. But thereafter…there is the aftermath. Now the wolf can no longer break away from the lamb, for the lamb retains, for better or for worse, traces of the gift. That which is given in love can never be taken back. It is me my entire self that I give with the gift of love.213 Conversely, in the Aphrodite Ode Sappho does not give of herself; she demands of both the goddess and her beloved. The speaker resents the beloved’s aloofness and calls for reversal of the one-sided transaction, so that the beloved must instead offer everything. Sappho moves beyond the role of “desiring wolf”, demanding a predatory control over the beloved that even Cixous’s example does not imagine.
Ellen Greene views Sappho’s ‘dramatization of desire’ as one that ‘rejects the conventional roles of a dominant lover and a passive object of desire’.214 She asserts that the woman-centred world described in Sappho’s poems often dissolves distinctions between lover and beloved, subject and object, through the speaker’s complex merging of female voices and dynamic descriptions of the desired woman and the environment they both inhabit.215 Rather than actively controlling the beloved woman, Greene claims that Sappho’s flexible gaze offers ‘an alternative of the competitive and hierarchical models of eroticism common in male patterns of erotic discourse’.216 This view does not recognise Sappho’s control over the beloved figure, entirely subject to her gaze and poetic rendering. Sappho’s beloved is silent at all times in the Aphrodite Ode, and the homosocial environment, populated by a goddess, female speaker and female personae, created by the poet, fosters a sense of female hierarchy rather than community. Focus is strictly on Sappho herself as ruler of this domain, rather than providing ‘environments suited to the idealisation of female beauty and
213 Cixous’ “Love of the Wolf” in Segara, The Portable Cixous, p 134. 214 Ellen Greene’s chapter ‘Subjects, Objects, and Erotic Symmetry in Sappho’s Fragments’ in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 83. 215 Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 83. 216 Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 83-84.
97 feminine desire’.217 Female beauty and feminine desire are certainly celebrated in the Aphrodite Ode, but only insofar as they appease the Sapphic persona’s emotional and sexual desires. The only active desire in Fragment 1 is Sappho’s; reluctance and recalcitrance on the part of the other woman (or man, depending on the translation) are at core the main inspiration for writing the ode, rather than any sense of equality and mutual affection.
Greene’s reading of the Aphrodite Ode downplays the warlike tone of the piece by contrasting Sappho’s depiction of Aphrodite’s chariot with that given by Homer in the Iliad. In the latter, Aphrodite’s chariot is drawn by horses, but in all translations examined for this chapter, this chariot is instead pulled by some variety of small bird, usually sparrows.218 Greene calls this deviation from the Iliadic model ‘an element of delicacy and beauty’, added to the warlike mode, which ‘suggests that the speaker is not merely declaring war on her beloved but wants to persuade her with the enchantment of her charms.’219 Such a view is difficult to support, since irrespective of their means of propulsion, chariots are instruments of war or competition. Aphrodite played an active role in Homer’s Iliad and the war between the gods, and any reference to her chariot can be readily construed in light of this association.
Harold Zeller explains the presence of Aphrodite’s sparrows as part of ‘Sappho’s distinctive compositional style, which characteristically employs unexpected word play and conceptually odd combinations’.220 Zeller emphasises the humour of the unlikely combination of sparrows and chariot, even in the context of Greek mythology, observing that the only case of birds as draft animals seems to be that of swans…Draft swans do not tax the imagination; they are if I may so put it, plausible impossibilities, which draft sparrows are not.221
217 Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 84. 218 These include translations produced by Ambrose Philips (1711), John Herman Merivale (1833), Francis T. Palgrave (1854), Edwin Arnold, Thomas W. Higginson (1871), Moreton John Walhouse (1877), John Addington Symonds (1893), Mary Barnard (1958), David Campbell (1982), Anne Carson (2002) and Willis Barnstone (2006). 219 Ellen Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 87. 220 Harold Zeller, “Sappho’s Sparrows”, Classical World (101:4, 2008), p 435. 221 Zeller, “Sappho’s Sparrows”, p 437.
98 The use of small birds to pull a chariot may be ironic: the diminutive stature of the animals belies their mistress’ power and her ability to radically alter the lives of those who fall under her influence. The unlikely nature of the image is also potentially disruptive to a reader, who may have anticipated a much more regal entrance for the goddess. Swans have a more elevated role in ancient Greek mythology than sparrows, although both are associated with Aphrodite.222 Zeller recognises that sparrows ‘have sexual associations in classical literature which makes it appropriate for them to serve the goddess of love’, but the unexpected nature of this reference is nonetheless still relevant.223 He compares this word play to another poem of Sappho’s, in which she referred to a ‘rosy-fingered moon’, rather than the stock-image ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ expected by her Greek audience.224 Where the audience would have expected ‘swift horses’, in keeping with Aphrodite’s chariot in the Iliad, they are instead offered ‘swift sparrows’.225 Challenging her listeners, by manipulating expected tropes and literary associations in order to present a new image, shows literary playfulness and potentially proto-subtle feminism. Surprisingly, Zeller does not assert that this demonstrates intent to subtly challenge Sappho’s audience, but her wilful exploitation of their expectations does show willingness to manipulate conventional images, putting listeners at a disadvantage and remodelling these conventions to suit the poet’s agenda.
To align Aphrodite with sparrows could be interpreted as mockery, but it also represents a move away from a bird symbol that was readily associated with an expression of male desire and control, namely Zeus as a swan. Sappho recognises the commonplace nature of love and lust in her use of sparrows, portraying the goddess as quite literally harnessing baser passions to aggrandise herself. However, by so doing, the masculine image of Zeus as the
222 This refers to the myth of Leda and the swan, in which Zeus takes on the form of a swan and rapes Leda, who later bore Helen of Troy and Polydeuces. Sappho’s engagement with Helen of Troy as an inspirational figure in Fragment 16 suggests her knowledge of this myth, and places weight on her decision not to refer to swans. Zeus’s rape of Leda in the form of a swan may represent too oppressive a masculine presence for Sappho’s exclusive poetic settings, hence her decision to use the smaller, more diminutive birds. 223 Ibid. Catullus also wrote of sparrows in an erotic context in his poems to Lesbia. 224 Zeller, “Sappho’s Sparrows”, p 441. Zeller is referring to Sappho’s Fragment 58. 225 Ibid.
99 swan is not permitted to enter the persona’s setting, nor to infringe upon her calls for power and control. To an ancient Greek audience, this omission of the swans, geese or doves generally associated with Aphrodite and used by her to travel, would have represented an intentional move, resulting in closer alignment with a smaller, weaker, and more easily controlled bird. Sappho’s overall treatment of the goddess in the Aphrodite Ode is therefore essentially respectful, but subtly manipulative, exercising more control over the poetic setting and events than the goddess.
A later reader may interpret sparrows serving as Aphrodite’s beloved servants as a challenge by Sappho on assumptions that only particular individuals, classes and genders can be associated with power; beautiful, apparently fragile individuals are able to exert authority over others, contrary to popular perceptions and preconceived limitations. This may symbolise Sappho’s view of herself as an aristocratic and influential woman in a distinctly patriarchal society. Homer’s portrayal of Aphrodite in the Iliad is not flattering; the goddess is ultimately impotent and wounded in the course of battle, but in this poem, Sappho restores Aphrodite to a position of glory, rendering herself the goddess’s subject, but harnessing the goddess’s own words and power in order to aggrandise herself, displacing her own need for divine assistance. Aphrodite is a pawn for Sappho as much as she was in the Iliad, save when manipulating Helen of Troy, and her sparrows operate as an unlikely militaristic image, hitched to the chariot, while symbolically challenging popular notions of beauty, grace, and association with divine influence.
Greene argues that the speaker in the Aphrodite Ode does not seek ‘erotic justice’.226 Greene asserts that through the speaker’s forceful tone, evident in the final lines, Sappho is elevated to a position of empowerment through her association with Aphrodite. She does not call for Aphrodite to be her ally in dominating the beloved, but to help stir the beloved ‘from passive indifference to active affection’.227 Alliance with Aphrodite is certainly a powerful indicator
226 Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 89. 227 Greene in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Auanger, Among Women, p 90.
100 of Sappho’s privileged status, but it is not necessary for success to be achieved. It is not clear where Greene finds any desire for ‘active affection’ on the part of the beloved figure. The only features consistently recurring in English translations of Fragment 1 are Sappho’s sexual desire, evasiveness of the object of her affections, and the goddess’s assurance that Sappho’s own will is to triumph. The Aphrodite Ode does not substantially support the mutuality put forth by Greene, although this may not be the case in other Sappho fragments. In the case of poetic responses to the Aphrodite Ode, or incorporations of similar elements, it is unlikely that a sense of mutuality, community or equality is intended, but its absence highlighted in order to emphasise the authority of one individual.
Poetic Manipulation Marilyn Skinner and Ellen Greene consider Sappho’s poetic reflections on women’s erotics with reference to Foucault’s model of power, indicating that they do consider issues of authority to exist in the poet’s work. Foucault observes that in the past, ‘the dangers of sexual activity were perceived in connection with involuntary violence and careless expenditure’, but that this has since changed, and now these are described ‘more as the effect of a general fragility of the human body and its functioning.’228 Neither Greene nor Skinner recognises any form of violence in Sappho’s work. Instead Skinner suggests that Sappho operates from a marginalised position from which she is able to construct an alternative to the phallic representation of desire. In the segregated female world of the thiasos, Sappho could express active female erotic desire and claim an authentic female subject position – what Teresa de Lauretis calls an “eccentric discursive position outside the male…monopoly of power,” a “form of female subjectivity that exceeds the phallic definition” of woman as object or Other.229
228 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Care of the Self, vol. 3, London: Penguin, 1984, p 122. 229 Ellen Greene, “Sappho, Foucault, and Women’s Erotics,” Arethusa (29:1, 1996), p 4: refers to Marilyn Skinner’s chapter ‘Women and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?’ in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics, also quoting Teresa de Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,” Feminist Studies (1.16, 1990): p 126-127.
101 Skinner claims that the Sapphic subject speaks from a ‘place of discourse’ outside patriarchy, and can therefore construct a model of erotic relations that is bilateral and egalitarian, in marked contrast to the rigid patterns of pursuit and physical mastery inscribed into the role of the adult male erastes, whatever the sex of his love object.230 Skinner does not recognise the intrusive nature of hegemonic beliefs on those of marginalised individuals; margins are created by the existence of hegemony. Sappho’s social status was undercut by the condescendingly misogynistic assumption that she could not be as intellectually rigorous as a man, but this did not mean that she must reject all aspects of patriarchal society in order to empower herself. Instead, Fragment 1 replicates the masculine order of beloved and lover, and subtly manipulates this to empower her speaker. Its focal point is no less aggressive or obsessive than those promoted in male treatises of love and lust. In contrast to Foucault’s assertion that sexual activity has historically been ‘involuntarily violent’, Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode not only refers to violence as a means of gratifying of physical desires, but also creates an image of the poetic figure’s eloquence and influence over others.
Sappho’s tone is self-reflective and measured, despite emotional turbulence. Greene claims that in Fragment 94 the speaker’s erotic fulfilment comes not from making the beloved a beautiful object of contemplation, but by drawing the beloved to her by making the beloved a part of the lover’s interior world of memory and imagination.231 I would question what the difference is between acts of ‘drawing the beloved to her’ and subsuming the beloved entirely. In Fragments 1 and 94 the beloved figure is essentially voiceless and subservient to Sappho’s desire for her. Greene argues that in spite of the speaker’s rapt absorption in the woman…there is no emphasis on describing the woman independent of the effect she has on the narrator herself, or separate from the atmosphere their shared erotic experience generates.232
230 Marilyn Skinner, ‘Women and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?’ in [eds.] Rabinowitz and Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics, p 133. 231 Greene, “Sappho, Foucault, and Women’s Erotics,” p 6.
102 It is not unfair to consider this evidence of the all-encompassing nature of Sappho’s desire. The persona is caught up in an obsessive current of emotion, and Greene acknowledges the lack of individuality afforded to the beloved as a result. Sappho’s desire nullifies physical or emotional boundaries between the two figures, but does not create an egalitarian space; even during declarations of love and desire, the Sapphic persona remains in full control of the poem, placing her voice and views at the forefront of the piece. The beloved figure is continually distanced, stripped of voice and action, just as Aphrodite’s own voice and activities are paraphrased or directed by the speaker. Sappho’s poetic figure in Fragment 1 generates a hierarchy in which only she can exercise authority.
Conclusion A Sapphic rhetoric of violent, obsessive and coercive love can be identified not only in Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode, but also in some of the other, smaller fragments. Central to these pieces is a hostile atmosphere, but one that is geared toward the establishment of a privileged, empowered speaker that can occupy a space that is simultaneously masculine and feminine, loving and controlling. Images of weapons and allies, overpowering the will of another in order to articulate the female speaker’s sexual, emotional or intellectual desires effectively deny any chance for an egalitarian, peaceful and mutually beneficially community to be created in the context of these poems, but this does not render any such images and settings unimportant or uninspiring for later feminist poets. The ability to subtly or overtly manipulate love lyrics, or the image of a martyred heroine, abandoned by an uncaring male lover, as in the Phaon legend, offers new possibilities for poetic depictions of a need for the very same utopic society that the aggressive or manipulative female personae appear to deny. It is by creating these excessively empowered figures in the context of a setting otherwise idealised as a place of peace, love and gentleness that the unjust nature of constrained gender roles of masculine, active lover and feminine, passive beloved are revealed.
232 Greene, “Sappho, Foucault, and Women’s Erotics,” p 10.
103 Chapter Three Controlling Bodies: Ovidian Sappho and Lady Mary Wroth
Introduction A desire to “fill in the gaps” of Sappho’s life, including those in her fragmentary poetry, has created many fictions over the centuries, which have in turn influenced later poets’ responses to the poet. One of the most prominent fictions of Sappho’s life, that of her love for a man named Phaon, has generated a considerable number of poetic responses as well as later criticism. Well-known works by Alexander Radcliffe, Alexander Pope, Mary Robinson, and Christina Rossetti represent only a few direct English-language engagements with Sappho’s supposed relationship with Phaon. These poets’ access to the legend stems primarily from its adaptation in Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus, which is one of the letters in the Heroides. Ovid’s Epistula features many consistent aspects of the myth: Sappho fell in love with an attractive ferryman and committed suicide by jumping from the cliffs of Leukas when he did not reciprocate her affections. The prevalent position of the myth in Sappho scholarship has resulted in an early tendency to heterosexualise Fragments 1 and 31, discussed in the previous chapters, in some translations. Some early scholars even read Fragment 1 as a poetic rendering of Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus.
For the purpose of this investigation, I will not debate the validity of the myth as a representation of Sappho’s life. Instead, I will address the subversive potential of this myth, which exists alongside and often in spite of its potentially reductive and counter-feminist interpretations. By reading Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus closely, and then engaging with the Sappho-inspired works of Lady Mary Wroth (1587-1651), who would have had access to this text, the extent of this potential will be illustrated. The popularity of this heterosexual, suicidal fiction did not necessarily have a detrimental effect on the preservation and conveyance of central themes in Sappho’s work, in similarly focused creative works by later
104 poets. Sappho’s fictional suicide and emphasis upon destruction, misery and pain in Ovid’s epistle complements a wider focus in Sappho’s work on bodily violence, obsession and emotional control. The combination of Phaon’s legend and Sappho’s poetry does not support traditional interpretations of Sappho as a poet and legendary figure concerned only with “gentle” love, beauty and passion. Rather, by reading these together, along with smaller fragmentary poems discussed in Chapter Two, the proto-feminist implications of Sappho’s destructive imagery, pride, and self-determination, can be clearly identified and their links to later creative works more clearly defined.
Contextualising Phaon and Wroth Lady Mary Wroth’s access to Sappho cannot be concretely determined, since we do not know precisely which texts she read in her lifetime, nor are there any reports to this effect. However, her aristocratic upbringing allowed for a formal education, and her engagements with Petrarch in her sonnets indicate exceptional consciousness of poetic techniques, as well as an interest in negotiating with poetic predecessors and their styles.233 In addition, Wroth’s own uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, produced and published the first known English translation of Sappho’s poetry in 1555. Whether or not she discussed this translation with her uncle is uncertain, but it is difficult to imagine that she would have had no knowledge of this project. As well as this translation, Wroth is likely to have heard of Ovid’s Heroides, which was enjoying particular prominence in France at the time and was also increasingly available in English.234 English translations of the Heroides were produced by the end of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, including those by Turberville (1567), Salton-Stall (ca.1633-1639) and Sherburne (1639).235 At the same time,
233 Jeff Masten notes that unlike a traditional Petrarchan discourse, Wroth’s sonnets in Urania are ‘relentlessly private’ and that in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the sequence contests a woman’s place in the Petrarchan lover’s discourse while at the same time placing the fictional Pamphilia firmly within the Petrarchan tradition: “‘Shall I turne blabb?’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets” in [ed.] Anita Pacheco, Early Woman Writers: 1600-1720, London and New York: Longman, 1998, p 25-28. 234 Joan DeJean describes the considerable impact of Ovid’s Heroides on the emerging French novel in the seventeenth century: Fictions of Sappho, p 44-46. 235 [ed.] Olive Classe, Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English: M-Z, London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2000, p 1030.
105 the Heroides was also inspiring a number of works in English that placed female characters in a speaking position, as Helen Hackett observes: Female retort was popular with readers, to judge by the success of the genre of ‘female complaint’, influenced by Ovid’s Heroides, in which abandoned female lovers from mythology or history lamented their fates. Examples included Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592), Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles (1597), and Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint (1609).236 Wroth is therefore likely to have had a workable level of awareness of Sappho via these texts, and could have consciously engaged with and adapted the poet’s techniques and imagery, or at the very least would have knowingly engaged with the creative interpretations of Sappho’s poetic oeuvre and sense of self available to her.
The myth of Sappho’s desperate and doomed love for Phaon has been available in English since the sixteenth century.237 Such a long history offers room for intrusive, additional values and ideas to be added. The Phaon legend had been recorded by a series of Greek playwrights before its adoption by Ovid centuries later. Two hundred years after Sappho’s death, at least six different dramatists wrote on both Phaon and Sappho: Six dramatists of this time wrote plays called Sappho, one of them, Antiphanes, wrote also a Phaon and a Leucadius; Plato, the comic poet, wrote a Phaon too, and Menander a Leucadia. As far as we can judge – a few quotations have been preserved – these plays were coarse and scurrilous enough and full of absurd stories. The theme of all of them was doubtless Sappho and her loves.238 William Prentice scathingly critiqued these writers, claiming that their work was focused on facts, but that they sought only a ‘sensational and effective plot’.239 Prentice asserts that from the fourth century onwards there was a new interpretation of the myth, and that in this newer literature there appeared …a new Sappho, a beautiful, passionate woman, leading a life of freedom, luxury, and promiscuous sensuality. This is that Sappho who figures in the
236 Helen Hackett, “Courtly Writing by Women” in [ed.] Helen Wilcox, Women and Literature in Britain 1500-1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p 170. 237 Cylde Furst, “Sappho and Phaon”, The Classical Weekly (15.1, 1908), p 114. 238 William K. Prentice, “Sappho”, Classical Philology (4.13, 1918), p 351. 239 Ibid.
106 fifteenth Heroides, in Swinburne’s Anactoria, and in many other plays, poems, stories, or pictures in modern times.240 Such a shift in attitude does not quash accusations of heteronormative intentions on the part of these “redeeming” writers, as well as perpetuation of reductive stereotypes in which heroines are physically, emotionally and intellectually incapable of triumphing over wrongs committed on them by men.
Interestingly, artistic representations of Phaon on ancient Greek vases are distinctly feminine in appearance. Williamson comments that in a series of Athenian vases, made in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, He is a curiously feminine figure, slightly plump and in a passive pose. His body is often turned almost full front toward the viewer, a position usually adopted by female figures. Above all, he is unlike most adult males on vases (except when shown getting married) in being beardless. This both makes him, like the ideal bridegroom, an erotically appealing figure and suggests that he has not yet attained adult status.241 The passivity and desirability of Phaon in such artwork is surprising, particularly when considered alongside the strength of Sappho’s voice in her poetry, as well as her orchestrated declarations of desire for Phaon in the Ovidian epistle. It suggests that Sappho’s desire, far from being a feminine expression of love and dependence, is contextually to be considered a masculine approach. As the lover, or erastes, Sappho breaches ancient Greek gender roles by pursuing the eromenos, or beloved figure, instead of allowing herself to be pursued, in Ovid’s fiction. Williamson asserts that for ancient playwrights, an assertive Sappho would have been a comic character, behaving in an unpredictable, laughable manner.242 Arguably the same image could have been considered unsettling and potentially dangerous for these audiences.
For later readers of Sappho, including Wroth, notions of strength and independence that accompany statements of desire could be weakened by her association with another canonical image in literature; that of a desperate,
240 Prentice, “Sappho”, p 351. 241 Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 9. 242 Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 11.
107 impassioned, and pained heroine. These ‘uncontained’ women, dubbed such by Linda Mizejewski, are part of a long tradition of such figures in literature: From Sappho through to Sexton, we find women writers and voices who come back again and again to the same kind of metaphor: woman broken off, flying into the night, swept into the air, running over earth like a thunderstorm.243 Such women are contrary to the ‘ideal woman of ancient Hebrew and Greek literature’ who cared for the home and was associated with earthly desires and maternity.244 A woman outside the domestic sphere, maternal and domestic roles, no matter how stricken with pain or grief, is still controversial because she has escaped “physical” containment within the home, and emotional restriction by deference to idealised feminine demureness, silence and obedience to male wishes. Ovid’s Sappho is depicted alone, speaking to the reader on a cliff face, which takes her outside the domestic sphere and into a wild setting, where only she has a voice and actions: Tell me, when you looked upon the characters from my eager right hand, did your eye know forthwith whose they were – or, unless you had read their author’s name, Sappho, would you fail to know whence these brief words come. Perhaps, too, you may ask why my verses alternate, when I am better suited to the lyric mode. I must weep, for my love – and elegy is the weeping strain; no lyre is suited to my tears.245 Her articulations of desire for Phaon are paired with desire for recognition, rather than domestic bliss. Immediately the reader is told to answer the speaker, to acknowledge her identity, and also her genius in poetic matters. Misery does not confine such talents, and Ovid emphasises his Sapphic speaker’s need for and right to recognition.
The Ovidian Sappho’s primary demands for recognition assist in displacing the stigma of being a ‘woman uncontained’. In addition, even when read in isolation from Sappho’s poetry, the Phaon legend demonstrates obsession with bodily violence and emotional anguish, evident in Sappho’s death and misery, as well as her interest in physicality, sexuality and power relations. Ovid’s Epistula
243 Mizejewski, “Sappho to Sexton: Woman Uncontained”, p 340. 244 Ibid. 245 Ovid, Epistula Sapphus in [translated by Grant Showerman] Ovid, Heroides and Amores, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931, lines 1-8, p 181.
108 Sapphus is an unusually aggressive text for this writer, indicating Ovid’s recognition and conscious adaptation of this aspect of Sappho’s oeuvre. Albert Baca even argued that the “Letter from Sappho to Phaon” may not have been part of the original Heroides.246 Baca observes that the Sappho epistle is the only part of the Heroides with an interrogative beginning, and that while the epistle is still a ‘tearful elegy’, it still indulges in intellectual play.247 The interrogative tone, despite a strong focus on sorrow and betrayal, reveals a relatively “empowered” persona, demanding answers in the throes of despair. The eloquence and “purity” of emotion shown has resulted in some critical comparisons between Sappho and Jeanne D’Arc by some critics, likening the persona’s death to martyrdom.248 The “righteous” nature of self-violence in this piece, in light of Sappho’s anguish and desire to end her suffering, reveals potential for violent acts of self-determination, in which ending her own life annuls betrayal and re-establishes the primacy of Sappho’s own position in a text otherwise focused on the beauty and inconstancy of Phaon.
Baca expressed surprise at the inherently sexual nature of some passages: The frankness of language in this passage cannot be paralleled in the Heroides, an observation which led Gruppe to consider these lines an interpolation first, and then to doubt the authenticity of the entire epistle on their account.249 R.J. Tarrant similarly rejects the idea that Ovid wrote the Epistula Sapphus, citing metrical usages, borrowings from Ovid’s own works and, interestingly, words and phrases not used elsewhere by Ovid, as reasons for this condemnation.250 Irrespective of its authorship, the epistle has been a major influence in Sapphic criticism. While Baca himself does not echo Gruppe’s conclusions, he nonetheless supports the validity of Gruppe’s concern that the forthright terms of the Sappho epistle have no counterpart in the rest of the
246 Albert R. Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15)”, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (1.102, 1971), p 29. 247 Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15)”, p 34-35. 248 See for example Furst, “Sappho and Phaon”, p 114, 116. 249 Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15)”, p 36. Baca quotes DeVries, Epistula Sapphus ad Phaoneum (Lugduni-Batavorum 1885) p 57 and Otto Gruppe, Minos, p 491. 250 R.J. Tarrant, “The Authenticity of the Letter of Sappho to Phaon (Heroides XV),” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology (1.85, 1981), p 136.
109 Heroides.251 Delicate treatment of the Sapphic persona indicates intention to promote the poet as an intelligent and sensuous individual, capable of expressing desire for both truth and sexual satisfaction. Arguably the violence of the piece can also be similarly aligned with this intention.
Celestial Imagery Despite the potentially restrictive, heteronormative content of the Phaon legend, Sappho’s link with this text also strengthens her association with Aphrodite and implicitly boosts parallels between her and the goddess. These divine engagements are a feature also applied by Wroth in her sonnets and songs within Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, which will be discussed. The Epistula Sapphus not only features demands for recognition and use of violence, but also ultimately combines these in the speaker’s independent act of self- determination and alignment with Aphrodite’s legendary actions. Ancient Greek playwright Menander wrote of Sappho’s leap from the White Rock of Leukas in The Leukadia, and in Fragment 258K it is implied that Sappho herself spoke of diving from the White Rock, crazed with love for Phaon.252 Gregory Nagy notes that the first to make the Leucadian leap was actually Aphrodite, to cure her futile love for deceased Adonis. This creates a persuasive parallel between Sappho and Aphrodite, initiated in Fragment 1 and consolidated in the Phaon legend. Nagy describes the implications of this as ‘cosmic’: Sappho is vicariously projecting her identity into the goddess Aphrodite herself. By loving Phaon, she becomes parallel with Aphrodite, who loves the native Lesbian hypostasis of the Sun-God himself. By diving from the White Rock, she does what Aphrodite does in the form of Evening Star, diving after the sunken Sun in order to retrieve him the next morning in the form of Morning Star.253 Aphrodite falls in love with many youths, according to different Greek myths, just as Sappho refers to numerous beloved girls.254 Nagy reflects on the
251 Baca, “Ovid’s Epistle from Sappho to Phaon (Heroides 15)”, p 37. 252 Gregory Nagy, “Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, (1.77, 1973), p 175. 253 Nagy, “Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas”, p 175. 254 Though married to Hephaestus, Aphrodite’s infidelity to him is legendary. She is the lover of Ares, the god of war, and Poseidon, god of the sea, but also young men Adonis and Phaethon. Similarly, it has been debated whether or not Sappho was married to a man named Cercylas, and poetic Fragments 1, 8, 16, 22, 23, 31, 48 and 49, among others, refer to beloved women.
110 goddess’s desire for and abduction of two men, Adonis and Phaethon, commenting that ‘like Eos, Aphrodite is both maleficent and beneficent in the role of abductor, since she confers both death and preservation’.255 Although the suicidal act may initially suggest vulnerability and an eventual loss of control, in Sappho’s case, this step is in fact the logical progression of her self-deification.
Aphrodite’s dive into the Okeanos after the sun, in the case of her doomed love for Phaethon, parallels her dive from the cliffs of Leakas at Apollo’s advice for love of Adonis, with a circular image of death and rebirth, conveyed through cyclic astral movements as well as her repeated romances.256 Apollo advises Aphrodite to jump from the white rock of Leukas, where Zeus comes to sit whenever he seeks relief from passion for Hera, but interestingly, Sappho does not seek advice when choosing her actions.257 The poet’s comparison between herself and the goddess, and those presented by supporters of the Phaon legend, mean that these similarities amount to direct and equal comparison to Aphrodite. Ovid’s Sappho takes this even further, emphasising the independence of Sappho’s decision to leap from the cliff, rather than seek or accept the advice of another, male or female, mortal or immortal. Far from being a reductive, heteronormative myth, intended to punish Sappho for her lesbian loves and outspoken poetic style, the Phaon legend cements Sappho’s pseudo- divine status through mythologised martyrdom in the name of love and in direct parallel to her patron goddess. In so doing, Sappho’s speaker also engages with the natural environment, which creates other interesting links between Ovid’s fiction and Sappho’s poetry.
Sappho’s smaller fragments include many “unexpected” descriptions of natural elements, combining conventional Greek floral and celestial imagery in unusual ways, which may have unsettled some of her contemporary audiences in ancient Greece. For example, her use of the term ‘rosy-fingered’ has attracted a lot of scholarly attention, explained by Harold Zeller as because
255 Nagy, “Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas”, p 172. 256 Nagy, “Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas”, p 143. 257 Nagy, “Sappho’s Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas”, p 143-143.
111 [A]t least on the first hearing of the poem [Fragment 96], Sappho’s audience was expecting “dawn” after “rosy-fingered,” and what they got was “moon.” The word choice is surprising, which of course is what has generated the literary problem in our own time…Similarly, Sappho’s audience was expecting “swift horses,” and what they got was “swift sparrows.”258 Zeller claims that this could simply demonstrate ‘a distinctive writing style, which, as we have seen, characteristically employs unexpected word choices and conceptually odd combinations’.259 Traditionally it is dawn and not the moon that is called ‘rosy-fingered’, but Sappho refers to both in this way in her poems.260 This stock epithet can be found Homer’s works and would have been familiar to ancient Greek audiences, but not necessarily in this presentation.261 Sappho does not completely disregard the Homeric phrasing, but subtly inverts it in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and fitting to traditional models, yet telling of an underlying desire to subvert the existing stock image. In addition, these unexpected, yet socially acceptable references to deities encourage further reflection on the speaker or poet, rather than the subject deity, in this case Eos, the goddess of Dawn.
In Fragment 58, a poem filled with lacunae, Sappho speaks of ‘rosy-armed Dawn’ while also speaking of old age and a desire for youth, suggesting willingness to conscript deities to reflect on her own concerns, rather than religious observances. In this poem, while bemoaning her aging body’s loss of physical beauty, Sappho’s speaker concludes optimistically that ‘love has obtained for me the brightness and beauty of the sun’, aggrandising her speaker’s body and linking her with Eos:
258 Zeller, “Sappho’s Sparrows,” p 441. Zeller is referring to Fragment 96 as well as Fragment 1: the reference to Aphrodite’s chariot being pulled by sparrows, rather than horses, comes from the latter. 259 Ibid. 260 In Fragment 53 Sappho also summons the Graces, calling them ‘holy rosy-armed Graces, daughters of Zeus’, extending the “rosy fingers” image to include this group: David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 96-97. 261 Philip Ford notes that epithets such as “rosy-fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea” are formulaic comparisons that have not been preserved in popular European imagination so well as the stories of the Trojan War or Odysseus: “Homer in the French Renaissance”, Renaissance Quarterly (59.1, 2006), p 1. Despite this inconsistent preservation, it is still possible for readers to identify these as Homeric references, as there has been relatively consistent access to Homer’s texts, and Sappho’s subtle and subversive reimagining of the terms.
112 …(fleeing?)…(was bitten?)…(you of many names?)… gives success to the mouth…fair gifts (of the deep-bosomed Muses?)…children…song-lover, (player) of clear-sounding lyres…old age already (withers?) all (my) skin, and (my) hair (turned white) from black…(my) knees do not carry (me)…(to dance) like young fawns…but what could I do?...not possible to become (ageless?)…rosy- armed Dawn…carrying (to) the ends of the earth…yet (age) seized (him)…(immortal?) wife… thinks…might give…but I love delicacy…love has obtained for me the brightness and beauty of the sun.262 There are many gaps in this poem and attempts made to complete some of the fragmented words must be read cautiously. The piece’s contrasting youthful and aging imagery risks this poem being interpreted as a bitter criticism of the speaker’s inability to control her aging body. However, Sappho refers to the myth of Eos, the goddess of Dawn, and her relationship with a mortal man turned immortal at her request, Tithonus, moving to occupy the symbolic position of both goddess and mortal in her poetic setting. Eos fell in love with mortal Tithonus and petitioned Zeus to grant him immortality, to which Zeus consented, but did not give him eternal youth. Tithonus continued to age, with the result that it caused unbearable suffering to both parties, as Eos herself remained young. Sappho’s first-person speaker adopts the tone of an older woman who does not begrudge her advancing years, but reflects on the experiences that these have granted her, claiming that these have intensified her understanding of love beyond that of other individuals. Sappho directs the audience’s attention to the intensity of her mind rather than her looks, likening herself to Tithonus physically, while her mind adopts the bright intensity of Eos. Sappho likens herself to the goddess, straddling the boundaries of mortality and immortality in this figuration, simultaneously accumulating symbolic power in the process.
The “rosy” image is reversed in Fragment 96 in order to present an optimistic interpretation of a potential disruption to the Sapphic speaker’s authority, expanding this image beyond references to deities to now include favoured women. Sappho’s willingness to create parallels between humans and
262 Fragment 58 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 100-101.
113 goddesses is now extended, but interestingly it is her speaker alone that is able to create such links, indicating a strong sense of control. In Fragment 96, a woman named Sardis is the inspiration, and Sappho speaks favourably of her, despite her absence, likening her to the moon, which is also represented as the Greek goddess Selene. In other fragments, Sappho has scorned some women who abandoned her, but in this poem, as in Fragment 94, Sappho uses flowers and an unconventional reference to the moon to highlight the woman’s favoured status: …Sardis…often turning her thoughts in this direction…(she honoured) you as being like a goddess for all to see and took most delight in your song. Now she stands out among Lydian women like the rosy-fingered moon after sunset, surpassing all the stars, and its light spreads alike over the salt sea and the flowery fields; the dew is shed in beauty, and roses bloom and tender chervil and flowery melilot. Often as she goes to and fro she remembers gentle Atthis and doubtless her tender heart is consumed because of your fate…to go there…this…mind…much…sings…263 Some scholars have suggested that the moon and moonlit area imply ‘the universality of the beauty of which Atthis’ beloved is a particular, contemporary and momentary fulfilment’, or that the moon and night operate as an allegory for death.264 Alternatively, Johnson suggests that the moon represents women and the reference to dew shed on the flowery fields is intended to reflect ‘a mythological connection of Moon and Dew as goddesses of fertility’.265 Sardis is connected exclusively with images of femininity, ignoring the masculine influence that is likely to have necessitated her departure, either to a new husband’s house or back to her father’s house. Sappho compares her to the goddess of the moon, dew and love. This intensely elevated state highlights Sappho’s respect for this woman, elevating Sardis as she does her own poetic personae. The beauty of the moon and sun are linked in these two poems, celebrating not only the start of life, but also the end. The Sapphic speaker is able to find beauty in two potentially contentious subjects: advancing age and the loss of a loved one.
263 Fragment 96 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 120-121. 264 G.M. Kirkwood, Early Greek Monody: The History of a Poetic Type, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1974, p 119, 138; André Lardinois, Making Silence Speak, 2001, p 87. 265 Marguerite Johnson, Sappho, London: Bristol Classical Press, 2007, p 89.
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Fragment 96 is unusual in that Sappho’s own speaker is relatively subdued and undecorated in comparison to Sardis, but the speaker still maintains control over the piece in that all flattery and references to the woman’s beauty issue from the persona, rather than Sardis herself. Women in ancient Greece had relatively little control over where they lived, and Sardis’s reasons for departure are also not included in the poem. Their exclusion symbolises the exclusion of masculine authority that would most likely have accompanied these reasons. The fact that there are no voiced criticisms of this move in the poem suggests that Sappho did not blame Sardis for leaving, but rather than rail against those responsible for her departure, she immortalises Sardis in her own work, thereby maintaining a symbolic form of control over her by shaping how she will be remembered by Sappho’s audience.
Sappho’s references to flowers and the moon in these smaller fragments reflect a consistent connection between the poet and female deities, as well as disruptive links between their power and her own. Aphrodite features prominently in Sappho’s work, even when not mentioned by name. However, power is extracted from deities through Sappho’s use of flowers popularly associated with different gods and goddesses, plied as tools to indicate Sappho’s favour for other individuals. By reducing deities to symbolic roles, the Sapphic speaker occupies places of prominence in these poems, and even likens herself to Eos as well as Aphrodite in terms of power. Sappho’s selective empowerment of women such as Sardis and Cleis, through deified floral and celestial imagery, indicates that borders between mortals and immortals are not strict in Sappho’s work, nor are they restricted to worship.
Ovidian Sappho and Lady Mary Wroth Ovid’s representation of Sappho in the Epistula Sapphus was readily accessible when Lady Mary Wroth began her writing career, dealing with similar subject matters. The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, a prose piece written by Wroth in 1621, was one of only a few known exceptions to the rule that most romances, though featuring and generally read by women, were typically
115 written by men in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England.266 The Ovidian Sappho elevates her desire for Phaon beyond baser, more frivolous passions that Phaon appears to express, but is ultimately betrayed and commits suicide in order to preserve a sense of self, escaping from a world in which she cannot rely on love, control or her own eloquence. The conclusion of Wroth’s Urania can be thought of as another, happier outcome for a Sapphic heroine; her eloquence and elevated perceptions of love are finally preserved and celebrated by the object of her affections.
For Wroth, confrontation with the male gaze does not render the female figure weaker, but inspires her to greater heights of literary excellence. The same can be argued of Ovid’s Sappho, since before committing suicide, the speaker first insists on “writing” the letter, filled with references to her literary prowess. It is this tendency, along with motifs of control, inequality and privileging of an individual’s experience above those of others that can be traced in Lady Mary Wroth’s “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus”, the first known sonnet sequence to be written and published in English by a woman, which will be discussed in detail. The sonnets contain several Sapphic elements as well as potentially feminist motifs.267 Both Urania and “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” were published in 1621, and controversy surrounded the former due to its rumoured autobiographical content and frank depictions of aristocratic in-fighting and power struggles.
“Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” begins and ends with a dream sequence in which the female speaker is confronted by Venus and Cupid, with striking similarities to Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode in terms of content, prosody and thematic concerns. The rest of the sonnet sequence, conversely, is more similar to Ovid’s epistle in terms of its miserable tone and expressive treatment of lovelorn suffering. In the first sonnet, the speaker dreams, and while sleeping sees …a Chariot drawne by wing’d Desire,
266 Helen Hackett in [ed.] Anita Pacheco, Early Woman Writers: 1600-1720, p 45-46. 267 Anne Haselkorn in [eds.] Anne M. Haselkorn, Betty Travitsky, Betty, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: counterbalancing the canon, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, p 295.
116 I saw; where sate bright Venus Queene of Loue, And at her feete her Sonne, still adding Fire To burning hearts, which she did hold aboue,
But one heart flaming more than all the rest, The Goddesse held, and put it to my breast268 Venus and her son Cupid confront Wroth’s first-person female speaker while she sleeps, and burden her with a heart that burns more strongly than any other. Unlike Sappho’s persona, Wroth’s is no willing participant in or instigator of this meeting, and emphasis is placed on her victimised state and the tyrannical nature of both deities of love. However, emphasis has also been placed on the personal nature of this piece, and the fact that this female persona speaks so eloquently and passionately indicates that her role is not merely that of passive victim, but active participant. Naomi Miller reflects on the implications of Wroth’s choice of speaker in the context of Renaissance England, in which she wrote. She observes that Wroth’s decision to write a literary work, rather than a political pamphlet in order to assert a feminine perspective on love, allowed her to modify sonnet conventions to reflect a feminine emphasis and also to revise male-authored conceptions of “the lady” in the Renaissance.269 Wroth’s Pamphilia gives voice to the otherwise silent female beloved of Renaissance sonnets, and simultaneously silences the beloved male Amphilanthus while undermining the Renaissance directives for female silence.270
Daniel Gil observes that even though Wroth’s speaker in the sonnets represents herself as wishing to withdraw from the public sphere, in keeping with the Petrarchan tradition, she never entirely imagines a private sphere that is separate from the public.271 In Sonnet 42, the speaker claims that And I that One, by love, and griefe opprest;
268 Wroth, “Pampihilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 1, lines 5-10 in [eds.] James Hogg, G.F. Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1977, p 24. 269 Haselkorn, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, p 295. 270 Haselkorn, The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, p 296. 271 Daniel Juan Gil, “The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,” Modern Language Studies (2.29, 1999), p 77.
117 Non euer felt the truth of loues great misse Of eyes till I depriued was of blisse; For had he seene, he must have pitty show’d;
I should not haue beene made this Stage of woe, Where sad Disasters haue their open show272 Gil asserts that in this particular sonnet, the speaker is explicitly figuring herself as the Petrarchan lady who is the subject of the speaker’s narcissistic gaze. She answers a question that was meant to be rhetorical273 and is implicitly not retreating to the passive position of a Petrarchan lady, but instead rising to the surface and insisting on occupying the space from which she would traditionally have been excluded.274 Not only does Wroth manipulate this traditional sonnet structure and hierarchy of voices, but she also reflects on Sapphic themes in so doing, drawing attention to the introspective nature of love. Wroth’s Pamphilia takes pains to assert ownership over her experiences and body: ‘my paines’, ‘my joys’, ‘my grieved brest’. Sappho’s poems similarly showcase possessive suffering. The Sapphic personae invariably emphasise their own pains and suffering in order to better illustrate their sophistication and depth of emotion, as well as the poet’s eloquence.
Pamphilia moves, as the sonnets progress, from a state of passive victimisation to empowerment, beyond the arbitrary power of Venus and Cupid, to construct her own rhetoric of love.275 Her frustration and misery abates not through interference by her male beloved or divine interjection, but via progression of thought. Just as in the Aphrodite Ode, interactions with the goddess of love result in the goddess’s eventual dismissal and the establishment of primacy for the speaker. Unlike Sappho however, Wroth does not privilege violent imagery. Instead, she disdains this stereotypically masculine emphasis on aggression,
272 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 42, lines 8-13 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 55. 273 Gil, “The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,” p 78-79. 274 Gil, “The Currency of the Beloved and the Authority of Lady Mary Wroth,” p 79. 275 Naomi J. Miller, “Rewriting Lyric Fictions: The Role of the Lady in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, p 304.
118 and has Pamphilia admonish Cupid in Sonnet 7. Her disgust is cuttingly eloquent; she asserts that Loue leaue to vrge, thou knowest thou hast the hand 'Tis Cowardice to striue where none resist, Pray thee leaue off, I yeeld vnto thy band, Doe not still in thine owne power persist.
Behold, I yeeld, let forces be dismist, I am thy Subiect conquer'd bound to stand Neuer thy foe, but did thy claime assist, Seeking thy due of those who did withstand.276 Pamphilia now consciously adopts the mantle of supplicant to Cupid and love in order to criticise the cruelty of this masculine love. In addition, she tells Cupid that …your Boy-ship I despise, Your charmes I obey, but loue not want of eyes.277 Cupid’s fair appearance is not enough to hide his cruelty, nor is it enough to woo Pamphilia. She condemns the “unkindness” of love extensively in Sonnet 8, and again in Sonnet 11, in which she also expresses frustration and anger at the injustice of her situation: Let me once see my cruell fortunes gaine, At least release, and long-felt woes redress.
Let not the blame of cruelty disgrace The honour'd title of your god-head Loue; Giue not iust cause for me so say, a place Is found for rage alone on me to moue.278 Rather than fixating on the beauty and virtues of her beloved, Pamphilia’s sonnets are steeped in pain and self-reflection. Amphilanthus is not only silent but featureless and entirely subject to this intense passion. When he is
276 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 7, lines 1-8 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 29. 277 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 7, lines 13-14; Ibid. 278 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 11, lines 7-12 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 31.
119 described, he is closely aligned with solar imagery reminiscent of Phaon, relegating him entirely into the passive model outlined in the fiction.
In Sonnet 22, Wroth’s speaker compares her love for Amphilanthus to that of …the Indians scorched with the Sunne, The Sunne which they doe as their God adore: So am I vs’d by Loue, for euermore I worship him, less fauours haue I wonne.279 In addition, at the end of the same sonnet, Pamphilia requests that she be allowed to wear ‘the marke of Cupids might, / In heart, as they in skin of Pheobus light’.280 Sonnet 29 also compares the persona’s enjoyment of the sun’s light and warmth to her delight in her beloved, and her loss of him to the bitterness of night: While I enioyd that Sunne, whose sight did lend Me ioy, I thought that day could haue no end: But soone a night came cloath'd in absence darke;
Absence more sad, more bitter then is gall, Or death, when on true Louers it doth fall;281 More solar imagery appears in Sonnet 25, in which love is compared to stars and fire, contrasted with blinded eyes and loss. She calls for restoration of ‘that blessed Starre,’ despite the pain that will result from this act, asserting that nothing will be gained Till that bright Starre doe once againe appeare, Brighter then Mars when hee dothe shine more cleare; See not then by his might be you redeem’d.282 Love is “brighter” than Mars, the god of war, compounding further Wroth’s denunciation of violence and her emphasis on the singular power and pain of love as a focal emotion.
279 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 22, lines 1-4 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 39. 280 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 22, lines 13-14 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 40. 281 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 29, lines 9-13 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 45. 282 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet 25, line 6; lines 12-14 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 25.
120
Mars and Cupid are both masculine presences, and neither welcome in Pamphilia’s dreams, nor in her figuration of the nature of love. Venus is similarly excluded until Pamphilia opens with the question ‘Say Venus how long haue I lou’d, and seru’d you heere?’ in only one song, bidding the deity recognise similarities between the two figures.283 Pamphilia directs the goddess much as Sappho steers Aphrodite, telling her to Looke on my paines and see if you the like haue prou'd: Remember then you are the Goddesse of Desire, And that your sacred powre hath touch'd and felt this fire.
Perswade these flames in me to cease, or them redresse In me (poore me) who stormes of loue haue in excesse,284 It is not enough for Wroth to call down Venus in a dream and then dismiss her influence for the majority of the sonnet sequence in order to chastise the goddess’s unfair treatment of Pamphilia. She forces the goddess to relate to Pamphilia’s suffering and then act according to the speaker’s wishes; a step that even Sappho does not take in her forceful prayer to Aphrodite. Pamphilia demands that Venus take control of ‘that wayward Childe your Son’ and ‘Rule him’ lest ‘he that hurt you, he (alas) may murther mee’.285 Venus is rendered an ally against the tyrannical Cupid and his figuration of love as an experience of grief and pain, uniting both female personae against him in an image of community not seen in either the Aphrodite Ode or the Phaon legend. In later sections, Pamphilia becomes less communal in her stance towards Venus, and directs Cupid to …let thy Mother know her shame, ‘Tis time for her to leaue this youthfull flame, Which doth dishonor her, is ages blame, And takes away the greatnes of thy name.
Thou God of Loue, she, only Queene of lust,
283 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Song lviii, line 1 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 61. 284 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Song lviii, lines 4-8; Ibid. 285 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Song lviii, line s13, 19, 20; Ibid.
121 Yet striues by weakening thee, to be vniust.286 Cupid is portrayed now as an errant and misguided child in need of help, while Venus is a negligent mother, subject only to her own whims and desires. Pamphilia is no longer subject to their whims, but capable of critiquing both deities and articulating judgements beyond those of her own suffering.
By spurning lust as well as Venus, it could be argued that Wroth articulates a worrying reduction of Pamphilia’s respect for other women, as well as for her own sexual desires. However, the authority in Pamphilia’s tone suggests that self-control appeals more to this persona than instinct; in denying the authority of a female deity over herself, she establishes her own position as an independent figure. At the same time, Cupid is treated like a small child, ‘Cold, wett, and crying, he had lost his way’.287 The god does not inspire feelings of awe or respect in Pamphilia, but a maternal pity and corrective duty that completely denies any power to him.288 Both deities are rendered powerless in the eyes of Pamphilia, yet are so rendered, not via declarations of proto-feminist independence, but through strategic adherence to conventional, patriarchally endorsed feminine values of chastity and maternal love. In the penultimate sonnet in the sequence, the masculine sun appears again and the speaker reiterates her desire for him, now free to speak without being subsumed by either Venus or Cupid and their associations with sexual desire: Alas, if thou bright Sunne to part from hence Grieue so, what must I haplesse leave from thence, Where thou dost goe my blessing fall attend;
Thou shalt eniuy that sight for which I dye, And in my heart thy fortunes doe enuy, Yet grieue, I'le loue thee, for this state may 'mend.289 Despite the pain that Wroth’s persona has experienced, she is still ultimately in love with Amphilanthus, but her understanding of this love and how she
286 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet xcv, lines 9-14 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 86. 287 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet xcvi, line 2: Ibid. 288 See Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet xcvi, lines 4-6; Ibid. 289 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet cii, lines 9-14 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 90.
122 experiences it has shifted, moving away from both conventional masculine and feminine roles, symbolised in her rejections of both Cupid and Venus, reimagining these figures to better complement her need for independence as well as love.
In the final sonnet, Pamphilia sleeps and advises that those in a similar situation to her ‘Leaue the discourse of Venus, and her sonne / To young beginners’ and to ‘let your Constancy your Honor proue’.290 She has overcome the pains of heterosexual, thwarted love, and resolves to remain “constant” as a means of fulfilling her desires, adopting a martyred stance. Ironically, this heartfelt dedication to Amphilanthus has resulted not in a reunion of the lover with the beloved, but with Pamphilia’s recognition of her ability to live in accordance with her own expectations, rather than any need for Amphilanthus to give her a reason to live. While ostensibly an exploration of a feminine, emotionally distraught persona’s experience of thwarted love, Mary Wroth’s “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus” shifts conventional roles of lover and beloved, masculine and feminine, giving Pamphilia her own voice, but not enough to overtly challenge the patriarchal values of the society in which the poet wrote. Her commitment to fidelity and self-control, renouncing lust, while also demonstrating her intellectual capabilities to question, challenge and redefine the nature of love for herself, indicate intention to establish her own identity, contrary to any social perception that would otherwise intervene.
This conclusion is echoed in Wroth’s prose piece, suggesting an overarching unity between these texts, as well as her Sapphic engagement. Helen Hackett claims, in her analysis of Mary Wroth’s Urania, that in this particular text, in an all-female company, the gaze does not intrude or engender violence; instead, it engenders empathy and communion. Like the confrontation between the male gaze and the female body, this encounter creates stasis…But this is the
290 Wroth, “Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,” Sonnet ciii, lines 9-10; line 14 in [eds.] Hogg, Waller, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by Lady Mary Wroth, p 91.
123 status not of disempowerment of the intratextual viewer which provokes defensive violence, but of wonder and revelations.291 Hackett acknowledges that many dedications by male authors to women employ irony and a patronising tone, but here a woman writing to other women does not create the same antagonistic atmosphere.292 In Urania, Pamphilia hides her love for Amphilanthus, treating it as a kind of possession that gives her a sense of identity, and which she renders more abstract in his absence, speaking of love at length and in more generalised detail. Importantly for Hackett, Pamphilia derives not only a sense of selfhood, but creative power from her secret passion: reading, and more significantly, writing, figure largely as private forms for her emotional expression.293
Conclusion Sappho’s poetry and details about her life were not as broadly accessible to Lady Mary Wroth in comparison to some of the other poets to be examined in this investigation, but this relatively limited access has not prevented a subtle and pertinent engagement with the poet from taking place. Her personal link with Sappho’s first English translator, as well as the spread of Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus and poetic responses to the Heroides in general, make it likely that Wroth was able to directly respond to representations and technical elements of the poet. The prolific spread of Ovid’s texts in Western Europe, including the Epistula Sapphus in the seventeenth century, offered Wroth a vision of Sappho already subjected to intrusive processes of scholarly scrutiny and dubious transmission with which to engage. In addition, this vision included Ovid’s sensitive treatment of Sappho’s poetic foci of violence and self-control, inviting engagement with Sappho the figure, and perhaps also with her poetry as well. The sensitivity and technical layers of Wroth’s engagement with the figure of Sappho, as an Ovidian construction that still applied many of Sappho’s original poetic manipulations, demonstrates a conscientious adaptation of Sappho as a literary figurehead, as well as a source of technical inspiration.
291 Helen Hackett’s chapter “‘Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction’: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the ‘Femininity’ of Romance’ in [ed.] Anita Pacheco, Early Woman Writers: 1600-1720, p 62. 292 Hackett, “Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction”, p 46. 293 Hackett, “Yet Tell Me Some Such Fiction”, p 55.
124
Concerns over the potentially restrictive implications of the Phaon legend can be dismissed when read alongside Sappho’s own works, and the implications of Sappho’s relationship with Phaon according to Ovid. As Lady Mary Wroth’s adaptation shows, and the close analysis of the Phaon fiction demonstrates, it is possible to subtly accumulate power and influence for feminine figures who would ordinarily be marginalised in such contexts. The difficulty in ascertaining the exact scale of Wroth’s awareness of Sappho’s poetic texts, as well as her access to these, does not prelude her from engaging with the poet at all, and the similarities between Ovid’s Sappho and Wroth’s speakers are compelling. French and English translations of Sappho were available, if not accessible to Wroth. The Ovidian and mythic reflections of her work, as well as close analysis of the imagery and speaking voices applied in Wroth’s work, indicate that indirect contact with Sappho could well have been made via her similarly manipulative poetic engagements with divine figures and uses of voice.
125 Chapter Four
“I used to wear crowns”: Identity and Hierarchy in Sappho and Louise Labé
Introduction The French poet Louise Labé, nicknamed the “Sappho Lyonnaise” by her sixteenth century contemporaries, shares much in common with the ancient Greek Sappho. Not only do their works focus on love and desire, but the poets share contextual ambiguity and subtle, evolving thematic interests with control. Despite disparate geographical and temporal locations, Sappho born in Lesbos around 625 BCE and Labé living in Lyons some time between 1520 and 1566, both poets share similar ambiguities and authorial controversies. Subtle, shared references to hierarchies and old age suggest that Labé not only was a real poet in her own right, contrary to recent disputes, but she engaged specifically with Sapphic symbols for control in order to combat similar issues with identity and independence.
By comparing translations of Sappho’s Greek and Labé’s French poems, it is evident that Labé consciously adapts Sappho’s imagery in her own work, as well as the poet’s fragmentary identity, using a process of selective empowerment to further her own feminist, individualistic calls for recognition. This is particularly apparent in both poets’ exploratory images of weaving, crowns, deities, and notions of old age. Even though Labé’s poems are not physically fragmented, the fact that relatively few biographical details and poems survive, make her an equally enigmatic figure. Sappho and Labé engage with socially acceptable, feminine activities and items, but connect these with broader ideas of female bodies and agency, covertly assuming authority while outwardly promoting the same hierarchies that they destabilise.
126 Uncertain Identities: Labé and Sappho Sappho and Labé are fragmentary poets in that they exist in a series of theories, limited biographical detail, and contested creative works, the criticism of which tends to revolve around their sex. Fragmentation can be considered part of their oeuvre, fraught with issues of interpretation and control. While Sappho’s work has been subject to physical degradation, intentional or incidental, Labé’s poetry is comparatively well preserved and not fragmentary in the same sense. Labé’s sex, rather than her ambiguity, inspired recent scholarly questioning of her as a poet; Mireille Huchon alleging that several men wrote Labé’s poetry, attaching her name to a collection and creating Lyons’ own “Sappho”. Lack of information about Labé’s writing practices makes this theory difficult to support or dismiss, but what we know of Labé suggests that she could have produced the poems accredited to her. The only noted examples of contextual public suspicion of the poet surround allegations of her promiscuity, rather than her status as a writer.294
The recovery of Sappho’s work is linked with ideas of death and breakage; fragments have been recovered from the shrouds of Egyptian mummies, and some of her fragments have been shared only recently with the public after the deaths of private collectors.295 Selfishness accounts for some of this restriction, and similarly, the scruples of later writers, critics and curators have impacted on receptions of both poets. A history of subjugation and interpretation adds a layer of obsessive subtext to their works; each piece has been manipulated by many different readers. Sappho’s work was important not only to the male scholars of Classical Greece, but was also preserved by Roman scholars, before becoming a subject of fascination for later Europeans, including Jean de Tournes and Maurice Scève. Labé has been exposed to a strikingly similar process of scrutiny and obsessive control, as she has been alternately celebrated and condemned on the basis of purported biographical details and poetic content,
294 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence” Yale French Studies (1.62, 1981), p 147. 295 See Dirk Obbink’s comments on recovery of the Cologne Papyrus in [eds.] Ellen Greene, Marilyn Skinner, The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and Philosophical Issues, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2009, p 8.
127 culminating in criticism that denies her even the agency of writing her own work.
The fact that Labé only published one book of poetry could beg the question why this is all that we have of her work. If she belonged to a literary circle, perhaps she circulated other poems or drafts. She did not die prematurely, nor did her lifestyle infringe upon her writing. The fact that we don’t have any more work could suggest that she was a hoax, created by a group of male poets, in order to fill a niche desire for a “Sappho Lyonnaise”, then cast aside after successful publication. However, the fact that we don’t have more of Labé’s work should not cast what we do have of her into question.
The Wars of Religion ravaged Lyons between 1562-1598, and peace was not restored during Labé’s lifetime. A poetic focus on injustice, as well as a need for stability, control and power for her female speakers, may have been inspired by such turmoil. War, massacres and looting swept through France, and Lyons suffered tremendously.296 Sickness from frequent plague outbreaks and violence during this period framed Labé’s production of poetry.297 Her volume of poems, printed 10 years before her death, may represent a collection of her life’s work, selected for popular dispersal, rather than the beginning of her writing career. The fact that draft pieces have not been retained reflects Sappho’s issues of preservation; these may have been simply lost or destroyed. In her will, Labé distributes property and money, but makes no mention of her writing.298 While it is not impossible for her personal writings to have survived in some way, no records exist.
296 Gaia Servadio, Renaissance Women, London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005, p 173. 297 Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et mediterranéens, volume 2, Paris: Mouton, 1976, 1:370; J. N. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009, p 58. 298 Servadio, Renaissance Women, p 174. Labé left property to relatives who deserted her and to financially assist girls who could not marry because they had no money.
128 Labé’s life may not have been terribly restrictive, since theories about gender roles were not always applied in daily life.299 Noblewomen even participated in both material and symbolic ways in making war in sixteenth century France, contrary to categorisation of warfare as a masculine focus.300 In upper class homes, roles were not always sharply defined for men and women in terms of household labour and purchases.301 Louise Labé’s wealthy rather than noble background may not have placed her in the same situation, but her liberal education suggests that she, unlike less affluent women, may have felt a high degree of freedom in terms of her actions, including her decision to write. Like Sappho, Labé’s privileged class position may have enabled her to write, publish, and express desires for power, as well as air concerns about risks to this control.
The printing press in Lyons was then France’s major printing centre, producing the first printed French book, La legend dorée, in 1473.302 Christine de Pizan’s Moral Proverbs was not only printed in 1478, but translated from French to English in 1526, signifying popular acceptance and dispersal.303 Many copies of de Pizan’s works survive, assisted perhaps by the fact that her Moral Proverbs, unlike Labé’s impassioned and sexualised poetry, ‘would stand comfortably alongside other advice books and conduct books made for young aristocrats’.304 A.E.B. Coldiron reflects that ‘its initial manuscript context points the advice mainly at aristocrats of either sex and either nationality’, but other texts, such as City of Ladies and Three Virtues are more overtly gendered, and ‘argue that
299 Kristen B. Neuscel, “Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth-Century France” in [ed.] Michael Wolfe, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997, p 124. 300 Neuscel in [ed.] Wolfe, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, p 125. This stemmed primarily from the property management required in war, since managing military resources comes under this category. 301 ‘Seeing to the various needs of the household and its members and managing most of its daily affairs was thus within the routine competence of both lord and lady…this competence included securing adequate quantities of gunpowder….’: Neuscel, “Noblewomen and War in Sixteenth- Century France” in [ed.] Wolfe, Changing Identities in Early Modern France, p 126. 302 Jennifer R. Goodman, “Caxton’s Continent” in [ed.] William Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2006, p 116. 303 A.E.B. Coldiron, “Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman: Caxton, Pysnson, and Christine de Pizan’s Moral Proverbs” in [ed.] Kuskin, Caxton’s Trace: Studies in the History of English Printing, p 127. 304 Coldiron, “Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman”, p 130.
129 virtue finds an equally happy home in women’s lives and legends’.305 Christine de Pizan’s tone is assertive and authoritative, extolling the virtues and achievements of women, but her texts are much less sexualised than Labé’s and therefore less likely to attract condemnation. Like Sappho, not all of Labé’s work has been considered palatable to popular sensibilities, and as a result may have been selectively destroyed, or simply ignored and lost.
Labé’s early education echoed that of her brothers, and included learning to read Latin and Italian, ‘to ride with her brothers, to throw a lance, to handle a pike, a war axe, to shoot and bow, and wield a dagger…[but then] put aside sports when she turned sixteen’.306 Her upbringing may have inspired some images of violence and physicality in pursuit of a reluctant man’s affections, as well as the feminist content of her poetry, and her decision to write and circulate her work. Labé’s relatively liberal education linguistically equipped her to read Petrarch’s poetry not only in French translations, but also Italian. Peter Sharratt reflects that it ‘seems certain’ that Labé knew Latin and Italian, ‘with perhaps a smattering of Greek and Spanish’.307 Importantly though, despite motifs of violence and manipulation in her elegies and sonnets, Labé’s approach to poetry is essentially the same as Sappho’s: love and desire are the focal themes, around which the first-person speaker’s fixation with hierarchy and control are subtly revealed. Labé’s “feminine” poetic concerns embrace Sappho’s notions of hierarchy and conflict as an intrinsic part of love and the interactions between lover and beloved, and also between other women.
Labé’s collection, Oeuvres de Louise Labé, published in 1555, contains three elegies, a prose section and twenty-four sonnets written in Petrarchan style. All poems deal with intense emotions, including pain and violent imagery, stemming from the speaker’s desire for an unnamed man. Curiously, the book itself is dedicated to Clémence de Bourges, a young noblewoman whom Labé
305 Coldiron, “Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman”, p 131. 306 Judith Thurman, I Became Alone: Five Women Poets, New York: Athenum, 1975, p 34-35. 307 Peter Sharratt, “Introduction” in Peter Sharratt, G.D. Martin, Louise Labé: Sonnets, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973, p 2.
130 hoped would become a writer.308 Like Sappho, Labé specifically addresses a female audience in her elegies, creating a feminist subtext as her first-person speaker calls on female listeners for sympathy, suffering under the unresponsive or fickle desires of an unnamed man. However, as in most of Sappho’s poems, imagined female listeners are not addressed by name, afforded personal markers or independent speech. Proposed hostility to the speaker’s expressions of love and desire is entirely imaginary, and sympathy is the only permitted outcome in the poems. Such treatment is consistent with Sappho’s constructions of hierarchies, which place the Sapphic speaker in a position of authority, contrary to the sometimes plaintive content of her work.
Labé ‘broke the rules of Petrarchan discourse and other rules as well’, since she published her poems herself…addressed them to a man who was not her husband and who inspired a love far less chaste than fiery, and wrote an introductory epistle to a woman friend in which she attacked the monopoly men held over education and culture.309 Despite subverting these “rules”, Labé’s sonnets are distinctly Petrarchan, engaging with her male predecessors on their own level, and then subverting established conventions from within. Conversely, Sappho constructed her own stanzas and poetic rhythms, but Sappho’s Homeric references are comparable to Labé’s Petrarchan references; both poets symbolically link their own work with that of a famous male predecessor, engaging with and subtly challenging a figure who would, in their respective contexts, generally be considered to be beyond their understanding. Labé’s unusually extensive education dominates her poetry, alongside “feminine” motifs of love, despair and calls for female sympathy. But when reading Labé’s sonnets, the reader is immediately confronted with their strict Petrarchan structures, and the opening sonnet is dedicated to Petrarch specifically, indicated by its composition entirely in Italian. At the outset then, these poems are an intellectual exercise, rather than purely emotional outpourings.
308 Judith Thurman, I Became Alone, p 37. Unfortunately, this friend died in 1561. 309 Ann Rosalind Jones, “Assimilation with a Difference”, p 146-147. It is uncertain what the extent of Louise Labé’s relationship with Clémence de Bourges was, but it could be compared to Sappho’s dedicatory poems to beloved women, such as Anactoria, Gongyla and Atthis.
131 Mireille Huchon laments that extremely little is certain about Louise Labé’s life in terms of dates, but it is possible to glean information about her life from incidental paperwork, including [un] long testament tres détaillé, en date du 28 avril 1565, de << dame Loyse Charlin, dite Labé, veuve de feu Sire Ennemond Perrin, en son vivant bourgeois citoyen habitant a Lyon>>, signé au domicile de Thomas Fortin, banquier d’origine Florentine, en presence d’un maître des arts, d’un Florentin, d’un Piémontois, d’un apothicaire, d’un cordonnier et d’un courturier (ces deux derniers ne sachant pas signer) which gave Huchon the impression of a woman living life easily, without children.310 It has not always been possible to identify full biographical details about the lives, deaths and lifestyles of poets. Sappho’s own details are relatively sparse, the majority of which are recorded in the Suda and whose reliability cannot be confirmed. Huchon’s comment that Labé was ‘sans enfant’ emphasises the reproductive status of the poet. Such a focus is not typically levelled towards male poets from the same time period, and signals gender- based tension in Huchon’s criticism, mirroring scholarly fixation on “Cleïs” in Sappho’s work, who may or may not be Sappho’s daughter.
Olivier de Magny’s Sonnet LV in Souspirs is almost identical to Labé’s Sonnet 2 in Oeuvres, begging the question of whom copied whom.311 The two poems suggest homogeneity of thematic inspiration, imagery and Petrarchan style, though Labé’s version is larger.312 Huchon suggests that de Magny may have written both versions. However, the fact that Labé’s work draws heavily from Petrarch and Sappho shows that intertexuality is central to her poetry, rather than fraud. By attaching poems to Labé, the perpetrators would have risked outcry if not by Labé herself, then perhaps by her much older husband and brothers. No records of familial outrage exist. Louise Labé’s application for and receiving “Privilège du Roy” in 1554 adds criminal implications of fraud, if she were a fake. Such a scam, supposedly perpetrated by several famous poets, may well have backfired and resulted in negative publicity, as well as legal repercussions.
310 Mireille Huchon, Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, Genève: Librairie Droz, 2006, p 10. 311 Huchon, Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, p 229. 312 Huchon, Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, p 230.
132
Labé’s sociable nature, combined with her intellect and drive to create a literary salon, placed her in a position ideal for direct and open poetic engagement with other writers. Records of her competitive nature stem back to her youth, including her involvement in a sword-fighting competition.313 It is likely that she produced her own work and circulated it with the intention of engaging with the figures she quotes. Labé shows signs of strong self-interest and independence, as well as intellectual vigour, akin to Sappho.
Huchon argues that Labé’s poetry may have been a “joke” or well-known literary exercise, but there are no records of this being common knowledge. If false attribution of poetry to Louise Labé were common knowledge, then why she was vilified by other writers on a character basis, rather than on literary grounds? Philibert de Vienne, a famous writer at the time, openly vilified Labé in 1547 as a courtesan. He does not claim that she was not a writer, but attacks her supposed morality, reflecting the anxiety of associating with Sappho’s lesbian imagery and open references to sexual desire. Philibert de Vienne’s criticism indicates that Labé was not part of a well-known hoax, and also that her association with Sapphic themes, whether part of the popular canon or less fashionable, was readily identifiable to her contemporaries.
Merging Contexts: Sappho and Labé Sappho’s status as a fragmentary poet of uncertain biographical details may have offered Labé a role model. The lack of documentation to clarify Labé’s status as a poet could even have been orchestrated or promoted by Labé herself. Though difficult to prove, it would offer an explanation for Labé’s lack of rebuttals to allegations of “immoral behaviour”. Labé’s intertextuality and
313 In “Sonnet 17” Labé’s speaker claims Masques, tournaments, and games are a dull affair, without you, there is nothing to admire: lines 5-6, translated by Annie Finch in [ed.] Deborah Lesko Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, p 205. Labé learned fencing thanks to her father’s decision to educate his daughter in the same arts as her brothers: Keith Cameron, Louise Labé: Renaissance Poet and Feminist, New York: Berg Publishers Ltd, 1990, p 17-18. She may have also participated in a tournament for King Henri II (then the Dauphin Henri) in 1542.
133 almost “silent” literary presence outside of her poems creates slippage of identity, consciously weaving Labé’s own voice into those of other poets, including Petrarch and Sappho. Even the speaker in Labé’s poems is seldom alone: she is accompanied by deities, muses, male beloved, and female audience. Labé’s layers of plurality incorporate the lives of her subjects, merging poetic constructions with her own context, creating a fragmentary and evasive construction of herself that is comparable to that of Sappho and Sappho’s body of work. The result is a self-conscious weaving and fragmenting of identity, linking Labé with Sappho poetically and biographically, facilitating and even necessitating the reading of both poets together. Central to this move is a focus on control and hierarchy, moving beyond the constraints of social norms, and even biological restrictions.
The heterosexuality of Labé’s poetry, despite being outspoken and openly sexualised, mirrors the popular heterosexual fiction of Sappho prevalent in Lyons. The lack of distinctive features of the male beloved in Labé’s sonnets and elegies is similar to the distant Phaon in Ovid’s depiction of a heterosexual Sappho, discussed in Chapter Three. However, by manipulating Sappho’s artificially heterosexual image and combining this with distinctively Sapphic poetic traits and ideas, Labé injects her own voice into a then predominantly male field of scholarship and literature, identifying herself with an ‘originary’ female author.314 Sappho had been first introduced to Lyons via the works of Ovid; the first editions of the Heroides and Metamorphoses began to circulate in 1508, becoming popular in the 1550s. Labé’s interjection represents a very small minority of French female voices engaging with Sappho, let alone adapting her themes and techniques, during this time period. Huchon states that Dans les années 1550, Sappho, en representante du lyrisme et de la femme passionnée, est souvent évoquée dans les écrits des auteurs publiés a Lyon, tout particulierement chez les poètes liés a l’atelier de Jean de Tournes … Le poète Charles Fontaine, dans Les ruisseaux de Fontaine, en 1555, cite la poétesse en
314 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, c1999, p 38-39.
134 compagnie des autres auteurs lyriques anciens, Homere, Pindare, Simonide, Stésichore, Alcée, Anacréon, Virgile.315 The rising popularity of ancient Greek and Latin authors in Lyons boosted an increased literary interest in Sappho. Jean de Tournes (1504-1564) played a prominent role in this interest, not only publishing Ovid’s texts relating to Sappho, but also printing Labé’s collection. Huchon agrees that de Tournes held a strong interest in Sappho, identifiable in the fact that Il parle longuement d’elle dans la préface sur l’épître de Sappho a Phaon qui accompagne la traduction de la vingt et unieme épître d’Ovide dans l’édition qu’il donne des épîtres d’Ovide pardue chez Jean de Tournes en 1556.316 Huchon surmises that de Tournes and Scève would have been primary instigators behind constructing a “Sappho Lyonnaise”, based on this shared interest in the ancient Greek poet. The heterosexual marketing of Sappho, conveyed via de Tournes’ publication of Ovid and the texts’ subsequent popularity, would also have supported the construction of a similarly desirous female speaker, beseeching an uninterested and unfeeling male beloved. However, such a construction would have been a very marketable ruse, assisted by the close friendship shared between de Tournes and Scève and their connections with Lyonnaise literary circles. Jean de Tournes’ printing press would have been able to disseminate Labé’s work with an air of authenticity, even if he had helped to fabricate it.
Would an esteemed printer like de Tournes want to publish, alongside Sappho, Dante, Petrarch and Scève, the works of a fraud? Jean de Tournes was a very highly regarded printer, coming from a long family line of “imprimeurs du Roy” and specialist German training in printing.317 He was involved in producing volumes of work by a range of authors, including Italian, Greek, Latin and French writers, as well as Latin and French versions of the Bible.318 The first page of Labé’s Oeuvres locates her name firmly alongside de Tournes’, offering a sense of legitimacy and support to the poet through proximity. Connections are
315 Mireille Huchon, Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, p 96-97. 316 Huchon, Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, p 97. 317 Rigolot, “Louise Labé and the “Climat Lyonnois””, p 406. 318 These include volumes of Des Perriers (1544), Petrarch (1545), Marot (1546), Dante (1547) and Plato (1550).
135 further drawn between the two by the fact that Labé’s sonnets are written in Petrarchan style, and de Tournes was responsible for printing Petrarch’s Rime sparse and Trionfi together in a book called Il Petrarca in 1545. Jean de Tournes did not oppose feminist publications, since he had already printed Pernette du Guillet’s Rhymes in 1545 and Marguerite de Navarre’s Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses in 1547, as well as treatises on women by François Habert (1545, 1547), Antoine Héroet (1547), and translations of Juan Luis Vive (1543, 1547, 1549).319 Rigolot claims that the preface to du Guillet’s love poems may have been an inspiration for Labé to write her own poetry, since in the preface the distinguished humanist Antoine du Moulin ‘presented himself as a defender of the author’s reputation and urged the “Ladies” of Lyons to continue a work that had been unjustly interrupted by death’, by continuing to write poetry.320
The relationship between Jean de Tournes and Maurice Scève, the other main figure in Huchon’s theory, appears to have been very close.321 Their discussions of Petrarch’s muse, Laura, potentially tie into Huchon’s theory that popular interest in Laura may have inspired creation of a “French Laura” in Labé, as well as a new Sappho. The copyeditor of Labé’s Oeuvres noticed similarities between Laura and Louise, but importantly, he also noticed a vital difference: Peletier noted that, contrary to Laura, Louise did not need a male admirer to sing her merits: she knew how to write and was able to gain the public’s esteem on the basis of her own poetry: Elle des dons des Muses cultivez S’est pour soymesme et pour autrui saisie: Tant qu’en louant sa di[g]ne poësie, Mieux que par vous par elle vous vivez.322
319 François Rigolot observes that these were published well before Labé’s Oeuvres, creating a sound precedent for female and feminist printing by Jean de Tournes: “Louise Labé and the “Climat Lyonnois””, p 408. 320 Rigolot, “Louise Labé and the “Climat Lyonnois””, p 408. 321 Mireille Huchon comments on this relationship and quotes the passage in Louise Labé, Une Créature de Papier, p 155; Rigolot, “Louise Labé and the “Climat Lyonnois””, p 407. 322 Rigolot, “Louise Labé and the “Climat Lyonnois””, p 407, quoting [ed.] François Rigolot, Louise Labé, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Flammario, p 141, II.5-8.
136 It is this prevalently and persistently unique voice, identifiable in all of her published poems, that argues against the theory that Louise Labé did not write. Labé’s speaker has more in common with Sappho than Laura, suggesting that Labé engaged with the trope of a passive, desired female in a Petrarchan setting, and twisted it to reflect a Sapphic model of a manipulative, desiring female instead. Labé affords more deference to Sappho than to Petrarch, since she essentially uses Petrarchan sonnets to explore the depth of feeling and control of a female, Sapphic speaker, quite unlike those seen in the Italian poet’s work. A traditionally masculine structure and Petrarchan imagery are used to highlight the failings of Petrarch’s depiction of women, and to reflect the accuracy of a Sapphic approach.
Criticism that Labé is too like Sappho is redundant, since this self-styling was intentional. Popular literary and social images of womanhood and femininity available to both Labé and Sappho would not have been remarkably dissimilar, inviting Labé to identify with and adapt Sapphic images and themes. Sappho’s poetic speakers are seldom passive. They recognise deficiencies and richness alike in their settings, critique and celebrate other characters, and desire or repel men and women. “Completeness” is not, for Sappho, found via sexual intercourse with men or production of children. Instead, the poet’s personae create a sense of “completeness” through the constructions of hierarchical settings, filled only with what the speaker desires, and where her voice is most prominent. The same process takes place in Labé’s sonnets, which will be discussed in detail, and this idea is foregrounded in her elegies.
Controlling the Audience By appealing to readers by name or collective directives, Sappho and Labé actively seek specific emotional and physical reactions from audiences, encoding subtle reflections on the speakers’ level of control over all other subjects in their poems. The poets simultaneously reveal possibilities for identity slippage: Labé, like Sappho, calls for particular emotional responses to situations, but at the same time, often masks the true agendas of her speakers. Both poets appeal directly to the desires of their female audiences, often for
137 love, but also for recognition, emphasising the role of the poet in offering or withholding both for the speaker, and also, in some cases, for the audience. Male figures are pointedly removed, displaced, or disempowered in the setting of each poem via the female speaker’s own selective self-empowerment.
Louise Labé uses a similar strategy of naming and directs the attention of specific female figures as Sappho does in her remaining fragments. By selectively naming women in her poems, Sappho is able to clearly confer favour or condemnation, depending on the context, and also draw attention to her control over these women. Outwardly personal, reflective poems can also be given a more general atmosphere, inviting broader sympathy from listeners, such as in Fragment 16, when Sappho mentions Anactoria’s name more than halfway through the remains of the poem, creating an element of suspense in revealing the identity of the favoured woman, but also making the first part of this poem more generally applicable and referential to the experiences of her listeners. In other poems, Sappho also mentions herself by name, emphasising her own engagement and placing herself in a constant state of selective empowerment, sometimes at the expense of other subjects.323 Conversely, very few male figures, even deities, are named in her work. Labé is less exclusive, but she engages directly with women more frequently than with men or gods.
In “cult” poems, Sappho instructs women to ‘strike yourselves’ and ‘tear your garments’ in mourning for Adonis, signalling an interest in directly impacting on an audience’s physical activities.324 Such calls for physical reactions do not happen with such violence in Labé’s poetry, nor does her speaker refer to herself by name. In fact, she takes particular care to avoid using the names of mortals. Violence is imagined and entirely enacted on the speaker. Deities’ names appear frequently, but Labé’s engagement with her audience is entirely phrased in general terms, refusing individual identity to anyone, or physical experience to another other than the speaker. Labé invokes her listeners as a
323 Examples of this preferential treatment of her own name, at the expense of other figures, can be seen in Fragment 1, in which the Sapphic speaker is named “Sappho” and the unwilling, beloved woman is left nameless, in an act of further removing her agency. 324 See Fragment 140, translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter, p 282-283.
138 nameless collective, allegedly capable of criticism and condemnation, according to the poems, but this is a power that is strategically and insistently prevented. The speaker’s emotive descriptions of her suffering and positioning of sympathy for her as the only conclusion available to the audience, or alternatively, threats of far greater suffering for the unsympathetic, are reminiscent of Sappho’s emotional manipulation and physical direction. Much like Sappho’s poems, Labé’s sonnets and elegies demand rather than request female sympathy, presenting a self-aware and self-promotional sense, rather than an atmosphere that is entirely mutual and supportive. Labé takes Sappho’s calls for direct physical and emotional control over her listeners to another level, preventing activity and engagement in order to emphasise the suffering and importance of the speaker.
By appealing to her listeners collectively and openly, Labé creates a sense of immediacy, demanding direct engagement and sympathy with her speaker, rather than allowing for critical distance. Eva Stehle observes that this was a popular move on Sappho’s part as well. In her discussion on the passion of Fragment 31, Stehle asserts that the Sapphic speaker’s love for a particular, unnamed woman may have caused jealousy among her listeners: ...the rest would feel emotionally left out, for the contrast between Sappho’s intense reaction to one and her disregard for all others present would be evident…The only way [Fragment] 31 can be heard without appearing to ignore or spoof the emotions of its audience is for each auditor to take it as meant for herself alone. As a result, the poem gains immediacy as each listener loses consciousness of any rival auditor.325 Louise Labé does not name her male beloved, nor does she name any of her female listeners. The impersonal nature of this mode of address is countered by the passionate descriptions of the speaker’s experiences and desires, inviting immediate emotional engagement, while also maintaining strict control over access to Labé’s own thoughts. By forcing her beloved male subject into anonymity, Labé maintains a layer of control over his identity, which can now
325 Eva Stehle, Performance and gender in ancient Greece: nondramatic poetry in its setting, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p 292.
139 only be shaped by her words, rather than any outside context. The same can be said for her female listeners, whom she addresses directly in several poems.
The final sonnet in Labé’s sequence, dedicated to another woman, does not address the man who has otherwise dominated the body of the work. Instead, “Sonnet 24” addresses Labé’s imagined female readers, speaking of love and the need for understanding, not condemnation, lest they too feel the same pains of regret and rejection. English translator Annie Finch presents the poem as follows: Sisters, do not reproach me that I’ve felt such love it makes a thousand torches burn, had a thousand cares, a thousand sorrows turn my days to days that tears consume and melt. Rough words like yours shouldn’t burden my name with guilt, if I’ve failed, you’ll know I feel all the pain I earn. So stop sharpening those needles. Someday you’ll learn how high Love flames every time it burns heartfelt, even if there’s no Vulcan as an excuse, no beauty like Adonis’s to accuse. On a whim, Love can force you to burn until – even with less occasion than I have – you’ll suffer a stronger, and a stranger, love. So watch out – you could be far more unhappy still.326 Finch’s translation dynamically moves to incorporate the original Petrarchan sonnet style of Labé’s poem, but deviates from strict replication of the original French in so doing. However, Finch affords much space to Labé’s declarations of desire, emphasising the emotion, and also the venom behind these, in keeping with the primary text, suggesting an adaptive, sensitive approach. Labé’s references to the opinions and experiences of her female audience are far outweighed by references to those of her speaker. The intense suffering of the speaker is contrasted with the ‘reproach’ and ‘rough words’ of the audience, and consequently found lacking. Any negative impressions are reproached in turn
326 Louise Labé, Sonnet 24, lines 1-14 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé, Complete Poetry and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, p 219. Translated by Annie Finch.
140 with the accusation that a victim such as the speaker should not be burdened further with more pain. However, Labé does not appeal for compassion; she also threatens violence against the bodies of those who would not heed this call for sympathy.
‘Love’ appears entirely in threatening terms: ‘you’ll suffer a stronger, and a stranger, love’, warns the speaker. There are no doubts in the speaker’s mind that such suffering will eventuate, irrespective of the audience members’ actions and desires. However, ‘Love’ in this instance, despite being portrayed as an irresistible force in all of the sonnets, is ultimately a device manipulated by Labé in order to explain and justify her suffering, and indemnify her agency via poetry. Love informs Labé’s sonnets, and also threatens all who would criticise these, therefore ensuring the speaker’s access to speech. In addition, the fact that she, unlike the critical listeners, is currently in the throes of pain and passion, imposes a sense of authority over the uninitiated.
In Labé’s “Elegy 1”, the opening lines claim that even the gods are subservient to love, suggesting that the “unfeeling” listeners are less close to the gods than the speaker. Subtitled “All-Conquering Love” by Annie Finch, the speaker immediately refers to the gods: At first when Love – whose power can make gods grow tame – brought down inside my heart a burning flame, embracing with his cruel and furious rage my blood, my bones, my spirit, and my courage, I was tender and did not yet have the strength to sing out my pain and suffering at length; Phoebus, the friend of laureled poetry, had not yet allowed my verse to come to me. But now that his divine furor has filled my valiant breast, I feel my ardour build…327 This idea of gods tamed by love occurs in several Sappho poems, to which Labé would have had access; namely the Aphrodite Ode and Fragment 31. In addition,
327 Labé, “Elegy 1 [All-Conquering Love]”, lines 1-10 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 153. Translated by Annie Finch.
141 Labé embraces Sappho’s technique of bodily fragmentation, employed with particular strength in Fragment 31 and discussed at length in Chapter One. Labé’s speaker, struck by love, is compelled to list ‘my blood, my bones, my spirit’ as victims of its power. However, she keeps using the possessive term, acknowledging a modicum of self-control despite the assault. In addition, just as the Sapphic speaker in Fragment 31 claimed to lose control of her voice, Labé’s speaker engages with the same, false image twice: she claims to then ‘not yet have the strength / to sing out my pain’ and Phoebus ‘had not yet allowed my verse to come to me’. This image of false restriction draws the reader’s attention to the speaker’s control; presumably, she has triumphed over this dismal situation and is now able to speak, therefore the poem must encode some instruction or reason for this state of affairs. Alternatively, the speaker never lost control, and this image of overpowering passion and pain is accompanied by a persistent sense of self, and an obsession with keeping control over her body and emotions.
Sapphic bodily disintegration takes place in “Elegy 1”, as the speaker breaks into component pieces then rebuilds these, simultaneously imbuing herself with divine influence. Love is a brutal process in this elegy, isolating the speaker from the uninitiated and lifting her closer to the gods via pain and suffering. The reference to ‘laureled poetry’ is true to the original French, ‘des Lauriers vers’, and invites comparison to Petrarch’s Laura, hinting at issues of access to follow in Labé’s sonnets. The suffering caused by love appears, at the outset, to be the speaker’s primary concern, but the opening to this elegy is strongly connected to issues of power and voice. The speaker describes how her suffering has “remade” her, granting her access to poetic speech, symbolised by the god Phoebus and subtle reference to Petrarch, but also, implicitly, through Sappho. Labé claims that Phoebus’s gift to her is comparable to that of Sappho: The lyre he gave me once chanted the verse of love on Lesbos, in the olden times328
328 Labé, “Elegy 1 [All-Conquering Love]”, lines 14-15 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 153. Translated by Annie Finch.
142 She does not state that Phoebus imparted this gift to the Lesbian poet. Rather, Phoebus has transferred Sappho’s lyre and poetic voice to Labé, reflecting a history of male-dominated transference of Sappho’s work. Labé establishes herself as a “Sappho Lyonnaise” in this poem, rather than passively receiving the name. She consciously links herself with Sappho’s authority, applying Sapphic techniques of self-aggrandisement.
Labé subtly creates a hierarchy in “Sonnet 24”, positioning herself and her speaker in a position of heightened emotion and eloquence in contrast to her listeners, and referring to her suffering’s duration. The passage of time is brought to the foreground. Like Sappho’s first-person speakers in some poems, Labé’s speaker adopts the role of a mentor, cautioning her listeners and forecasting their futures, but withholds solutions. The only advice offered is compassion and respect for the lover, not condemnation. The conclusion of “Sonnet 24”, as in Sappho’s “audience” poems, is the same: the speaker is depicted, despite any suffering or difficulty in the poem, as the sole authority and figure in whom control is invested. This is compounded by the fact that Labé’s sonnet, despite being the final piece in the sequence, completely ignores the male beloved to whom the other poems appear to refer. In this final poem, only the speaker influences the audience. Even the intrusive, disruptive presence of the beloved man is banished, signalling the speaker’s entire, unchallenged control over interpretation of ‘Love’ and its management.
Sappho names female listeners in many of her remaining fragments, suggesting intent to exercise emotional control over certain individuals, as well as generic groups, ultimately expanding her influence beyond the privacy of the gatherings detailed and into a more public domain. Female figures considerably outnumber male figures in Sappho’s poems.329 Sappho not only names most of these
329 A large number of female names are mentioned, including those of deities and mortals: Aphrodite is mentioned by name in Fragments 1, 2, 5, 15B, 22, 33, 35, 44, 65, 73A, 86, 96, 102, 103Ab, 112, 133, 134, 140; Doricha in Fragments 7, 15B; Atthis in Fragments 8, 49, 96, 131; Hera in Fragment 9; Helen of Troy in Fragment 16, 23; Anaktoria in Fragment 16; Gonglya in Fragment 22; Abanthis in Fragment 22; Hermione in Fragment 23; Gorgo in Fragment 29C, 103Aa, 144; Gyrinno in Fragment 29H, 82A; Andromache in Fragment 44; Artemis in Fragments 44Aa, 84; The Muses in Fragments 44Ab, 64B, 103, 127, 128, 150, 187; The Graces in Fragments
143 women, but also mentions them more than once, suggesting that these are either individuals close to her and her listeners, or that they are recurring personae. Most men named in her poems are deities or legendary figures, rather than living men, suggesting that Sappho preferred, as Labé did, to exile male figures from positions of mortal authority in her poems and relegate these to inspirational rather than active roles. Labé is much more restrictive than Sappho. By preventing male and female figures alike from having names, unless they are deities and intrinsically separate from mortal hierarchies, Labé’s speaker is the most influential figure in her poems, occupying the role of clearly identified mentor and sympathetic character.
Some small Sappho fragments appear to be directed towards future readers, or demonstrate a preoccupation with later views of the poet. Unlike Labé, Sappho’s speaker does not appear outwardly concerned by criticism, but is worried about being forgotten. Labé’s desire not to live in infamy is foregrounded in “Sonnet 24”, but this overt concern is undercut by the content of the poem itself, with its ominous tone and violent imagery. Agony for the female listeners is apparently inevitable, yet Labé’s speaker appears as an educating, overcoming presence, reflecting an overarching desire to assume control over the otherwise insurmountable pressure of ‘Love’. It is to female readers that Labé issues her caution and to whom she appeals for support, suggesting preference for women’s rather than men’s support, or perhaps a desire to completely dictate the actions, thoughts and feelings of other women. Such a move is similar to
44Ab, 53, 81, 103, 128; Dawn in Fragment 58, 103, 123, 157; Andromeda in Fragment 68A; Megara in Fragment 68A; Mika in Fragment 71; Dika in Fragment 81; Mnasidika in Fragment 82A; Eirana in Fragment 91, 135; Gonglya in Fragment 95; Sardis in Fragment 96, 98A; Goddess of Persuasion in Fragment 96; Kleis in Fragment 98B, 132; Archenassa in Fragment 103Ca; Kalliope (one of the Muses) in Fragment 124; Andromeda in Fragment 131, 133; Leto in Fragment 142; Niobe in Fragment 142; Leda in Fragment 166; Gello in Fragment 168A; and Medeia in Fragment 186. Conversely, men and male deities are only occasionally named: Zeus is mentioned in Fragments 1, 53; Pan in Fragment 18 and 44; Paphos (son of Pygmalion and Galatea, brought to life by Aphrodite, therefore a figure subservient to a female presence) in Fragment 35; Hektor and Priam in Fragment 44; Eros in Fragments 44Aa, 47, 130, 159; Phoibos in Fragment 44Aa; Kronos in Fragments 44Aa, 103; Hades in Fragment 55; Ares in Fragment 111; Hymenaios in Fragments 111, 117B; Adonis in Fragment 117B, 140, 168; Pandion in Fragment 135; and Hermes in Fragment 141.
144 Sappho’s Fragment 5, in which the actions of her brother result in a call to female deities, rather than her brother directly.
Despite the fact that male subjects cause emotional distress and incite new desires in the minds of the female speakers, in both Sappho’s Fragment 5 and Labé’s “Sonnet 24”, female listeners are invoked, rather than male. Sappho prays to ‘Kypris and Nereids’ to ‘grant my brother to arrive here’ and that her brother’s desires be attained. However, most of the surviving text is dedicated to describing the shame that Sappho wants her brother to feel, referring to the ‘sorrow’ that he has caused his family, ‘sad pain’ and ‘grieving for the past’.330 Sappho’s poem initially appears to portray a dutiful sister and her errant brother, but the piece is full of controlling directives: …all the wrong he did before, loose it. Make him a joy to his friends, a pain to his enemies and let there exist for us not one single further sorrow May he willingly give his sister her portion of honour, but sad pain…331 The prayer to Aphrodite (Kypris) and the Nereids suggests that Sappho does not expect her brother to listen to her request, instead intending to appeal to the deities to act upon her wishes. In Fragment 1, Aphrodite’s respect for the Sapphic speaker is emphasised, and Fragment 5 reads as an extension of this influence. Rather than wholly being a prayer, spoken in place of actual conversation with her brother, Sappho selects a goddess in whose esteem she places herself, and over whom she has demonstrated control in other poems. By invoking a female deity as a listener, the Sapphic speaker subtly brings to attention her inherent control over the situation, despite the otherwise dismal, apparent state of being. Just as Labé opts not to address the male beloved as her listener, Sappho does not consider her brother to be an appropriate recipient: both poets select audiences over whom they can still exercise control, despite otherwise bleak implications for their agency.
330 Fragment 5, lines 8, 10, 11 in Carson, If Not, Winter, p 13. 331 Fragment 5, lines 5-11 in Carson, If Not, Winter, p 13.
145 Weaving in Sappho and Labé References to traditionally “feminine” motifs and means of creation convey authority to female first-person speakers and implicitly, the poets themselves. ‘Needles’ in “Sonnet 24” echo the “weaving” processes in some of Sappho’s poems. Association between women, weaving and speech has been recognised by many scholars, and is also present in Sappho’s poems and Labé’s poetic interpretations of Sappho. 332 For both Labé and Sappho, weaving is not a simple domestic task, but a symbolic act connected with desire for control. Kathryn Kruger observes that weaving and cloth making were not incidental to culture, but were vital forces in establishing, homogenising and perpetuating many societies.333 Kruger claims that textiles were ‘not metaphors for lack’, but indicated ‘the important presence of the contribution of women to the creation of culture, its texts, and its history’.334 In these poets’ works, references to feminine processes of creation subtly reflect on more destructive, subversive potential.
Sappho’s weaving is a distinctly feminine act of shaping and creating, referring to change with a mentoring, authoritative tone. Kruger notes that ‘weaving has long been a metaphor for the creation of something other than cloth, whether a story, a plot, or a world’.335 In Sappho’s fragments, “weaving” implies a level of agency in which the weaver is able to consciously act on items such as crowns, imbuing these with an overarching focus on the control and skill of the weaver. However, these are not always reflections of stable power, and can dwell on threats to this authority. Sappho’s woven crowns and other weaving references
332 Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz remarks on the difficulty of tracing women’s writing historically, because women writers of antiquity aside from Sappho are likely to have existed, despite the masculinity of the received tradition of writing, but are difficult to identify. She uses the comparison between women’s writing and handicraft to symbolise this: If the silence is not total, however, the voices are nonetheless muted and fragmentary. To the extent that women’s artefacts were not pots but weaving, they were also more perishable (Barber 1991); when women are represented on vases and in sculpture or relief, we see them through male eyes : in [eds.] Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Amy Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics, London; New York: Routledge, 1993, p 9-10; E.J.W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. 333 Kathryn Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production, Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 2001, p 21. 334 Ibid. 335 Kruger, Weaving the Word: The Metaphorics of Weaving and Female Textual Production, p 23.
146 may be Homeric references. In the Odyssey, Odysseus’ wife Penelope, under siege from uninvited suitors in Odysseus’ long absence, was able to delay the suitors by weaving, unravelling and re-weaving the same burial shroud for four years, claiming that she could only make her choice once this traditional task was complete.336 She tells Odysseus that …they [the suitors] are pressing me to name my wedding-day and I have to think out tricks to fool them with. The first was a real inspiration. I set up a great web on my loom here and started weaving a large and delicate robe, saying to my suitors: “I should be grateful to you young lords who are courting me now that King Odysseus is dead, if you could restrain your ardour for my hand till I have done this work, so that the threads I have spun may not be altogether wasted. It is a winding sheet for Lord Laertes. When he succumbs to the dread hand of Death that stretches all men out at last, I must not risk the scandal there would be among my countrywomen here if one who had amassed such wealth were laid to rest without a shroud.”337 Interestingly, it is the opinions of women that ultimately shape Penelope’s actions. Weaving a shroud for her father-in-law is a dutiful, traditional act beyond reproach, the absence of which would attract scorn, but it is a maid’s mistake that betrays Penelope and denies her this limited agency.338 The perceptions of women are potentially destructive in this scenario. Considering Sappho’s awareness of Homeric images and ideas, explored in other chapters, it is likely that her references to weaving include this literary history of subterfuge. Sappho’s weaving references, adapted by Labé, are part of a broader tradition of female creative and potentially destructive activity, countering outward appearances of domestic duty, and inviting female agency even at the expense of male desires.
Weaving and the image of a crown are intrinsically connected to ideas of female agency and control, and the two symbols are actively connected: woven crowns feature in several of Sappho’s poems and one of Labé’s sonnets, and are unified further by consistent focus on the voice and desires of the first-person speaker.
336 Penelope describes this situation to Odysseus: [translated by] E.V. Rieu, Homer: The Odyssey, London: Guild Publishing, 1987, p 291-292. 337 [translated by] Rieu, Homer: The Odyssey, p 291-292. 338 [translated by] Rieu, Homer: The Odyssey, p 292.
147 In Labé’s “Sonnet 19”, as in Sappho’s weaving fragments, a woven crown is mentioned when the female speaker’s control over her body and poetic subjects is called into question. These crowns direct readers’ attention to an exclusively feminine process of production and female-based hierarchy, ultimately at the top of which is the speaker, despite whatever challenges are presented. In Sappho’s Fragment 125 and Labé’s “Sonnet 19” however, both speakers refer to crowns that have been woven; their use of the past tense suggests that some aspect of this situation has changed, creating tension and suggesting challenge to their power.
Use of the past tense highlights anxiety over the passage of time, prevalent in several of Sappho’s fragments and Labé’s elegies, and also in Homer’s The Odyssey. Penelope’s shroud not only delays the advances of the prospective suitors, but also demonstrates a link between women, weaving and death. Shroud-weaving focuses on mortality and decay, and can be linked to both Labé’s and Sappho’s interest in old age and control, even though neither poet mentions shrouds in their existing work. Images of weaving and woven items, and the poets’ lingering preoccupation with old age as opposed to youthfulness, illustrate this connection. Penelope’s weaving denies male access to her body, wealth and status, turning her focus away from the reproductive and property- orientated focus of marriage in ancient Greece to instead contemplate mortality and duty. Ian Morris observes that ancient Greek funeral rites probably did not vary much from Homeric times.339 Despite a lack of information about ancient Lesbian burial customs, it can be surmised that Sappho would have been aware of burial shrouds and their implications of duty, as well as possible deception, through Homer’s references.340
339 Ian Morris, Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State, p 47. Morris cites the funeral games of Amphidamas at Chalcis (Works and Days, 654) and also Plutarch’s Moralia 153 E-F as evidence of this. 340 Joan Breton Connelly observes that the roles of priestesses mirrored those of domestic women, since many of their rites ‘involved the traditional household work of ancient women: cleaning, decorating, weaving, and cooking. Social behavior experienced at home was thus codified in public ritual performed within the formal setting of the sanctuary’: Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007, p 5-6. In her roles as wife, possibly mother, and leader of a cult of Aphrodite, Sappho could well have experienced the duality of these roles firsthand, encouraging additional layers of meaning in her own references to weaving. At the same time however, Sappho’s experience of
148
Sappho’s floral crowns are linked this death image, since bodies were not only wrapped in shrouds, but also given wreaths and garlands. Annual mourning rites were considered so familiar in ancient Greece that classical sources are overwhelmingly ambiguous about their details. ‘There were probably visits to the tomb, offerings of flowers, garlands and ribbons – traditional signs of respect and reverence’, suggest Donna Kurtz and John Boardman.341 Woven circles of flowers were prominent during the highest points of youth, beauty and fertility, and likely also at the end of life, offering a more ominous subtext to Sappho’s floral crown references.
Ancient Greek burial rites involved several important steps regarding dress and weaving, with women playing a central role. Donna Kurtz and John Boardman note that historically it was the women’s duty to prepare bodies for burial, creating another link between women and mortality: According to Demosthenes only those women who were over the age of sixty or very closely related to the dead could take part. They bathed the body, anointed it with oil, dressed and adorned it with flowers, wreaths, ribbons and jewellery. The prosthesis took place on the day after death in the house of the dead…Plato recommended that it last long enough only to confirm death. The body was displaced on a plank-like structure with high legs – a dining couch, bed, or kline. The body, wrapped in a shroud, endyma, lay on a thick carpet-like stroma.342 Joan Breton Connelly observes that public burial of a woman would have been an exceptional event, and that by the Hellenistic period, this honour was associated with priestesses, benefactresses, and civic-office holders.343 Archaeological digs have revealed grave-goods associated with priestesses, including funerary gifts of precious metal jewellery and ornate clothing:
these activities would not have been typical for most Lesbian women of her time. As an aristocrat and leader of a group of women, she would have been distinguished from others. Connelly notes that priestesses may have had more in common with men of the same social and economic standing than they had with women of lower rank: p 23. 341 Donna C. Kurtz, John Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, p 148. 342 Kurtz, Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, p 143-144. 343 Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, p 224.
149 An enormously rich burial has been found at Aigai, the first capital of Macedonia. The large tomb, one in a cluster of nine others, has been dated to circa 500 B.C. In it, the skeleton of a woman in her early thirties was found, adorned with gold from head to toe. The gold strap diadem that circled her brow would originally have been sewn to fabric, together with a wreath of organic material, now disintegrated... Her dress was fixed with two great gold pins…The purple fabric of her costume was adorned with gold disks…The richness of this burial treasure, the libation bowls, cart model, and sceptre, have led to the identification of the entombed woman as a priestess.344 The wealth of her clothing is a signifier of her status in life and interestingly, the flowers that would have previously signified beauty, youth and fertility, are also connected to the body in death. So too are the processes of weaving and donning particular forms of dress. Kurtz and Boardman note that the ‘normal Classical practice may have been to leave the body naked in its shroud’, but that this practice seems to have changed by the fourth century, as archaeological digs reveal jewellery buried with richer individuals.345
Links between clothing and mortality are explored in Labé’s “Elegy 2”, subtitled “Such endless waiting” by Annie Finch. The subtitle emphasises the speaker’s focus on time, foregrounding anxiety over delayed affections. Thoughts of death saturate the last stanzas, in which it is revealed that the speaker has been waiting for her beloved to return to her for ‘two whole months long’.346 The otherwise confused sense of time in the poem emphasises the need to act on love and desire immediately, reiterating the fleeting qualities of youth and how the speaker feels closer to death the longer these desires are not reciprocated. As in Sappho’s Fragment 31, distance from the beloved object of desire initiates an imagined death, but one treated with violent certainty. Labé includes references to particular items of clothing as an important part of this mourning ritual: Come back right now if you ever want to see me alive again. But if it has to be
344 Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, p 225-226. 345 Kurtz, Boardman, Greek Burial Customs, London: Thames and Hudson, p 207. 346 Labé, “Elegy 2: Such Endless Waiting”, line 90 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 165. Translated by Annie Finch.
150 that death finds its way to me before you do, and takes away this soul, which so loves you – find me once, at least. Dress yourself all in black. Come circle around my tomb: forward, then back. And if it pleases God, your eyes will find on the white carved marble headstone these four lines:
MY LOVE, I BURNED FOR YOU UNTIL DESIRE CONSUMED MY BODY. THEN THE FLAMES GREW HIGHER. I’M STILL BURNING UNDER THE ASHES OF THIS PYRE. ONLY YOUR TEARS CAN EVER QUENCH THE FIRE.347 Like Penelope, the speaker uses death-orientated imagery in order to steer the sexual desires of a male figure. In this case however, the tomb of the speaker is to attract attention, and the violence of her desire is paired with this deathly imagery. Labé’s speaker, though “dead”, is able to make specific demands of the male beloved, directing his body, dress and actions from beyond this theoretical grave, and notes that if these actions are fulfilled, then this is because it “pleases God”, conscripting the Christian God as a supporter. Obsessive love in this elegy mirrors that seen in Sappho’s Fragment 31, but adds a reference to clothing as a way of dictating the actions of the beloved but unnamed man. The passion of Labé’s speaker is “excused” due to her fixation on mortality and the urgency that comes with it: her youth and fertility are squandered while her beloved is unresponsive, and her psychological well-being is clearly being damaged.
In Fragment 125, the Sapphic speaker reverts to the past tense, distinguishing between this piece and other crown poems: I used to weave crowns348 This fragment is particularly small, even by Sappho’s fragmentary standards, but the ominous tone inherent in use of the past tense and professed loss of control over the crown imagery suggests that something has dramatically changed. By referring to other “crown” poems, it is possible to extrapolate what this loss or change may have been. Emphasis on the previous state of affairs, but
347 Labé, “Elegy 2: Such Endless Waiting”, lines 93-104 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 165. Translated by Annie Finch. 348 Fragment 125 in Carson, If Not, Winter, p 255.
151 absence of a present or future situation as a counterpoint or consolation, means that this speaker’s situation cannot be rectified. The minute nature of this fragment invites speculation: why does she no longer weave crowns? What does she weave instead, if she weaves at all? Why is this fact of such concern? The fact that the crown is woven, rather than forged, also invites questioning.349 The central idea in this image is one of lost or restricted creativity, and implicitly power.
Woven crowns feature most frequently in poems where young women are present, so this poem may nostalgically reflect Sappho’s youth. An aged Sappho may no longer have been considered fit to weave crowns in a religious, ritualistic setting. If so, Fragment 125 could resentfully indict old age, bemoaning loss of a leadership role, while scorning the individuals or ideas that have disempowered her. In his discussion on engraved crowns in ancient Greek sculpture, George Hussey notes that ‘the crown, or wreath of honour, was doubtless developed from a badge of priestly office or a mere ornament, and became a reward conferred by the highest civic authority’.350 Pragmatically, Sappho’s theorised role as a cult leader, proposed by some scholars, means that she could have used her role to favour particular girls with wreaths, merging her personal preferences with ritualistic duties for her own and their gain.
By weaving crowns made from natural materials, Sappho uses another form of subtle influence: her selection of material. Hussey observes that most Greek crowns in statuary, and possibly in real life, were made from branches and vines: ‘[T]he great majority of these crowns appear as though the original wreath had been made out of two pliable sprays or branches. The lower woody ends of these branches are loosely twisted so that one makes a complete revolution
349 Goddesses, queens and noble women, as well as kings, could be depicted wearing mural crowns, which suggests that social standing, rather than sex, determined the recipient of a crown: Dieter Metzler, “Mural Crowns in the Ancient Near East and Greece” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (1.1, 1994), p 78. 350 George B. Hussey, “Greek Sculptured Crowns and Crown Inscriptions”, The American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts (1/2.6, 1890), p 69.
152 around the other, and the tips are then brought together so that the whole forms, approximately, a circle’.351 Hussey claims it was also not uncommon for such crowns to be covered in leaves.352 Sappho’s references to natural imagery and apple trees in other fragments suggest that such materials, if taken from poetic settings in which her speaker has primacy, take on additional connotations of control.353 If Sappho refers to weaving crowns from these materials in the past tense, the poem may depict separation from her cherished, dominated surroundings. This may not be an old age poem, but a piece written during her time in political exile in Sicily, waiting to return home and to favoured, controlled areas.
The fact that the speaker ‘used to weave crowns’ may refer to Sappho’s previous engagement with the biologically encoded symbols of flowers, vines and young women’s crowns. Crowns are still worn at Greek Orthodox weddings, and are even part of a traditional good-luck gesture offered to courting or engaged couples, called καλα στεϕανα.354 Problematically, crowns could also stand for poetic prowess, since Sappho has previously referred to crowns as a means of achieving favour with the Graces.355 It is possible that this poem is a dismal reflection on the poet’s perceived loss of poetic skill. Ovid imagines such a situation in his Epistula Sapphus, discussed in Chapter Three, the result of which is Sappho’s dismal suicide. Fragment 125 may have inspired Ovid’s traumatic scene, but the poem does not necessarily end on the same catastrophic note; the fact that the speaker no longer ‘weaves’ crowns does not preclude her from wearing or bestowing them. The speaker still has other means of subtly using this privileged item to convey or deny power.
Use of crowns as symbols for control is not unique to Sappho. In Aristophanes’ Plutus, the wife of Chremylus tells Cario ‘By Hecate, I want to bind you (i.e.,
351 Hussey, “Greek Sculptured Crowns and Crown Inscriptions”, p 70. 352 Ibid. 353 The full implications of control in physical as well as poetic settings are discussed in detail in Chapter Five. 354 Thornton B. Edwards, “The Sugared Almond in Modern Greek Rites of Passage”, Folklore (1.107, 1996), p 51. This phrase means “happy crowns”, referring to wedding crowns for a happy marriage. 355 See Fragment 81.
153 crown you…)’ with ‘a chain of loaves (literally “things baked in an oven”)’.356 The choice of verb not only confers favour to Cario, but also suggests that Chremylus’ wife has the power to bestow such favour in the first place. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata the titular female character mocks the older Magistrate with the offer of “Here, take this garland”, telling him to prepare for death while she, Myrrhine and Cleonice drench him with water.357 The Lysistrata is saturated with sexual innuendo and puns. Reconciliation at the end of the play is wholly orchestrated by a group of women, and both male and female characters openly articulate sexual desires throughout. The links between crowns and female sexuality, as well as control, may have been inspired by Sappho, or this image may be considered standard, hence Aristophanes’ application. But while Aristophanes encodes bestowal of crowns by women with sexual subterfuge or invitation, Sappho does not similarly restrict the gesture. The body on whom the crown or garland has been placed is made sexually available, rather than the body who does the bestowing. Sappho’s power play is reversed by Aristophanes’ approach to crowns, suggesting tension between Sappho and this later male writer, but importantly for the purpose of Labé’s reception of this image, the ancient Greek view of crowns as a symbol of hierarchy, variously linked with sexuality depending on the author’s intent, remains.
Layers of meaning in a symbol that is, in itself, a layered item, are a form of écriture féminine. By weaving a crown from plant parts and flowers, Sappho's speaker assembles a new form of identity for both the matter from which the crown has been created, and also the individual wearing the item. By garlanding or crowning favoured women, or mentioning these with regards to her own body, Sappho essentially "writes her self" in a form of feminine authorship: the creation and bestowal of a crown from select materials on a select individual.
356 Anne H. Groton, “Wreaths and Rags in Aristophanes’ “Plutus””, The Classical Association of the Middle West and South (1.86, 1990), p 19-20. Groton explains that the joke here is that Cario is a known glutton, so requires an edible crown for a reward. In addition, Aristophanes used rings and circles into euphemisms for female genitalia. 357 Lines 599-604 in [edited and translated by] Jeffrey Henderson, Aristophanes: Birds, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria, Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, p 48.
154 Since the weaving of crowns, shrouds and other materials was considered an acceptable feminine process in ancient Greece, this represents a feminine mode of authorship inherently linked with biological and hierarchical interests.
Anita Pacheco observes that this French feminist theory of feminine authorship does not refer to the biological sex of the author, but to a certain kind of ‘poetic, playful, non-rational’ writing, which ‘challenges and disrupts the male symbolic order’.358 It is not wholly appropriate to describe either Labé or Sappho's poetry as "non-rational", since there is a strong sense of internal logic and rationality conveyed in their poems and shared amongst Sappho's fragments, but this notion of "playfulness" is a suitable description. By ascribing to the popular perception in ancient Lesbos that women could, and even should, adorn themselves with flowers and pay homage to deities by using garlands, Sappho exercises control over both herself and the crown recipients (or, conversely, over those who are selectively not given crowns) in the open. The playfulness of this image stems from the fact that it is overt favour or denial, openly bestowed and discussed by the Sapphic speaker, without an effort to mask the potentially proto-feminist implications for such an act and image.
Lack of description in this fragment makes it is impossible to determine whether the crown was to be given as a symbol of victory, respect, class, or for some other reason. Irrespective of exact motive, Sappho fixates on the means of producing the crown, the past tense, and the possibility of a recipient; positioning the speaker as an active, controlling figure. It is possible that there are no longer any individuals towards whom she feels enough respect to bestow a crown. The speaker may refer to bridal crowns, woven with branches and flowers, reflecting on the departure of newly-married, beloved girls. However, the primary focus in the poem is still the impact of this on the speaker herself, thus retaining a strong sense of self-interest and control.
In Fragment 125 it is the act of weaving that has been lost. This may refer to a loss of poetic prowess, as weaving can be considered a form of écriture féminine
358 Anita Pacheco’s “Introduction” in [ed.] Anita Pacheco, Early Woman Writers: 1600-1720, p 3.
155 in Sappho, since it is a feminine act readily associated with female bodies in Sappho’s remaining fragments. According to Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous stresses that the inscription of the rhythms and articulations of the mother’s body which continue to influence the adult self provides a link to the pre- symbolic union between self and m/other, and so affects the subject’s relationship to language, the other, himself and the world 359 suggesting a link between this perception of women’s writing, women’s bodies and fertility. In ancient Greece, weaving was most often performed by women and was considered ‘amongst the usual domestic occupations of the country’.360 Virgil and Hesiod describe weaving of fabric as the duty of a wife, while Euripides suggests that servants and slaves performed plain work, and decorative embroidery was done by the ladies of the house.361 Wreaths in ancient comedies, such as Arisophanes’ Plutus, were normally associated with rejoicing and celebration, and were used as ‘labels of the fortunate’.362 It is not clear who was responsible for making such wreaths: if women were generally entrusted with this duty, then it may be a form of écriture féminine, in which a typically feminine activity, performed by a woman, is done to confer favour on a (likely) male subject, placing a woman at the beginning of the crowning process. Reproductive and weaving roles offer opportunity for subtle expressions of power, “writing” the roles of the recipients of such wreaths. The use of “weaving” to represent a woman’s cultural and poetic achievement is not a new concept, but Sappho’s use of weaving imagery, strongly associated with notions of femininity, female roles and power through crowns, suggests that she may have been one of the first poets to make and utilise this connection.
359 Jacque Derrida’s “Foreword” in [ed.] Susan Sellers, The Hélène Cixous Reader, London: Routledge, 1994, p xxix; referring to Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, in [ed.] Susan Sellers, The Hélène Cixous Reader, p 88, 90-100. 360 Luther Hooper, “The Technique of Greek and Roman Weaving”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (95.18, 1911), p 277. 361 Hooper, “The Technique of Greek and Roman Weaving” citing Virgil, Georgics, I, 285 at p 277; Hesiod, ‘Works and Days’ in Op. 179; Euripides, Iph. in Tauris, p 345. Wesley Thompson argues that men in ancient Greece may have also woven clothes for sale, rather than for use by the family, such as may have been done only by women: “Weaving: A Man’s Work” Classical Association of the Atlantic States (4.75, 1982), p 217. 362 Groton, “Wreaths and Rags in Aristophanes’ “Plutus””, p 16; 19.
156 Marriage in ancient Athens was intended to produce legitimate citizens, and a consequence of this was to seclude young daughters within domestic spaces, in ‘a female world with their mothers, female relatives, and female servants, training in the household arts, and spinning and weaving to clothe the household’.363 Sappho’s poetry hosts similar images, suggesting that ancient Lesbos shared some common attributes. While Sappho’s own lifestyle is less isolated than Clark’s image, having access to an audience, as well as naming a selection of different women in her poetry and describing group cult practices, it is highly likely that Sappho would have made a connection between female experiences and female activities. It is almost impossible that Sappho would not have been exposed to weaving in some way, since it was considered an “ordinary” part of a girl’s education. Aristocratic women would have been expected to supervise weaving performed by other members of the household.364 The word-weaving of Sappho’s poetry is mirrored by her image of crown-weaving, forming another layer of creativity with a focus on Sappho’s perception of femininity.
Barbara Walker notes that circles are ‘one of the primary feminine signs, as opposed to the line, cross, or phallic shaft representing masculine spirit’.365 In addition, she states that circles were ‘associated with the idea of a protected or consecrated space’; an interpretation that complements Sappho’s use of crowns and garlands as items by which to honour and privilege particular women.366 It is this same process of selective empowerment and favour that is also taking place in Labé’s “Sonnet 19”, in which the speaker is ironically questioned for her loss of power, in a tone remarkably similar to the disbelief in the Aphrodite Ode, discussed in Chapter Two.
363 Anna Clark, Desire: A History of European Sexuality, New York and London: Routledge, 2008, p 17. 364 Anne Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets; Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983, p 211. 365 Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988, p 4. 366 Ibid.
157 In Louise Labé’s “Sonnet 19”, some of these preoccupations with crowns and weaving appear and are treated in a very similar fashion to Sappho’s fragments. The speaker imagines meeting with Diana, the Roman name for the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. Not only does Diana in mythology stand for hunting, but she is also the goddess of maidens and mothers, watching over virgins and women in childbirth. This connection between the speaker and the hunter is framed as a dialogue between equals, with a tone reminiscent of Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode. Annie Finch translates the poem as: Diana, standing in the clearing of a wood after she had hunted her prey and shot it down, breathed deep. Her nymphs had woven her a green crown. I walked, as I often do, in a distracted mood, not thinking - when I heard a voice, subdued and quiet, call, “Astonished nymph, don’t frown, have you lost your way to Diana’s sacred ground?” Since I had no quiver, no arrows, it pursued, “Dear friend, who were you meeting with today? Who has taken your bow and arrows away?” I said, “I found an enemy on the path, and hurled my arrows at him, but in vain – and then my bow – but he picked them up in wrath, and with my arrows shot back hundreds of kinds of pain.”367 It is immediately ambiguous whether it is with Diana that the speaker converses, or with one of her underlings. It is this same ambiguity of identity that immediately places the speaker in a position of control, likening her to the goddess. The questioner recognises Labé’s persona as Diana’s equal, asking why she has no bow or arrows, unlike the goddess, and asserting that to be unarmed is entirely unlike the speaker. By rejecting a state of vulnerability and naturalising a physically empowered, potentially deadly state of being, the speaker is passively elevated via dialogue, but actively empowered by the poet.
367 Labé, “Sonnet 19”, lines 1-14 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 209. Translated by Annie Finch.
158 This layering of perspective foregrounds Labé’s conscious desire to present figures who are ironically disempowered. Rather than refuting this comparison, the speaker accepts the flattery and enforces this interpretation, noting that unlike Diana, she was unsuccessful in her hunt. The male beloved is now ‘an enemy’ that turned the speaker’s weapons against her, leaving her alone, lost in thought, and frowning. However, despite this failure, the speaker does not appear disempowered; in fact, it is due to her solitude that her importance has been recognised at all.
In Labé’s poem, the motif of a woman wearing a crown is used to subtly suggest links between the figure’s femininity and her superiority in the context of the sonnet. Selene was the only figure wearing a crown when Phoebus fell, but in “Sonnet 19”, Diana is the first figure to be mentioned at all, suggesting that her authority is inherent and need not be introduced when a major male character has fallen. The sonnets are evolving, slowly incorporating the idea of a female- based hierarchy into the body of each poem, becoming subtler with each adaptation. Interestingly, Diana’s ‘green crown’ is woven by ‘her nymphs’: a group of female spirits identified by a possessive pronoun. Just as in Sappho’s portrayals of groups of women, Labé’s Diana has an entourage of nymphs that do not exist independently of her. Instead, these figures appear only to better glorify and celebrate their mistress. Sappho the poet occupies a similar role in her poetry. Indeed, even in those poems where the beauty or other qualities of a beloved girl are being described in detail, the authority of the Sapphic speaker as the one who bestows favour is recognised. In “Sonnet 19”, this system is self- sustaining, as the nymphs are both possessed by Diana and empower her, weaving her a crown in recognition of her elevated status.
The fact that the speaker is associated with Diana suggests that, like the goddess, she is in some way naturally superior to the nymphs, and implicitly, superior to the listeners. The parallel between Sappho’s circle and Diana’s nymphs can be extended to Labé’s representation, suggesting that Labé’s speaker occupies a relatively unique position in the body of the poem. Like Sappho’s speaker in Fragment 1, Labé’s persona is a hunter who has been
159 unsuccessful, but unlike the Sapphic speaker, Labé need not consult a goddess in order to demonstrate her lingering power: rather, the goddess consults her in order to remark on the unlikely state of affairs. Labé’s adaptation of the Sapphic scenario indicates evolution in the Sapphic model, suggesting that the subtlety of Sappho’s original dedicatory poem is no longer required; it is “safe” in the speaker’s eyes to pronounce her own superiority. Contextually, the religious requirements of Sappho’s time would have made any other representation problematic. The subtlety with which the persona’s power is emphasised, with reference to Aphrodite, can in part be attributed to this need for respect. However, Labé is under no such requirements when dealing with gods or goddesses. In this sense, Labé’s treatment of deities represents an evolution in Sappho’s own subtle lack of respect; Labé is not bound by contextual demands for piety to these deities and can therefore overtly dismiss their professed or implied influence over the actions and experiences of her speakers. However, both poets engage with a symbol of hierarchy and power that has religious implications, encoding this with additional layers of personal interest for their speakers.
Crowns in Sappho’s Fragments Several of Sappho’s fragments refer to a ‘στεϕανα’, the Greek word for crown, as an accessory to be made, bestowed and worn, and to draw attention to particular individuals. Sappho’s crowns are active symbols, moving between Sappho and her favoured women, and inviting interpretation by figures within and outside her poems. Such a move would not have been considered particularly controversial in ancient Lesbos; crowns and garlands are not unusual symbols in ancient Greek literature, and were typically used in religious and cultural events, including weddings. However, even though Sappho’s crowns function in these socially expected roles, they also operate as items of ritualised adornment, loaded with symbolic implications regarding femininity, biology, hierarchy, and control, relating back to ideas surrounding “weaving”. These implications arise as a result of Sappho’s selective invocation of crowns, embedding these into particular poetic contexts, and her choice of materials
160 from which these crowns may have been constructed, as well as the process of construction itself.
Crowns in Sappho’s poetry have not been afforded much critical attention, however their frequent appearances and less consistent symbolic meanings, varying from fragment to fragment, suggest that these are an evolving set of symbols. Rather than being “only” another beautiful item in Sappho’s repertoire, crowns and garlands represent conscious engagement with notions of control: to be crowned is to be favoured by the giver, as well as by the gods. Sappho only offers crowns to women, but not to all women, suggesting a high level of subjectivity and favouritism in the bestowal process. To later translators, Sappho’s imagery of woven crowns could have invited consideration of these items as symbols for female-centric interpretations of fertility and nature, relating to subtle hierarchies in Sappho’s poems and her references to natural materials, offered to young, fertile women, and female body parts.
Crowns are not a completely straightforward image of control; they did not necessarily symbolise leadership or authority for Sappho or her contemporary readers. Some Greek deities are depicted wearing crowns in ancient artworks, as are highly ranked mortal individuals, but this was not considered necessary in all or even a majority of cases.368 Jeremy Tenner claims that in ancient Greek artwork ‘archaic gods are not immediately distinguishable from each other, or humans, except by context or attributes’, which indicates that crowns would have been particularly important markers for such purposes in Sappho’s lifetime.369 Crowns were considered a customary gift for a host to provide to guests. These would be constructed out of olive, laurel or other decorative leaves, and given as an expression of hospitality.370 The crowns in Sappho’s poems are implicitly made from flowers and vines, woven by hand and
368 Jeremy Tenner notes that early fifth century BCE witnessed a change in Greek art, developing ‘naturalism’ in the presentation of gods and their iconography, making deities more readily identifiable. Rather than relying on images of crowns to depict authority, gods and mortals of high social status are identified more typically through physical gestures such as stances, pouring libations, and responding to sacrifices: in “Nature, culture and the body in classical Greek religious art”, World Archaeology (2.33, 2001), p 257, 270. 369 Tenner, “Nature, culture and the body in classical Greek religious art”, p 256. 370 Walker, The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, p 132.
161 bestowed upon women as a sign of favour, or as a symbol of good taste and refinement, and also to appease the Graces.
However, it is possible that these crowns may also have been emblems of hospitality and invitation into a setting controlled by the speaker, the full implications of which will be discussed in Chapter Five. Materials taken from the natural world were considered to be the domain of divine powers, which would have imbued Sappho’s crowns with great symbolic deference to or respect for particular deities, as well as reflecting on the sources of these materials.371 Tenner remarks that for the ancient Greeks ‘possession of an image was tantamount to control of the sacred power it embodied’ in the case of ancient statuary of gods.372 Implicitly this same notion of control and possession could be extended to pseudo-divine objects, such as crowns or garlands made from sacred plants. The fragrances of these floral decorations could also have important implications, as different plants were burned in different temples to honour certain deities: poppies for Demeter, lilies for Hera and for Aphrodite myrtle, redolent of sexual desire not only through its association with the goddess, but through its ritual uses in the crowns of bride and groom and the euphemistic description of the female pudenda as myrtle.373 Sappho does not mention myrtle in any of her crown poems, nor, interestingly, in any of her known wedding poems, but it is possible that this euphemism may have been embedded in other references via her wedding poems and bestowing of crowns on youthful, beautiful favoured girls. A considerable number of crowns, garlands and headbands are mentioned in Sappho’s poems. References occur in Fragments 8, 33, 92, 94, 98A, 98B, 125 and 168C, many of which share other consistent traits in terms of imagery and adjectives.
371 J-P Vernant in his “Introduction” notes that plants and deities in ancient Greek mythology are often tightly connected with mortals, citing the myth of Adonis, who was born in myrrh and died in a lettuce, and Persephone’s pomegranate: in [ed.] Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p vii. 372 Jeremy Tenner, “Nature, culture and the body in classical Greek religious art”, p 262. 373 Tenner, “Nature, culture and the body in classical Greek religious art”, p 262; Marcel Detienne, Dionysos Slain, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1994, p 48, 63; Ann Bergren observes that scents are important to Aphrodite in “The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite”, in which she basks in ‘overwhelming fragrance and adornment’: “The Homeric hymn to Aphrodite” Classical Antiquity (1.8, 1989), p 8.
162
Jack Goody notes that crowns and garlands were historically considered to be of great importance by the Greeks, since Pliny wrote a chapter on crowns in his Natural History, referring to source books by Eschinus, Paschalius, Asclepiades, Apollodorus, Philonides and Haphaestion.374 Crowns in ancient Greece were used ‘largely for joyful occasions’ and never funerals.375 According to Athenaeus, a grammarian and rhetorician from around 200-300 CE, the first use of crowns among the Greeks was to honour deities.376 The weaving and selling of flowers for garlands and crowns was almost exclusively the domain of women, but it was usually men who wore crowns.377 Rather than being a wholly static symbol however, Sappho’s crowns demonstrate a shifting attitude and may even be used to “timeline” some of the poems’ dates of writing.
In Fragment 33, Sappho beseeches ‘goldcrowned Aphrodite’, using the term ‘χρυσοστεϕαν’, in the process, highlighting the materials used to construct the deity’s crown. What remains of this poem is a statement of both desire and probability: ‘if only I, O goldcrowned Aphrodite, could win this lot’, placing heavy emphasis not only on the desire for victory, but also relating this desire to the elevated status of the goddess.378 Sappho’s crowns are typically not made of metal, which suggests that the crown in question is the sole property of the goddess, unlike those woven crowns whose construction the speaker dictates in other poems. This elevation suggests a more respectful tone than is seen in the Aphrodite Ode, in which the goddess is compelled to travel to Sappho’s speaker and support her demands. In Fragment 33, the speaker is only able to speak with longing for an unspecified victory, suggesting that in this particular poem, the relationship between the two is perhaps not as egalitarian, or powerful on Sappho’s side, as in Fragment 1. Emphasis is on otherness: Aphrodite wears a crown made from material not offered to any other woman in Sappho’s poems,
374 Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p 67. 375 Ibid. 376 Athenaeus gives a through examination of garlands, their forms, and uses in ancient Greece in Deipnosophistae, XV.668d-688c: [edited and translated by] S. Douglas Olson, Athenaeus: The Learned Banqueters Book 15, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012, p 27-125. 377 Goody, The Culture of Flowers, p 59-62. 378 Translation by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 66-67.
163 signalling her position outside the “normal” hierarchy of Sappho’s work. Interestingly, the crown does not feature plants associated with either the goddess, nor the sacred scenes dedicated to her in Sappho’s other fragments, suggesting that Sappho is subtly displacing the goddess’s influence over these settings and natural materials used in creating other crowns.
In Fragment 168C Sappho connects crowns to the image of the earth, strengthening this sense of crowns as a part of nature, but also subtly reflects on a link with Aphrodite . In this fragment, all that remains is a description: ] spangled is the earth with her crowns379 The material with which the crowns have been made is not stated; only their plurality and the fact that they are ‘spangled’ is recorded. The description used for the crowns, ποικιλλεται, is a form of the same adjective used in the opening line of the Aphrodite Ode: ποικιλοϕροιν. There has been much dispute over the exacted translation of this term, but its meaning is not determinative of its importance as a further connection between Sappho’s Aphrodite, earth and crowns.380 Not only does Sappho refer to both the earth and Aphrodite as ‘crowned’ in her poems, but she also uses a similar adjective to describe both the goddess’s and earth’s crowns, further connecting these two, feminised images of power with images of crowns. The earth is delineated as female or feminine, and linked with Aphrodite, suggesting via the crown imagery and linked adjective that these two aspects, immortal and material, exist outside the hierarchies illustrated in Sappho’s poems.
In Fragment 8, Sappho’s speaker expounds the virtue of wearing crowns, claiming that ] despise ] quick as possible ] But you, O Dika, bind your hair with lovely crowns, tying stems of anise together in your soft hands.
379 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 344-345. 380 See Carson, If Not, Winter, p 357 for more comments.
164 For the blessed Graces prefer to look on one who wears flowers and turn away from those without a crown.381 The pessimistic opening words that remain create a slightly threatening atmosphere, countered by Dika’s weaving and wearing of crowns and Sappho’s favour. Sappho notes that her preference for a crown is supported by the Graces, creating an additional hierarchical link between herself and immortal figures. The mortal woman mentioned in this poem is afforded a privileged status, but this is a status undercut by the Sapphic speaker’s own revealed rank. Interestingly, none of Sappho’s existent poems associate crowns with men or male figures, or male deities, therefore crowns can be understood as wholly feminine symbols for Sappho. These crowns are used to connect female bodies with female deities, mediated by the female speaker. Encoded in all of these crowns is Sappho’s subjectivity, and her decision whether or not to acknowledge the importance of the women or deities involved. This suggests that for Sappho, even if a poetic subject undertakes the act of wearing or making a crown “independently”, this is still very much an emblem of Sappho’s own control and decision-making.
The crowns in Fragment 8 draw attention to the physical aspects of their wearer. Dika’s hair and hands are the focus of the poem, as well as the gaze of the Graces, which is turned towards those who are adorned with flowery crowns and away from those who are bare. Ritualistic adornment is equated with divine favour and favour from the Sapphic speaker. The “frivolous” fixation on clothing and headbands in Sappho’s poems is not suggestive of superficial interests, but subtle, symbolic reflections of favour and righteousness. This is compounded by the selection of materials used to characterise such items. The symbolism of flowers as signs of fertility and productivity is important here; implicitly, Sappho suggests that the youthful softness of Dika’s hands and her bound hair are best complemented by wearing a floral crown. Such crowns emphasise youth and fertility, foregrounding the importance of the woman’s biological role, in contrast with Aphrodite’s metal crown, which is more representative of authority and material wealth.
381 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 156-157.
165
Fragment 92 is physically sparse, consisting predominantly of listed nouns and sizeable lacunae, mentioning a ‘purple robe’, an item ‘coloured with saffron’, ‘crowns’ and ‘rugs’, as well as another ‘robe’, an item that is ‘purple’, and the adjective ‘beautiful’.382 The lack of a central human figure makes the role of crowns with regards to female bodies unclear, but this poem’s importance lies in its association of crowns with wealth and material possessions. Sappho’s aristocratic status may account for her descriptions of wealth, opulence and extravagance, since purple dyes would have been particularly costly and difficult to procure at the time.383 In light of the expensive nature of the items listed, the ‘crowns’ are likely to have been made from metal or flowers, as in Fragment 94, but this is not confirmed by the text of the poem. It is possible that the missing, or intentionally blank, portion of the poem may have referred to gold, in Fragment 33. However, the intended or unintended ambiguity of the crowns’ materials suggests that Sappho could be equating the woven flower crowns of women with the more overtly valuable possessions of the wealthy. In this poem, the “wealthy” could be male or female, since purple robes were worn by both men and women of high status.384 The fact that these ambiguously feminised crowns have been slipped into this context suggests a subtle manoeuvre to compare Sappho’s preferred symbol for female beauty, fertility and power with conventional symbols for aristocratic wealth, or arguably masculine settings. Greek women could own property and it is likely in this
382 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 180-181. 383 Llyod Jensen notes that the ancient Phoenicians were proficient in manufacturing dyes and that ‘perhaps only mild objections might be raised to the thesis that Tyrian or Phoenician purple was first and foremost their esteemed and desired product – esteemed not only by themselves but also demanded by the nabobs of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds.’ Purple was worn by royalty in Imperial Roman times and ‘the cost of purple robes would preclude acquisition by the many’: “Royal Purple of Tyre”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies (2.22, 1963), p 104. Charlene Elliott in “Purple Pasts: Color Codification in the Ancient World” reflects that the colour purple was admired and considered the most beautiful hue in the ancient world – ‘Purple was a jewel box glittering with meaning – serving as a symbol, emblem, or signature color, evolving rhetorically, deployed allegorically, and given material basis’: “Purple Pasts: Color Codification in the Ancient World”, Law and Social Inquiry (1.33, 2008), p 177. 384 In The Natural History Pliny asserts that the Tyrian colour, ‘exactly the colour of clotted blood, and is of a blackish hue to the sight, but of a shining appearance when held up to the light’ was most favoured. In ancient times, ‘red signified the divine’ and was used during weddings and funerals, consequently ‘purple’s iridescence embraced all these myriad concepts, of light and life and divinity, and of blood’: “Purple Pasts: Color Codification in the Ancient World”, p 178; quoting Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, Book 9, Chapter 60, p 2446.
166 setting that the possessions being listed could have been owned either by a wealthy woman, but it is also equally possible that they may have belonged to a male aristocrat. The uncertain status of the owner of this wealth invites further questioning: Sappho has not made it abundantly clear whether it is a man or a woman who is entitled to these valuable possessions, but slips in a reference that she strongly associates with femininity in other poems. As a result, this poem could be read as a subtle move to take control of treasured items, encoding a feminine presence doubly as treasured object – the crown – and also as possessor – the woman who wears the crown. Simultaneously, Sappho asserts the value of her symbol for control and the women it acts upon, placing it on the same level of importance as costly robes.
Fragment 94 features one of Sappho’s most intense and tender descriptions of love between her speaker and a beloved woman whose compulsory departure invites reminiscing on times spent together. Often cited as the clearest example of lesbian desire in Sappho’s poetry, Fragment 94 is a predominantly ritualised scene of sexual desire, into which crown imagery is introduced. Among the cherished activities mentioned are weaving and wearing of flower garlands and crowns: … But if not, I want To remind you ] and beautiful times we had.
For many crowns of violets and roses ] at my side you put on
and many woven garlands made of flowers around your soft throat …385 Reference to the beloved woman’s throat creates a particularly vulnerable image, suggesting that the garlands/crowns are worn as a symbol of trust or
385 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 184-187.
167 submission. In this instance, the exploitative downsides of such control are highlighted, but not displaced. Sappho’s mention of ‘violets’ and ‘roses’ highlights a series of conflicting ideas: the relatively sweet fragrance of the roses is tinged with the more bitter scent of the violets; the deep purple of the violets is offset by an unspecified, mysterious colour of the roses; and the relatively small, flat petals of the violet offset the larger, curving rose petals.
In ancient Greek mythology, both flowers are sexualised symbols. The violet was supposedly created by Zeus as food for the nymph Io, whom he transformed into a white heifer to avoid Hera’s wrath. Io’s bitter tears were transformed into sweet flowers for her to eat, suggesting a link between this flower and beauty, as well as bittersweet emotions. Homer mentions that violets grow in the garden of the nymph Calypso on the island of Ogygia in Book V of the Odyssey, whose beauty, immortality and sexual desire for Odysseus are still unable to distract him entirely from his desire to return home to Penelope. Violets were symbolic more generally of love and fertility, and were considered sacred to Io, Demeter and Ares. Sappho generally refers to violets close to women’s bodies: speaking of ‘child of Kronos with violets in her lap’ and ‘setting aside anger the one with violets in her lap’ in Fragment 103; in Fragment 30 is ‘girls’ ‘might sing of the love between you and the bride…with violets in her lap’; and Fragment 21 refers ambiguously to ‘the one with violets in her lap’. The sexual nature of this position on women’s laps suggests a conscious link with eroticism, doubled when this reference is paired with roses, which are linked to Aphrodite.
This poem operates primarily as a memory exercise, reinvigorating the memories of the dedicatee, but also installing memories in the other listeners, returning to this Sapphic fixation on control. Susan Jarratt suggests that Fragment 94 combines the idea of a forced departure from the pleasure of a group of women in the ritual space of Aphrodite’s sanctuary with the shaping of memory in the
168 face of that departure, the remainder which is actually a changed impression of what was “undergone”’.386 Consequently, the Sapphic speaker implants a new memory into the parting woman’s mind ‘in order to sustain her in a future in which she would perhaps be cut off from the richness of experience with the speaker and others who have shared those experiences’.387 The sensual poem implies not only the existence of a close, likely sexual relationship between the Sapphic speaker and the beloved woman, but also strongly connects the images of crowns and garlands to this sexuality. In addition, the encircling form of a crown or garland creates a sense of enclosure and captivity, whether it is the suffocating entrapment of social necessities, the protective encircling and preservation of a certain memory, or embellishment of a memory. The Sapphic figure forecasts a loss of control over this beloved woman, and strives to create links that will preserve her dominance.
The more intense physical exchanges in this poem take place almost immediately after the speaker’s references to flowers and crowns: And with sweet oil costly you anointed yourself
and on a soft bed delicate you would let loose your longing
and neither any [ ] nor any holy place nor was there from which we were absent
no grove [ ] no dance ] no sound [ 388
386 Susan C. Jarrat, “Sappho's Memory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (32:1, 2002), p 19. 387 Susan C. Jarrat, “Sappho's Memory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (32:1, 2002), p 19. 388 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 186-187.
169 The beloved woman’s body is acted upon, anointed with expensive oils that reconnect the image of crowns to opulence and wealth in Fragment 92, along with the notion of covert female influence over traditionally masculine possessions. The woman’s body in this poem is almost entirely autonomous, as the speaker emphasises that she anointed herself. The speaker is relatively passive, only referring to the two in a plural and communal sense in the final lines. Their crowns of violets and roses therefore not only suggest sexuality and power, but also confirm that in the Sapphic speaker’s view, any woman deserving of a crown occupies a privileged position in her hierarchy. The final lines focus on accessibility, and the speaker reiterates that both she and the beloved, crowned woman could enter any place of their choosing, be it a grove or a holy place. This combined emphasis strongly suggests that crowns in Sappho’s fragments are intended to create a consistent symbol, linking female bodies with biologically based influence and power that can even infiltrate into typically masculine spheres of influence.
Headbands and headbinders, similar to crowns in that they are worn by women and can be made from plants, feature in Fragment 98A. Here the Sapphic speaker appears to simply observe how fashions have changed since her mother’s time. However, this poem also reads as a subtle political jab at how trading had been changed along with leadership in Lesbos. Relations between Lesbos and Sardis were anxious during Sappho’s lifetime.389 Even though this poem initially sounds like a rather trivial description of what kind of hair decoration best suits different women’s hair, Sappho’s crowns again create a layer of tension, now directed towards the ruling elite of Lesbos, in which in- fighting and intrigue were prominent.390 In the opening of the poem, Sappho
389 The political atmosphere of Lesbos was not peaceful: ‘In the late seventh to early sixth centuries BC Lesbos was a vulnerable island, threatened all the time by the immense military capabilities of the province of Lydia (now part of mainland Turkey). So when Sappho speaks of the impressive sight of Lydia’s chariots, or prefers her own child to the wealth of Lydia, she is talking about something that would have been all too painfully apparent to her contemporary audiences.’: Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion, New York: Palgrave, 2001, p 23.
390 Sappho’s home city of Mytilene was originally ruled by the Penthilidai family, but during social and economic turmoil, this supremacy was overthrown, creating a power struggle
170 directs the audience’s attention to recent history by referring to trends in her mother’s time, before moving to assert that this is not the case nowadays: ] for my mother
in her youth it was a great ornament if someone had hair bound with purple –
a very great ornament indeed But for the one who has hair yellower than a pinetorch
crowns of blooming flowers and just lately a headbinder
spangled from Sardis ] cities391 As has been discussed, the ancient Greeks considered purple items to be indicative of aristocratic status and wealth. However, in this poem Sappho’s speaker asserts that now, far greater than a purple band, is a crown ‘of blooming flowers’ or ‘a headbinder…spangled from Sardis’. A headbinder taken from a politically unreceptive city is comparable to a crown that symbolises female power. This suggests a slightly antagonistic relationship between the speaker and male politicians that have caused such turmoil, since the feminine symbol is closely aligned with the problematic headband. In fragment 98B, this issue is continued with a much more overtly political tone, as the Sapphic speaker accuses ‘the Mytilinean’ of making it difficult for her to acquire a spangled headband for ‘you Kleis’.392 The shift of the poem in the final lines emphasises the fact that this is not a simple shopping list or expression of desire for a pretty headband, but rather, Sappho is using a feminine item to articulate a
between the island’s remaining aristocratic families, including Sappho’s own: Margaret Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 64-65. 391 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 194-195. 392 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 196-197.
171 subtle, political jab at a man in power. Crowns and headbands create this criticism by outwardly suggesting that the only reason that Sappho is concerned with politics is because of their impacts on her purchases, providing a “suitably trivial” cover for her subversive comment. By associating her crown symbol, representative of female biology, power and beauty, with a rival city, Sappho sets herself and implicitly, her mother and Kleis, up in opposition to the ruling figures of Lesbos.
Aging Bodies, Renewed Control For both Labé and Sappho, crowns and weaving foreground central issues of control, located in female bodies and strained by references to aging. Both poets privilege the status of a mentor, creating a leadership option for their speakers beyond fertility, even when acting on their desires would be considered inappropriate in their contexts. Labé and Sappho engage with images of women’s aging bodies in their poetry, establishing sources of power for their speakers that operate outside physical beauty, fertility and sensuality. Both poets articulate a self-consciously superficial perspective by grading older women’s physical appearances, and dismissing the sexual desires of older women in order to avoid being considered comic or inappropriate. Sappho’s evolving crown imagery is paired with spurned sexual advances, as the speaker retains authority over her own body symbolically by declining to be considered “the older woman” in sexual relationships. As a result, Sappho’s crowns come to be distanced from notions of fertility and sexual appeal, and become more strongly symbolic of power conferred or withheld from certain female bodies. This idea of power is also presented in Labé’s “Elegy 1”, in which the speaker expresses dismay over the fickle nature of love, but uses images of a hopeless, sexually desiring but undesired older woman, to justify her pursuit of love.
In “Elegy 1”, Labé’s speaker examines ‘Love’s awful strength’, whose ‘power can make gods grow tame’.393 The poem openly engages with Sappho, as the
393 Labé, “Elegy 1”, lines 115; 1 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition,p 159; 153. Translated by Annie Finch.
172 speaker cites ancient Greek and Roman figures as sources for engagement, and poetic inspiration.394 She claims that I saw a woman once, who blamed and scorned Love in her youth; but in old age, she turned to burning passion, and tenderly lamented the late, bitter hardship with which she was tormented.395 The ‘blame’ and ‘scorn’ once felt by the woman are implicitly reversed; no longer young and fertile, her passions are presented as inappropriate, emphasised by references to artificiality. In Annie Finch’s translation, the elderly woman turns to cosmetic procedures to counter this feeling of regret and frustrated passion, creating an illusion of youth. Labé’s speaker emphasises the futility of these struggles: Then, with continual washing and rouge, she tried to bring back beauty, camouflage the wrinkles and the furrows, and to chase the marks age had engraved deep in her face. On her gray head she wore a wig, a puff of borrowed hair, and badly curled enough. The more she was, to her eyes, nicely painted, the less her love looked at her; he nearly fainted, then paid no attention, ran far away so fast – he thought her ugly, and was quite embarrassed to be loved by her. And so the poor old dear got just exactly what seemed to be fair; in times long past, men had clamoured for her in vain; now she loved, and it only earned her pain.396 The speaker adopts a chiding tone, as though she considers this turn of events to be fitting punishment for the unresponsive younger woman and desirous elder. The old woman is trivialised as a comic character, wearing ‘borrowed
394 Labé speaks of poetic skill as bestowed on her by ‘Phoebus, the friend of laureled poetry’, via a lyre that ‘once chanted the verse / of love on Lesbos, in the olden times’: “Elegy 1”, lines 7; 14- 15 [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 153. Translated by Annie Finch. 395 Labé, “Elegy 1”, lines 93-96 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 157. Translated by Annie Finch. 396 Labé, “Elegy 1”, lines 97-110 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 157-159. Translated by Annie Finch.
173 hair’ and exercising a painful, shameful naivety that serves only to isolate her further from her beloved. It is this same sense of contempt for a sexually desirous older woman that also infuses Sappho’s Fragment 121, which leads the speaker into declining the advances of another in order to avoid being considered an unfittingly older partner.
The bodily fragmentation that takes place in this section is strongly reminiscent of a Sapphic desire for control over the body, rendering it into component parts in order to do so. Labé’s “Elegy 1” employs a similar description of the woman’s body as a series of parts to be acted upon as in Sappho’s Fragment 31. Just as the Sapphic speaker in this piece demonstrates the extent of her pain by dissolving her body into pieces, the cautionary female figure in Labé’s poem is fragmented and mocked. The “wholeness” of the speaker, who has adopted a mentoring role, rather than pursuing love actively, is a clear contrast here. While this could be considered evidence of conventional female passivity and a form of female misogyny, much more is happening in this poem. Both poets’ treatment of aged bodies suggests not only anxiety, but determination to assert a new form of control over the lives and actions of their personae.
Sappho’s increasing age is a source of some chagrin, but does not detract from her poetic skills, nor does it create a sense of despair or frustration in her poetry. In Fragment 121 the speaker calmly but firmly demurs from entering into a romantic relationship, on the basis that she refuses to be the elder partner of a pair.397 Just as Labé uses the body of an older woman as a cautionary figure, Sappho too avoids falling into this trap of being considered comical and unsightly, overly sexualised yet, unwillingly, virginal. Both poets are preoccupied with public perception, but seek to control this perception, rather than passively accept its judgments. Unlike Labé’s speaker however, Sappho’s is much older in tone, and the atmosphere in the poem is one in which
397 Carson, If Not, Winter, p 247. The fragment reads as follows: but if you love us choose a younger bed for I cannot bear to live with you when I am the older one.
174 the central character is able to control her surroundings, despite her old age. In contrast, Labé’s elegy is filled with situations and feelings beyond the speaker’s control: she speaks of ‘piteous memories’, ‘many troubles, so little gladness’, ‘sobs’, ‘tears’, ‘the bruising thunder / of Zeus’ and ‘the wars we suffer under’ caused by love.398 By lampooning the desiring mind but unfertile, aging body of an older woman, Labé pits the “unfit” sexual desires of an older woman against those of a younger, supposedly “deserving” woman, identified as the speaker. While Sappho’s speaker avoids being considered an older partner, this does not openly result in frustration, sexual or otherwise in her poems. Conversely, Labé posits this frustration as a natural, pitiable response in her older character, suggesting that in order to avoid such a turn of events, the sexual desires and intense emotions of the younger character must be indulged. The desires of the first person speaker are, just as in Sappho’s fragments, privileged at the expense of a female scapegoat, yet ironically it is a rather conventional view of youthful sexuality, familiar to both poets’ audiences, that is used to both create the aged victim and empower the younger speaker.
Despite their different approaches to older women in their respective poems, Labé and Sappho essentially argue for the same form of control: both poems’ speakers exercise control over a physically aging body, or show alarm at the prospect of not being able to do so. In so doing, both poets address the impact of love and desire on such a body, move beyond this, and promote agency for the speaker. In addition, both poets express an overarching interest in shaping the opinions and responses of a wider audience, rather than simply expressing a socially endorsed dichotomy between young and old women, and the appropriateness of their sexual desires.
Louise Labé’s “Elegy 1” incorporates a call to her readers near the middle of the poem, after a description of witnesses named ‘Women who read these words’,
398 Labé, “Elegy 1”, lines 23; 19; 24; 11-12 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 153. Translated by Annie Finch.
175 rather than men.399 The elegy is conveyed as an educational piece, directing female readers’ thoughts and actions: Come sigh with me, for the sorrows you have heard! And maybe one day I’ll do the same for you, helping your pitiful voices to sound more true as you tell about your pain and your sad trial, lamenting in vain for times gone this long while. Whatever hardness lodges in your heart, Love will always conquer it through his special art, and the more you have made him your enemy, the worse he’ll act when you are at his mercy. So never think that anyone should blame the women whom hot Cupid has enflamed!400 This portion of the elegy not only encourages female readers to share Labé’s grief, but also imposes a feeling of solidarity and community, united through suffering, imagined or actual, in the process of seeking love. Even though this section is dedicated to female readers, the impact that it would have had on male readers must be considered: Labé’s conscious reflection on Sappho in the opening poem is now being linked with a conscious engagement with a broader group of female listeners, not unlike those with whom Sappho would have played and sang in the past. The supposed “blamelessness” of these female listeners precludes the presence of older female readers, such as those scapegoated in later lines as “fittingly excluded” desiring women.
Labé actively engages with popular imagery of Sappho in this call to her female listeners, but she implicitly excludes older women to better justify her expressions of sexual desire. Selective empowerment of young, fertile women is done to accumulate influence over a group of women, privileging their bodies and excusing their actions, while lampooning older women. Such an act can scarcely be called feminist, but perhaps represents a “necessary sacrifice” in the eyes of the poet: by controlling the bodies of women in her poetry, the speaker
399 Labé, “Elegy 1”, line 41 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 155. Translated by Annie Finch. 400 Labé, “Elegy 1”, lines 42-52 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 155. Translated by Annie Finch.
176 gains greater control over her own life. The backlash against Labé for her supposed promiscuity shows Lyons’ prominent views regarding women’s sexual autonomy. Despite contempt for older women in her poetry, Labé’s technical approach is proto-feminist because some women are able to express their physical desires, albeit at the expense of another group of women. The fact that neither group would have been considered suitable candidates for such expressions must counteract the detrimental nature of the sacrifice.
Labé’s “Elegy 2” is steeped with impatience and the speaker’s thoughts turn to assertive anger. She demands answers from her nameless beloved for his absence. No answer is provided, nor is the beloved introduced directly to the poem. He is denied agency, just as the speaker is denied fulfilment of her desires. But the speaker remains constant; fixating on time wasted rather than calls for revenge. Annie Finch subtitled this elegy “Such Endless Waiting”, recognising this suspended state. The speaker’s thwarted desire for the silent beloved figure is depicted as cruel and unnatural: …But ah, such endless waiting; that’s the cause of this vain, passionate berating. So cruel, so cruel… didn’t you pledge a solemn vow, When you first wrote, that you’d be back by now? Do you have so little memory of me that your promises are broken so easily? How do you dare abuse me? How could you wrong one who has stayed so loyal, for so long?401 The speaker’s suffering is reminiscent of Ovid’s depiction of Sappho in the Epistula Sapphus, discussed in Chapter Three. Like Sappho in Ovid’s fiction, this speaker focuses on her own pain and suffering, but is not purely reduced to a dismal and hopeless state. “Elegy 2” is steeped in righteous anger and outrage, but the speaker upholds a position of moral superiority: But I will keep faith, because of our former love, that you’ll find it impossible to rove. I’ll vow, again, my faith in your own faith;
401 Labé, “Elegy 2”, lines 7-14 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 161. Translated by Annie Finch.
177 I’ll esteem your constancy more than my breath!402 The speaker assumes direct control over her beloved’s reputation, simultaneously reiterating her own strength of character and resolve. Distance between the two figures appears as cruel, however it results in the speaker being able to not only articulate her desire openly and sympathetically, but also to appropriate further control over her inconstant beloved. This male presence is not required in the poem, just as it is routinely dismissed in Sappho’s fragments. Conversely, in other pieces female figures are required to consolidate Labé’s speaker’s influence.
In “Elegy 3”, Labé opens the poem with a call to women and another reference to her youth, strengthening the suggestion that the poet appeals to her own and other women’s fertility and vitality to justify her expression of sexual and romantic desire. In the poem’s first lines, the speaker orders her female listeners to act and think in a certain way, positioning herself in a place of sympathetic authority: Oh, women of Lyon, whenever you read these writings of mine, so full of love and need – all the worries, grudges, tears, sobs, and regret that the piteous music of these songs has set – please don’t condemn me for simplicity because of my youthful weakness…403 Old age is now contrasted with youthful weakness, adding weight to Labé’s words. Despite the respectful tone with which she addresses her listeners, portraying herself as a ‘piteous’, simple and weak woman, this is a contrived act in which the speaker emphasises stereotypically feminine qualities in order to be better received by conservative readers. Youth is again used as an excuse or even as a right to express intense emotions outwardly, including frustration and desire for sexual and romantic contact. However, this is not entirely located in her femininity, shown as the speaker turns her attention to another factor: So, if there’s anything imperfect in my life,
402 Labé, “Elegy 2”, lines 27-30 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 161. Translated by Annie Finch. 403 Labé, “Elegy 3”, lines 1-6 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 167. Translated by Annie Finch.
178 blame Love. He is the cause of all my strife. In my green youth he got a hold of me, while I was exercising both my soul and body in a hundred thousand ingenious feats of skill which, in no time at all, he rendered dull.404 The speaker directs attention to her own merits, just as Sappho has directed attention towards her own poetic skills during crisis, a technique recognised and applied by Ovid in his tribute to her. It is no fault of character, or even strictly weakness that has resulted in her strife, but the male personification of Love.
Labé’s speaker is portrayed as a valiant and resourceful warrior: I had challenged myself to extinguish the great fame of her who – surely more studious than wise – set her work against what Pallas had devised. And you should have seen me in armor, riding high, gripping my lance, letting my arrows fly! I kept my head in the fury of the fight, spurring my glorious wheeling horse. You might have compared me to great Bradamante with ease, or to Roger’s sister, the renowned Marphise. But what of it? Love couldn’t lend my heart to Mars and study for long; soon he would start to lead me to other concerns.405 Rather than sitting passively, waiting to be wooed, Labé’s persona adopts the role of an active, aggressive conqueror, whose romantic conquest is triggered by a manipulative male depiction of Love, and then inappropriately thwarted.406 The speaker’s pride, and the violence and strength of her battle imagery, are combined with references to Pallas Athena, reiterating Labé’s interaction with ancient Greek goddesses. This idealised, empowered depiction of the speaker,
404 Labé, “Elegy 3”, lines 27-32 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 167. Translated by Annie Finch. 405 Labé, “Elegy 3”, lines 33-44 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 167. Translated by Annie Finch. 406 Labé, “Elegy 3”, lines 39-40 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 167. Translated by Annie Finch.
179 occupying a semi-deified state similar to the Sapphic speaker in the “Ode to Aphrodite”, is problematized by both the male presence in the poem, and the youth of her speaker. She laments: I was not even sixteen winters old when all these cares took me into their hold, and now it has been thirteen summers more since Love first froze my heart to its young core.407 However, love maintains and intensifies its hold on her as she ages: ‘But, alas, in me the flame grows still more fervent’. The speaker operates on a cautionary level.
Labé’s elegies foreground passion that is more thoroughly itemised in her sonnet sequence, encoded with justification for romantic expression based on a contrived dichotomy between old age and youth, comic impropriety and natural passion. By appealing to a female audience, Labé intentionally places herself in a position of both leadership and moral guidance, indignantly expressing her desires on the basis of youth, while also scapegoating older women as necessary sacrifice in order to further her own agenda: to express female sexual and romantic desire openly, while using violent and Sapphic imagery.
Sappho’s Fragment 121 addresses a group of listeners and potentially multiple subjects, similar to Labé’s layered address to women of Lyons in “Elegy 1” and “Elegy 3”. In the fragment, the speaker asserts but if you love us choose a younger bed for I cannot bear to live with you when I am the older one.408 This is a curious inflection, suggesting that the lover in this case is not Sappho, but an unnamed figure, unlike in other poems. Sappho adopts the passive, beloved role, pursued rather than pursuing. However, she is able to firmly reject these advances on the basis that she considers herself too old. This is precisely
407 Labé, “Elegy 3”, lines 73-76 in [ed.] Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose, A Bilingual Edition, p 167. Translated by Annie Finch. 408 Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 246-247.
180 the position that Labé’s mocked older female character should have adopted in order to avoid such criticism in “Elegy 1”. The fact that the Sapphic speaker is able to put aside these advances does not necessarily mean that she does not feel sexual desire, but that she can mask it. It is heavily implied that she does desire the pursuer, but rejects him or her for the benefit of “us”. Just as Labé addresses a group of female listeners, so too does Sappho, and just as Labé speaks for the benefit of younger women who have been unlucky in love, Sappho’s speaker aims to assist those who would be mocked by the union of an older woman with a younger partner, or perhaps she addresses both herself and her would-be lover as potential victims of ridicule if they were to go ahead with their partnership.
Bessie Richardson notes that the ancient Greeks viewed old age as a ‘destructive, deadly force’, but also that it was considered inevitable: No one by paying a ransom can escape it unless Fate imposes an issue. There seems to be some notion that in occasional instances Fate can find a release. Prayers for release are common. The feeling is also prevalent that to be visited by old age is the normal thing; failure to arrive at old age was a misfortune. Old age, however, should pay as brief a visit as possible.409 Richardson also observes that Greek women were regarded ambiguously in terms of old age, expressed through humour in some cases. In Greek mythology, ‘woman is given to man in exchange for fire because she burns up and withers him with care, thus bringing hasty old age. Northing is worse than a bad wife for she consigns a man to unripe old age’.410 The fact that a “bad wife” may be attributed with artificially aging her husband suggests that the relationship between Greeks and the passage of time was not wholly equal in popular mythology. However, in Sappho’s age-related poems, this unequal status does not appear to be considered, indicating that Richardson’s assertion may not have been standard for ancient Lesbos. Sappho discredits this theory by ignoring her husband entirely in her age poems, focusing instead on her own physical changes and desirability.
409 Bessie Ellen Richardson, Old Age Among the Ancient Greeks: The Greek Portrayal of Old Age in Literature, Art, and Inscriptions, New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1933, p 10. 410 Richardson, Old Age Among the Ancient Greeks, p 5-6.
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Sappho’s fragments suggest that old age was not entirely appreciated, which explains the shift in her crown reference in Fragment 125 to the past tense, distanced from this image associated with fertility and youthful beauty. Richardson claims that Sappho’s poems recall ‘the happy memories of youth – its songs, dances, and sweet friendships’ as part of a desire among Greek women ‘to appear youthful for as long as possible’, in order to be treated more favourably by men, and perhaps other women as well.411 While Richardson is accurate in asserting that Sappho’s memory poems do focus on images of youth, it is possible that these are not entirely wistful, nor intended to recall only previous beauty. In addition, the identity of the younger beloved figures, even though these individuals should theoretically occupy a privileged position, as fertile and desirable bodies, occupy very little of these poems. The Sapphic speaker adapts these images in such a way that she still maintains an authoritative position, even from the position of an older woman, no longer sexually attractive in a conventional, ancient Greek sense, nor fertile. By focusing on the ability to remember and be remembered, Sappho controls the thoughts of her audience, young and old alike, creating another sense of power, even when her looks may no longer catch attention.
Even though Sappho would not have been biologically empowered as a potentially fertile wife and mother, nor endowed with a youthful sensual appeal, it is possible that her ritualistic influence may have increased. Older women could continue to perform ritual functions. Plato asserted that priests and priestesses should not be less than sixty years old in Laws, which may have been the case for Sappho in her own lifetime.412 She may potentially have been ousted from her leadership role in the cult of Aphrodite by a younger woman, if Lesbian worship of Aphrodite placed emphasis on the youth and fertility of its
411 Richardson, Old Age Among the Ancient Greeks, p 11. In Aristophanes’ play, Ecclesiazusae, written in 319 BCE, elderly women are treated as contemptible, one of whom is referred to as ‘a vile wrinkled beldame’ and ‘this plaguy old crone’ for expressing sexual desire for a younger man: [translated by Roland Smith] Aristophanes, The Ecclesiazusae; Or, Female Parliament, Oxford: W. Baxter, 1833, p 89. 412 [translated by] R.G. Bury, Plato Laws, Volume I, Books 1-VI, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926, Book V, 759d, p 419.
182 celebrants and devotees, but this is unclear. Richardson notes that in Greek literature this would have been an unlikely scenario: Hector calls the Trojans to go into battle while he goes to Ilium to bid the Elders and the women to pray to the gods and vow hecatombs. Helenus, son of Priam, bids Hector to go to the city and bid their mothers gather the aged dames at Athena’s temple and vow twelve sleek kine if she will have mercy on the city.413 In this instance, elderly women are entrusted with appealing to the gods in order to save Troy, which suggests that they may have been considered more adept at performing prayers and sacrifices than younger citizens.
The Sapphic speaker generally accepts her advancing years with grace, but she is determined to delineate the terms on which love and sexual desire can be expressed in this context. Fear of loss of control, created by old age is revealed and creates another link with a figure to be discussed in Chapter Five – Nemesis. Plato asserts that it is necessary to honour one’s parents, or face the wrath of Nemesis, the messenger of Justice.414 Sappho’s status as a mother has been tentatively established in the eyes of some scholars and translators, meaning that she would hold a place of favour in the eyes of this goddess of vengeance, sister to Aphrodite. Like Labé however, contextually both poets’ maternal status is difficult to confirm and unlikely in the case of Labé, creating even more possibilities for ambiguity in this depiction.
Conclusion By closely reading Louise Labé’s elegies and sonnets, it is possible to see a subtle and consistent interaction with Sapphic imagery and concerns about lack of control in her work. Recent controversies over the identity of Labé, suggesting that she was not a poet in her own right, are not supported by the consistency of these images, nor her prevailing focus on the ability of women to articulate desire. Analysis of Sappho’s fragments reveals themes that would have been of great interest to Labé: the ability to be perceived as appropriately “feminine” in a predominantly patriarchal context, and to derive power from
413Richardson, Old Age Among the Ancient Greeks, p 40. 414 Plato, Laws, IV, 717b-d in [translated by] R.G. Bury, Plato Laws, Volume I, Books 1-VI, p 297- 299.
183 this position. Both Labé and Sappho allude to the pressures of growing old and becoming distanced from romantic love and sexual desire, resulting in both poets pursuing a course in which their desires, at least for power, are still depicted as legitimate. In Sappho’s case, the control and voice of the speaker are still portrayed as being of exceptional importance. Labé conveys the same message, with an additional warning to her female listeners should she not be allowed to speak.
Both Sappho and Labé engage with images of weaving, deities and crowns, while also referring to time as a problematic element. By so doing, these poets successfully elevate their speakers to places of even greater authority in their poems, describing and acting upon the bodies of beloved figures, male and female alike, with a tone of biologically and divinely ordained support, in spite of the passage of time. At latest, Labé’s poetry was published some time around her thirty-fifth birthday, which would have meant that she was writing of passions better suited to a younger woman, in light of average marriage ages in France at the time.415 Similarly, Sappho’s Fragments 125 and 58 articulate the desires of an older speaker, both wistful but inherently in control. Both poets are able to use images that would ordinarily have been aligned with restriction to instead promote the articulation of their desires.
Labé’s authenticity as a poet should not be in question. It is likely, based on the intricacy of her level of engagement with Sappho as an inspirational figure, seen consistently across her elegies and sonnets, that she was a poet in her own right, rather than a group construct. This identity slippage and ambiguity, central to both poets and their reception in English, appeals to a sense of inaccessibility, despite the outwardly personal tone of the poets’ works. The fact that both poets subtly as well as overtly challenge the authority of their male predecessors, as well as the autonomy of their beloved figures, through similar imagery, suggests a much higher level of poetic engagement and modelling than the mimicry implied by Mireille Huchon’s hypothesis.
415 All around France in the sixteenth century the average age for brides was between 18-21. This rose to between 23-25 in the seventeenth century: D.B. Grigg, Population Growth and Agrarian Change: An historical perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, p 113.
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The importance of “controlling” these female poets, evident in the recent anxiety over Labé’s identity and Sappho’s chequered reception, reveals a patriarchal concern, rather than any real problem with these poets’ works. The perceived necessity for questioning Louise Labé’s authenticity, while no male poet from the same time and geographical period is so questioned, highlights a deep-seated suspicion of women’s writing. For Labé to write of Sappho and Sapphic imagery only compounds this concern. The importance of Sappho’s poetry in sixteenth century Lyons is steeped in fascination with her position as the only canonical Greek woman poet at the time. Sappho was an object of fascination, but also suspicion for Labé’s contemporaries, just as Labé herself has come to be treated as such. For both Louise Labé and Sappho, expressions of love and desire create opportunities to slip in symbolic engagements with broader issues of control – over age, fertility, and human bodies, imagined or actual – without presenting feminist discourse that would be entirely unpalatable to their contextual audiences.
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Chapter Five
Subversive Spaces: Lacunae, Nature and Setting in Sapphic Poetics
Introduction This chapter will examine the subversive and reflective content of some of Sappho’s smaller fragments, referring specifically to their natural imagery and lacunae. The presence or absence of lacunae has already featured structurally in previous chapters, which focused on Sappho’s two most physically “complete” poems and their translation. Creative adaptations of Sappho’s open-ended fragments show how various writers have constructed meanings to “fill in the gaps”, which amplify lacunae in the originals to create new meanings. In this chapter, I will address how settings, space, natural images and environment are adumbrated in a variety of ways. These processes will be compared to the works of Grace Schulman, an American poet writing in English in the twentieth century. Schulman does not replicate Sappho’s images and settings exactly, nor are her poems as fragmented, but she expands on these techniques and aligns these with a feminist agenda, through her selective empowerment of female or feminised figures. Schulman’s lacunae are enacted through symbolic representations of distance and division between speakers, other characters, and natural imagery in her poetic settings.
Poetics of Lacunae For the purpose of this analysis, a “lacuna” is a ‘manuscript, an inscription, the text of an author: A hiatus, blank, missing portion’.416 This definition dwells on the fact that something is missing. It does not require that this lack be accidental or intentional. There are differences between poems whose lacunae are intentional and non-intentional, as well as poems in which something has been lost, rather than removed or imposed. Central to this difference are the poet’s
416 Definition “lacuna, n.” from Oxford English Dictionary Online, definition from Second edition, 1989; online version March 2012.
186 authority in making these spaces and their intentions or lack of intention behind this. It is possible that some of Sappho’s lacunae could be alternately intended and unintended, but it is not certain which poems should be so categorised. Absence of parts of Sappho’s texts could be likened to a symbolic silence, stemming from Western notions from the Middle Ages that linked sexual purity to women’s speech; female passive qualities are emphasised, especially that of chastity…Sexual purity is linked to a woman’s speech. The quality of silence is not as universally required as chastity, but it is one of the prominent virtues in dominant discourse [in the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries BCE].417 Sappho subtly critiques subordination of women’s desires to those of men in her poems through strategic use of setting and natural imagery. By closely reading some of Sappho’s smaller fragments, it is likely that Sappho could have intended to “break” some of her poems via lacunae to draw attention to issues of control.
Poetic representations of space through setting, lacunae, and symbolic distance between personae, perceptions, and natural imagery, are steeped in psychological concerns.418 Bachelard recognises a desire to ‘seek to determine the human value of the sorts of space that may be grasped, that may be defended against adverse forces, the space we love’.419 Sappho’s lacunae fit this spatial definition; these are contested spaces in which the reader is either excluded from knowledge or entirely permitted access. The uncertainty of what has been held back, lost, or selectively ignored, as well as possible motivations for this, create instability in the “known” spaces, as well as hierarchies and conventions that accompany these. However, Bachelard’s very problematic references to male and female roles in creating such spaces mean that his definition requires further qualification. His sexist perception that women offer ‘housewifely care’ to an interior space to create ‘intimate harmony’, alien to
417 Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance, London: Routledge, 1992, p 5. 418 Gaston Bachelard, [translated by Maria Jolas] The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p xxiv-xxv. 419 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p xxxv.
187 men, is entirely inappropriate, and inadequately describes Sappho’s poetic spaces.420
Bachelard notes that space has a ‘concrete duration’ not afforded to memory, with the result that memories ‘are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are’.421 But Bachelard’s observations again fall short here; Sappho’s poetic and structural spaces are neither motionless, nor restricted. Sappho’s lacunae are not necessarily permanent; recovery of lost fragments has taken place as recently as 2004, resulting in reassembly of Fragment 58. Bachelard’s opinion that to be at peace with a space is to ‘radiate immobility’ falls well short of Sappho’s designs.422 Not only is the physical body of Sappho’s work subject to flux and reinterpretation via archaeological recovery, translation, and creative adaptations; her poetic settings are also dynamic. Sappho solicits readers’ gazes in the form of directives, describing a variety of cultivated settings, and asserting authority over their boundaries and gaps, also well outside the domestic prescription in Bachelard’s text.
Sappho’s poems may intentionally incorporate lacunae. The Palatine Anthology contains the Greek “pattern” poems, composed in the bucolic tradition.423 Margaret Church defines pattern poetry as ‘verse which by the varying length of its lines forms a picture or design’, but this breakage of lines on the field of the page, in order to better convey the poems’ contents, can also be described as a kind of lacunae.424 Thematically these ancient pattern poems are appropriate
420 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p 68. 421 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p 9. 422 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p 137. 423 The Greek Anthology was circulated widely in Europe and was particularly popular in Italy and France. It is not until 1509 that pattern poems begin to appear in English, the first known of these written by Stephen Hawes in The Convercyon of Swerers: Margaret Church, “The First English Pattern Poems”, PMLA (63.3, 1946) p 637. Afterwards a number of male English poets became known for their pattern poems, including William Browne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick and Thomas Traherne: Margaret Church, “The First English Pattern Poems”, p 639. 424 Church, “The First English Pattern Poems”, p 636. Church asserts that pattern poems probably originated from Asia Minor (now Turkey) or even further east, noting that Simias of Rhobdes (300 BCE) was influenced by the school at Alexandria and by the encroachment of Persia on the eastern Mediterranean islands: “The First English Pattern Poems”, p 636. In this sense, Simias was implicitly interested in the interactions between words and boundaries, enacted on the pages of each poem and also in his focus on the territorial disputes taking place
188 comparisons to Sappho’s fragments, since these often demonstrate a pastoral focus; Sappho gives descriptions of flowers and fruit growing in open spaces, including meadows and sacred sites.425 In addition, some of these works use strategic lacunae to structurally shape poems. Issues of control over space and the poetic form inherently confine these to a set structure, and implicitly, invite focus on issues of constraint and confinement.
Some ancient Greek pattern poems include Simias’s “The Axe”, “The Wings” and “The Egg”, Theocritus’s “The Pipe”, Dosiadas’s “The First Altar” and Vestinus’s “The Second Altar”. Theocritus in his Idylls also engages with the concept of space as a workable area in Greek poetics, creating a smaller but no less valid Greek tradition of manipulating structure through lacunae in order to better convey imbedded meanings. Since these poems originate from the Hellenistic era, between the third and second centuries BCE, they are not contemporaneous with Sappho. However, they suggest that intentional placement of lacunae in poetry, as a means of conveying additional ideas, naturally evolved in ancient Greek poetry. Sappho and her contemporaries were firmly entrenched in the literary traditions of Hesiod and Homer, but experimentation in style still took place. Sappho’s thematic fixation on divisions, hierarchies and boundaries in her poetry, as well as any intentional lacunae, may well have inspired these later writers.
Even though Sappho uses a first-person speaking voice in most of her work, it is seldom clear whether or not this speaker is to be interpreted as Sappho herself, an imagined version of the poet, or someone else entirely. Similarly, due to issues of transmission, it is difficult to assert when one poem begins and another ends, or whether they were part of some larger narrative. It is possible that some of the poems to be examined here may have come from the same, around him. This focus on spatial negotiation is extremely similar to terms of tensions to those of Sappho’s poems in which place and hierarchy feature prominently. 425 Charles Whitmore’s description of “the pastoral spirit in literature” as ‘the more or less realistic presentation of rustic human nature in a setting of natural scenery’ applies to some of Sappho’s fragments. Those fragments in which flowers, fruit and animals are mentioned, as well as dawn, stars, seas and how these form a background or give support to her emotional, psychological and theoretical thoughts and experiences, can be viewed as a form of pastoral poetry: Charles Whitmore, “Pastoral Elements in the Greek Epigram”, The Classical Journal (13.8, 1918) p 616.
189 larger work, or from separate books entirely. They may even have been draft versions. Regardless of these poems’ original forms, their ambiguity and lacunae create opportunities for poetic explorations of borders, perceptions and reflections, and recognise the importance of textual descriptions, images and settings in directing such examinations. At the same time, in much of Sappho’s work this frustration of “completeness” is slightly pacified in her use of reflective, ideologically-charged natural imagery, facilitating identification of tensions and gender-based criticism in some poems. Sappho is not only a theorist but also a practitioner of a poetics that splits images and ideas, subtly encoding these with a focus on the Sapphic speaker as an authoritative figure, denouncing any figures or ideas that would displace this, irrespective of their gender or divinity. Whether she was a theorist in the sense that the position is considered today, or even in the context of ancient Lesbos, cannot be ascertained, but due to her celebrated status for her poetic prowess, it is not an unfair suggestion, and will be explored in this chapter.
American poet Grace Schulman in “Apples” uses the image of apples for sale as a catalyst for the memories of a female speaker and her struggle to align her desires and experiences with those set out as patriarchal social expectations.426 Schulman also uses natural images of a maple tree and a herd of horses in her poem “Horses on the Grass” to criticise feminised and masculinised representations of hierarchy, dividing and only conclusively ending this poem in another, separate piece titled “That Maple”.427 While it is not possible to tell whether or not Sappho was a feminist figure in her own lifetime, it is easier to recognise ways in which her work has been used as an inspirational source for feminist poets.428 Schulman is among those poets who have applied distinctively
426 Grace Schulman, “Apples” in The Broken String, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, p 47-48. 427 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass” and “That Maple” in Burn Down the Icons, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976, p 32-33. 428 Among these numerous feminist poets are H.D., Renée Vivien, Amy Lowell and Michael Field (two women poets writing under a male pseudonym), as well as the ancient Greek woman poet Nossis. Susan Stanford Friedman comments that H.D.’s poetry, inspired by Sappho, has also influenced later feminist poet Adrienne Rich as ‘an important literary foremother…[whose presence] nourished the evolution of a younger woman’s poetic vision toward the woman- identified, gynocentric feminism of The Dream of a Common Language’, enacting Virginia Woolf’s theory that ‘women writing look back through their literary foremothers’: “I go where I love”:
190 Sapphic strategies to engage with struggles faced by female or feminine figures in terms of personal agency and control over space.
Schulman also presents distinct and individualistic poetic personae, interested in accumulating power and influence.429 In Sappho’s fragments, the multiplicity of bodies which represent aspects of the self threaten to hold the female speaker back from her desire for autonomy, be it social, sexual, or any other interpretation. The same can be said for Schulman’s speaker in “Apples” and her relationship with a female school friend. By engaging with this problematic figuration of the self as another person, these female speakers are able to articulate their desires, and if not reconcile these by asserting control over their actual bodies, punish perceived “weaker” aspects of themselves in a vicious circle of self-contained violence.
Ancient Greek Perceptions of Space Lacunae in Sappho’s work bring very real experiences of physical, gendered segregation to the foreground, acknowledging their creation and enforcement for reasons not revealed to the reader. Due to Sappho’s aristocratic status, it is unlikely that she would have engaged with the general populace in public life. Sue Blundell remarks that friendships among lower class women were commonplace and frequently part of a greater network of neighbours who would help one another ‘when they were in labour, and might pop into a
An Intertextual Study of H.D. and Adrienne Rich” in [eds.] Estelle B. Freedman, Barbara C. Gelpi, Susan L. Johnson, Kathleen M. Weston, The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1985, p 11-112. 429 This idea is not entirely harmonious in the context of studies into representations of community in Sappho’s poems. Anne Pippin Burnett claims that the poems had a community basis, as she prescribes to the theory that Sappho led a group of girls, so the flattery and openness of some poems could appeal to any of the listeners directly: Three Archaic Poets; Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983, p 225; 236. Susan C. Jarratt argues that Sappho’s references to memory and persuasion, through her mentions of the goddess Peitho and ‘the articulation of the most compelling of human desires – desire for another person’, openly relates to the ability to communicate communal desires: “Sappho's Memory,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly (32:1, 2002), p 20. This suggests that not only may this focus have been intentional on Sappho’s part, but also intrinsic in understanding the poem. Whether or not the poems are communal in content or direction is not in question, but when read in reference to the manipulative tones and layered voices, images of control and isolated settings, this communal atmosphere becomes charged with the speaker’s broader agenda of asserting symbolic control over her listeners, by appealing to their emotions and privileging her own.
191 neighbour’s house to borrow some salt, a handful of barley, or a bunch of herbs’.430 Sappho is unlikely to have had the same kind of relationship with her neighbours. Aristocratic women were generally secluded, but her fragmentary poetry refers directly to a close circle of female, and possibly male, companions, on a basis of a shared interest in music and poetry, as well as religion. While not entirely restricted and isolated, this audience and its named members imply a sense of exclusivity, real in Sappho’s life and symbolic in her poetry.
The separation of female and male spaces extended into the public and religious spaces of ancient Greece, most clearly among members of the upper classes who could afford to build their homes to reflect distinctions between private and public. Blundell observes that in an affluent family’s home, [M]ale guests were entertained in the andron, the men’s dining room…while women spent much of their time in the gynaikeion, the women’s quarters. The latter consisted of either a single room or a suite of rooms, and might be located on either the ground floor or, where one existed, on the upper storey. It was here that women did wool-working, looked after their children and entertained themselves.431 Segregation symbolically appears in Sappho’s poetry through her selection of images encoded with masculine or feminine qualities, or associated with particular deities. This gendered status results in their being selectively associated with exclusionary verbs, signalling subtle dismissal of those influences from poetic spaces, in which Sappho alone enjoys authority. Some examples of these can be found in Fragments 9 and 31.432 In Fragment 9, a particularly broken fragment, Sappho mentions a ‘feast… for Hera’ that is beset with conditionals: ‘invites’, ‘all not’, and ‘as long as’, suggesting that entry to the feast of a female deity imparts control to the speaker over who may or may not attend. Unwanted elements are repelled grammatically, revealing an almost casual contempt for these in their ease of expulsion, but also presenting this
430 Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, p 137: citing Theophrastus, Characters, 10, as reference to this kind of exchange among lower class women. 431 Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, p 139. Blundell refers to Euripides’ description of this kind of home set-up in Lysias, I.9-14. 432 In Fragment 31, discussed extensively in Chapter 2, Sappho introduces and then dismisses a male figure in the poem, focusing instead on her speaker’s fixation on an unnamed and cherished woman.
192 extraction with enough subtlety to escape popular criticism.
Women in ancient Greece were strongly associated with ideas of contamination. Sappho’s poetic settings, from which undesired elements are excluded or downplayed, reverse this patriarchal imagining of female bodies. Susan Guettel Cole states that birth and death were popularly viewed as so powerfully corrupting that ‘the mother in childbed and the corpse before burial were classified along with murderers as not only polluted in themselves but able to pollute others’.433 Medical opinions in ancient Greece associated women’s bodies with pollution. There existed social protocols to warn others of potential “contamination” during female reproductive stages.434 Menstruation and childbirth were viewed as times of greatest risk to men, and in some cases, signs would be placed on the doors of homes to alert guests to stay away.435 Zaidman and Pantel note that the sanctity of religious sanctuaries demanded that it would be forbidden for anyone to give birth, make love or die in a sanctuary. No one who was in any way polluted was allowed in, and at the entrance were placed lustral basins of holy water for worshippers to purify themselves before crossing the sacred boundary.436 Sappho’s creation of spaces in which feminine figures occupy the most prominent positions counters this compulsory female exclusion. Her speaker, as
433 Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience, California: University of California Press, 2004, p 106. 434 This is strongly reminiscent of Julia Kristeva’s commentary on the abject and the female body. In Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Rousiez, Kristeva observes that in Celine’s novels, there is a ‘two-faced mother’, one of whom ‘is tied to suffering, illness, sacrifice, and a downfall that Celine, so it seems, readily exaggerated. This kind of motherhood, the masochistic mother who never stops working is repulsive and fascinating, abject’: New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p 157-158. She suggests that the image of the ‘two-faced mother’ represents ‘the baleful power of women to bestow mortal life’: p 158. 435 A popular superstition of the time held that a menstruating woman did not have a reflection, and as a result, women could be associated with the idea of a “stained mirror”, suggesting lack of perception, abnormality, and uncleanliness. In Pausanias, 8.38.6, the writer claims that when visiting the sanctuary of Zeus on Mt Lykaios, he observed a mirror in which an ordinary individual could only see their reflection very dimly and a god very clearly. Cole indicates that such a comment may mean that a menstruant has no reflection at all: Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience, p 111. At Lindos, a new mother had to wait twenty-one days after giving birth before she could enter a sanctuary of Athena, and families would mark doors in Attika with an olive for a boy and a piece of woollen fleece for a girl to inform of the birth and also warn of the pollution of the process of birth itself: p 106-107. 436 [translated by Paul Cartledge] Louise Bruit Zaidman, Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p 56.
193 the creator of these elevated spaces, occupies the most prominent position of all. Biological functions such as childbirth are not mentioned in the remaining fragments, so although there is an oblique reference to sexual activity in one poem, it is difficult to claim that Sappho openly rejected this system of exclusion in her work. Fragment 94 refers to the departure of a beloved woman, with whom the Sapphic speaker remembers lying …on a soft bed delicate you would let loose your longing and neither any [ ] nor any holy place nor was there from which we were absent…437 Female sexual activity and a holy place are mentioned in the same poem, subverting the social expectation that these not be mixed. Sappho deliberately places her speaker’s sexuality and the desires of the beloved, remembered woman in a position of greater importance than any need for segregation.
Ritualistic settings could create spaces in which conventional female deference to male authority would no longer be considered appropriate. A ritual is defined as a complex of actions effected by, or in the name of, an individual or a community. These actions serve to organise space and time, to define relations between men and gods, and to set in their proper place the different categories of mankind and the links which bind them together.438 An individual Sapphic speaker initiates rituals in poems, directing a broader community of usually anonymous and obedient characters. Lardinois reflects that Sappho’s ‘invocation of predominantly female deities is matched by her choice of myths’, referring to Eva Stehle’s observation that Sappho’s preferred myths ‘often focus on relationships between a strong female goddess and a weaker mortal man, such as the relationship between Eos and Tithonus, Selene
437 Fragment 94, lines 21-26. Translated by Anne Carson, If Not, Winter, p 186-187. 438 Zaidman, Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, p 27.
194 and Endymion, Aphrodite and Adonis, or Aphrodite and Phaon’.439 Unlike Stehle, Lardinois claims that Sappho’s identification with a powerful female deity or heroine would not have been considered subversive in ancient Greece, since it was also part of Greek religion, and most of Sappho’s songs that compare ordinary women with goddesses or heroines appear to have been composed for public performances, either by Sappho herself or by choruses of young women.440 However, Sappho does not merely identify with a goddess; she invokes goddesses to reveal her influence over deities, and then extends this control to apply to other characters. When considering Sappho’s tendency to encode poetic appeals to Aphrodite with subtle celebrations of her own abilities, the relationship between poet and goddess becomes more complex. Ritualistic space poems are intrinsically connected with subtle symbolic intrusions, suggesting that more than religious observances are taking place in these settings.
Ritualistic settings in poems such as Fragments 1 and 2 inadvertently or consciously reflect on the evolution of Greek religion, including its history of oppressing female-focused cults. M. P. Nilsson’s classic evolutionary model asserts that Greek religion came about through the marriage between pre- Hellenic religions and the cults and beliefs introduced by the Greek peoples when they arrived in the course of the second millennium.441 Sappho’s religious beliefs, as well as poetic settings in which inclusion and exclusion play a major role, connect with a wider tradition of religious adaptation and historical invasions of spaces by the patriarchal Hellenes. Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel observe that the concept of pollution in ancient Greece
439 Lardinois in [eds.] Lardinois, McClure, Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, p 79. Lardinois refers to Eva Stehle 1990, 1996. 440 Lardinois in [eds.] Lardinois, McClure, Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, p 80. 441 M.P. Nilsson, A History of Greek Religion, Oxford, 1925 p 28, Greek Popular Religion, New York, 1940, p 29, Greek Piety, Oxford, 1948, p 30 quoted in Zaidman, Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, p 5.
195 is often associated with the sacred, through the rapprochement of two series of terms: those attached to agos (another word for ‘pollution’) and those…in the context of haigon, sacred in the sense of forbidden, dangerous for men.442 The concept of access denial due to danger, pollution, or something inherently forbidden, informs Sappho’s ritualistic poems in which masculine elements and images are outnumbered by feminine counterparts, or portrayed as overpowered or outcast. This subtle engagement represents another layer of critique within Sappho’s works, empowering her own feminine speaker, as well as appropriating conventionally masculine or neutral symbols.
Women in ancient Greek religious, social and medical systems have often been connected with the land, with the result that any representation of the land as exploited or unexploited can be seen as a reflection on female freedom.443 Linguistically in ancient Greek there is a strong distinction between desert and sown lands, evident in their terms: άγριος for “wild” and ήμερος for “tamed”.444 After Sappho’s time, Greek thinkers supported human control and manipulation of the natural environment.445 Whether or not this way of thinking was rising to prevalence in Sappho’s home and time is not certain, but in light of divisions of land into ritual, urban and rural spaces, these notions may not have been alien to her. Ritual spaces dedicated to worship and prayer reflect the idea that nature can be sanctified and Coates observes that Greek deities were overwhelmingly nature-based. They either represented elements of nature such as the sky (Zeus), the sea (Poseidon) or plants (Demeter), or they included parts of nature in their constituencies: wolves, lions and bears were devoted to Aphrodite while the creatures of the forest warmed to Apollo’s
442 Zaidman, Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, p 10. 443 Margaret Williamson discusses the perceived link between female sexuality and the earth: ‘Linking women’s bodies metaphorically with the earth suggests a positive valuation of their sexuality: human life depends on women’s fruitfulness just as, in a largely agricultural economy, it depends on the earth’s. But the fruitfulness is, especially in classical Greek thought, conditional on the proper cultivation of women through marriage. Women who are not yet married, or who have broken out of marital constraints, are linked through a darker set of images with the wild, uncivilised regions outside the polis, even with bestiality’: Sappho’s Immortal Daughters, p 100. 444 Hamish Forbes, “The uses of the uncultivated landscape in modern Greece: a pointer to the value of the wilderness in antiquity?” in [eds.] Graham Shipley, John Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, p 72. 445 Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p 27-28. Coates refers to Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) who views nature as a storehouse in his Natural History (AD 77): p 28.
196 musical skills.446 This means that ‘to intervene in the natural world was to encounter these deities and run the risk of offending them’.447 Coates cites groves as particular favourites for worship, noting that these were ‘protected from fire, grazing, ploughing, felling, horses and dogs’.448 However, Sappho mentions grazing horses in the meadow where she summons Aphrodite in Fragment 2, an alteration that will be discussed in detail. For the majority of Greece however, this kind of treatment was confined to relatively small areas, and trees could be felled and animals hunted with minimal restriction.449
Religious sanctuaries in ancient Greece could have rules of their own, varying from place to place, and the ability to dictate entry or access appears as a concern in several of Sappho’s fragments.450 By referring to fruit, flowers and trees that have religious significance, in poems not otherwise considered religious or ritualistic, Sappho engages with other poems in which she can exercise such control. The private settings invoked by other poems, though not her “wedding” poems, suggest a sense of confinement and enclosure not unlike the prescribed “landscapes of leisure” and private woodlands in eighteenth century Britain.451 Sappho’s settings, as in these managed landscapes, are places of natural beauty and peace that were not “found” but constructed and decisively owned. In Sappho’s fragments, although it is Aphrodite who owns these spaces, it is Sappho who speaks for them and enacts control, enhanced by references to specific natural images.
Lacunae in Sappho’s work emphasise the fact that deities, as well as masculine
446 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 30. 447 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 30. 448 Ibid. 449 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 31. 450 A range of rules and prescriptions for entering sacred spaces existed in ancient Greece, some of which are discussed here: John Ferguson, Among the Gods: An Archaeological Exploration of Ancient Greek Religion, London: Routledge, 1989, p 32. 451 Woodlands were turned into hunting estates and controversial game laws were introduced in the Black Act of 1723, in which ‘mere presence in the vicinity of game in possession of weapon and with a blackened face was a hanging offence’. Such laws annulled traditional relationships with the land and animals, although hunting remained a popular pastime if you could afford to own the parkland: Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 115.
197 influences, are always not welcome in her poems’ settings, unless serving the interests of the poetic speaker and idealised figures. Sappho’s references to Aphrodite can be interpreted as spiritual commodification and manipulation of the goddess’s name and presence as a means of legitimising the poet’s own words and her speaker’s assertions. Later poets’ evoking Sappho in their own work can be compared to such an act, when Sappho is cited as an Ur-text or overarching, supportive maternal figure. However, the fact that such an act is essentially mimicry of Sappho’s original manipulation of a deified figure, ensures that she remains in a relatively unique position of authority, enacting the process that ironically has yoked her, and perpetrating her own conscription of divine favour at the same time, via the later poet’s reflection.
While Sappho’s descriptions of ritualistic settings and practices appear sincere, there is still a mildly exploitative element here, as in many cases in which her poems mention a ritual, since the Sapphic speaker is in a position of particular prominence and power. The speaker is not necessarily disrespectful towards the goddess or religious rituals, but can be interpreted as using these to further her own agenda in addition to her beliefs. Sappho’s personae are not an “anti- ritual” or irreligious. In fact, they are blatantly focused on both deities and rituals as a means of furthering their own desires, therefore are insistent on respect for these.
Flowers in Sappho’s Smaller Fragments References to flora and fauna are encoded with notions of mastery and control over territory, complementing Sappho’s focus on a need for greater personal control over other individuals and spaces, as well as her criticism of societal elements that would challenge this authority. Peter Coates states that ‘it is difficult to superimpose nineteenth-century Romanticism onto classical Greek poetry’, with regards to images of nature and natural beauty, despite lavish scenes in Homer’s Odyssey, since these do not have the same sense of emotional connection and physical effect.452 But his reading does not recognise the satirical and occasionally bitter reflections on natural imagery that can be found
452 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 36.
198 in Romantic poets’ works, nor does it acknowledge the similarly layered response to nature taking place in Sappho’s poems.453 Her poetic settings, full of flowers, fruit, trees and running water, reflect a scholarly tendency to overstate the extent of natural woodland in ancient Greece.454 Oliver Rackham notes that, in general, we do not know what Greece used to look like, since the ancient authors did not go into lengthy descriptions.455
Scientific processes have offered few answers on this subject, since Greece is climatically unsuitable for preserving ancient pollen deposits, which could have been used to identify past plant life.456 Evidence gleaned from accounts of land management and cultivation suggests that the ancient Greeks of Sappho’s time predominantly acted in favour of economic and social requirements, not environmental concerns.457 Coates observes that among ancient Greek writers, nature was viewed as ‘an internal property rather than a physical territory’ and intrinsically entwined with scientific, philosophical and religious speculation.458 Sappho’s natural images embed ‘deliberations over the properties of the human body and the relationship between matter and spirit/soul’, even in a poem that
453 For example, see Charles Baudelaire’s collection of poems Les Fleurs du Mal, in which death, despair, and other dismal motifs including horror imagery, are connected with nature and a strong desire to make these appear beautiful. 454 Oliver Rackham attributes this to the 1780 writings of Abbé Barthélémy, who described ‘noble forests and crystal fountains’ as settings for the heroic deeds of ancient Greek heroes, popularizing the theories of 1801 scientist Sonnini. This tendency has persisted for centuries. Rackham asserts that ‘Athens had roughly as much forest in classical times as in the 1920s, and less than it has now’: Oliver Rackham, “Ecology and pseudo-ecology: the example of ancient Greece” in [eds.] Shipley, Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, p 27-28. 455 Rackham in [eds.] Shipley, Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, p 22. 456 Rackham in [eds.] Shipley, Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, p 25. 457 See for example Demosthenes 55.22; a lease from Arkesine on Amorgos SIG 963.1-23; Theophrastos Causes of Plants 3.6.5; quoted in Lin Foxhall, “Feeling the earth move: cultivation techniques on steep slopes in classical antiquity” in [eds.] Shipley, Salmon, Human Landscapes in Classical Antiquity: Environment and Culture, p 46-51.
458 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 23. Coates cites Aristotle’s premise that ‘nature (physis) is everything outside culture (nomos)’ and his characterisation of nature as ‘the origin of living things…the ‘immanent’ part of a growing thing; the principle of life; and the source, constituent material or essence of something’: p 23; quoted in George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972, p 447- 456.
199 seems otherwise focused purely on descriptions of beautiful scenery in a religious or personal setting.459 Overt reflections on beautiful scenes can mask embedded criticisms, and together with lacunae in these pieces, create additional barriers between the reader and speaker, emphasising the speaker’s heightened control over the poem.
Deities and nature are strongly aligned; Aphrodite has floral symbols in a number of Greek texts, including the Anacreontea, in which several poetic fragments by the poet Anacreon record this connection: The soft rose. It is the breath of the gods and the joy of mortals, the glory of the Kharites (Graces) in spring-time, the delight of the Erotes (Loves) with their rich garlands and of Aphrodite; it is a subject for poetry and the graceful plant of the Mousai.460 Pausanias notes in his 2 C.E. Greek travelogue that ‘the rose and the myrtle are sacred to Aphrodite, and associated with the story of Adonis’, and Nonnus in 5 C.E. similarly observes ‘That herb of passion [the myrtle] which Kythereia [Aphrodite] loves as much as the rose, as much as the anemone’.461
Interestingly, flowers are not necessarily treated as the most significant or beautiful features in Sappho’s poems. Nameless flowers are used as comparatives to emphasise a mortal woman’s beauty in Sappho’s “garland” poems, Fragments 81 and 168c.462 In Fragment 81, a woman named Dica is instructed to put ‘lovely garlands around your locks’ and bind ‘together stems of anise with your soft hands’, since according to the speaker, ‘the blessed Graces look rather on what is adorned with flowers and turn away from the ungarlanded’. The Sapphic speaker mentors Dica how best to be noticed by the
459 Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, p 23. 460 Anacreon Fragment 35, translated by David Campbell, [ed.] Goold, Greek Lyric II: Anacreon, Anacreontea Choral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman, p 207. See also Fragment 44: ‘Let us mix the Erotes' rose with Dionysos: let us fasten on our brows the rose with its lovely petals and drink, laughing gently. Rose, finest of flowers, rose, darling of spring, rose, delight of the gods also, rose with which Kythere's [Aphrodite's] son [Eros] garlands his lovely curls when he dances with the Kharites’: p 219. 461 [translated and with a commentary by] J.G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Volume 1, London: Macmillan and Co., 1898, 6.24.7, p 322; [translated by] W.H.D. Rouse Nonnus, Dionysiaca, Books 16-35, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940, 32.25-30 ff, p 447. 462 These garland poems can be found in David A. Campbell [translator], Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1982, p 108-109; p 172-173.
200 Graces. The garland of flowers is a tool to both appeal to the Graces and ingratiate Dica, and is also a physical marker of Sappho’s influence. Any divine associations of the flowers used are not revealed; they are merely means to elevate a favoured woman by the Sapphic speaker, through her selective advice and manipulation of an unknown deity’s symbol. The beauty of the flowers and the apparent frivolity of such an item as a garland do not mask the subtle control and exercise of authority enacted in their being assigned and worn.
In the second “garland” poem, it is the earth ‘with its many garlands’ that ‘is embroidered…’ rather than a woman. This is all that remains of the poem, and only Fragment 81 can be compared to it in terms of this imagery. Natural beauty has been encoded with subtle divine influence, as well as direct activity via the implied act of making and bestowing garlands, as well as embroidering. Divine influence has once again been supplanted by the Sapphic speaker’s use of directives. In both Fragment 81 and 168c, the word “garland” is part of the verb “to wear garlands”, suggesting an assertive activity performed at the Sapphic speakers’ behest, rather than simply referring to an item that is present and the verb only obliquely mentioned.463 In addition, the earth in the latter fragment is not only garlanded but embroidered; it has been subjected to two activities that are traditionally associated with women in ancient Greece and identified by the Sapphic speaker. While the divine influence implied in creating the beautiful scene is recognised through the reference to flowers, this is outnumbered by subtle references to the speaker’s control and assessment of the situation. In both poems garlands of flowers are accompanied by affirmative action, engendered as feminine, and associated with a Sapphic persona’s ability to guide the actions of those around her.
Sappho frequently likens women and girls to flowers, but at the same time makes it apparent that the beauty of the human is superior to that of the flower. All that remains of Fragment 122 is a reference to ‘a tender girl picking flowers’,
463 The noun forms of garland in Greek are ὀ στeεφᾶνος or τὀ στεφος, while the in Sappho’s fragments the corresponding term comes from the verb “to wear garlands”, στεφανηφορεîν: S.C. Woodhouse, English-Greek Dictionary: A Vocabulary of the Attic Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1910. P 354.
201 in which it is the tenderness of the girl that is the focus of the poem, rather than the act of picking flowers.464 Only one adjective has survived in this fragment, and it describes the girl rather than the flowers. This may not have been the case for the entire poem, but since this fragment is all that is left, the reference forms part of a collection of poems in which such comparisons are made. Similarly in Fragment 132, Sappho’s speaker claims that ‘I have myself a beautiful child who looks like golden flowers, my darling Cleis, for whom I would not [take] all Lydia or lovely…’465. In both poems it is the loveliness of the young girl that takes precedence in the order of delivery, and also in hierarchies of subjective beauty. However, this dedication to Cleis strongly suggests that the Sapphic speaker values the life and beauty of her child, likened to golden flowers, more than the actual gold or wealth of the nation of Lydia, or an unrecorded ‘lovely’ item, idea, place or person, suggesting a subtle political jab.
Cleis is not the only girl to be likened to a flower in order to express Sappho’s appreciation. In Fragment 105c a hyacinth is used to symbolise a young girl whose virginity and beauty are unappreciated by an uncouth group of men. Sappho compares this woman – imagined, remembered or generalised – to ‘the hyacinth which shepherds tread underfoot in the mountains, and on the ground the purple flower…’466. The rest of this poem has been lost, but the disparaging tone toward the shepherds and sympathy for the crushed flower are unmistakable. The undeserving fate of the flower is that it has gone unnoticed and been crushed by men who neither saw nor appreciated its beauty and vulnerability. The Sapphic speaker counters such perceived cruelty by recognising the suffering of the flower, its colour, and also by naming the wrongdoers. That Sappho’s favoured women are compared to flowers is grammatically also an interesting manoeuvre. Flowers were sometimes considered to be masculine images by ancient Greek writers, and the word for flower, τó ἄνθος is neutral; neither feminine nor masculine in Greek.467 In these
464 Fragment 122 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 142-143. 465 Fragment 132 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 148-149. 466 Fragment 105c in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 132-133. 467 Susan Guettel Cole remarks on this tradition of thinking in Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience, p 22.
202 poems, a potentially masculine image is used to complement female beauty, and even to place these female figures in a greater position of importance in the piece. While this technique is doubtless very subtle, and some of Sappho’s contemporary audiences may considered these descriptions to be encoded with gender ideologies, this move could still inspire a female-based hierarchy.
Flowers also appear in settings for scenes of intense passion, particularly in Fragment 94, in which Sappho bids farewell to an unnamed woman, invoking memories of times spent together in order to ease her suffering. Passionate exchanges are remembered and recounted for the benefit of the audience, while the beauty and religious significance of the flowers is only briefly mentioned, indicating that Aphrodite’s role in these matters is less than that of Sappho herself. The opening of Fragment 94 has been lost, but it reads as a quotation from the woman in question, retold by Sappho’s speaker: …and honestly I wish I were dead. She was leaving me with many tears and said this: ‘Oh what bad luck has been ours, Sappho; truly I leave you against my will.’ I replied to her thus: ‘Go and fare well and remember me, for you know how we cared for you. If not, why then I want to remind you…and the good times we had. You put on many wreaths of violets and roses and (crocuses?) together by my side, and round your tender neck you put many woven garlands made from flowers and…with much flowery perfume, fit for a queen,… you anointed yourself…and on soft beds…you would satisfy your longing (for?) tender…There was neither…nor shrine…from which we were absent, no grove…nor dance…sound.468 The first-person speaker repeats the words of the departing woman, with the result that even though this woman, whether imagined or real, originally spoke for herself, her words are now framed in the past tense and subsumed by the words of the poet. The speaker refers to flowers, appealing to the sights, smells and sensations of ‘wreaths of violets and roses’, ‘flowery perfume’ and ‘woven garlands’ ‘round your tender neck’. The result of this is that the memory is made more potent, but while the beauty of the flowers is not in question, it is overshadowed by the intensity of the passionate relationship between the two women. The flowers are ‘fit for a queen’ and the garlands fit to be put around
468 Fragment 94 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 116-119.
203 the beloved woman’s ‘tender neck’, rather than the woman being considered “fit” for their gifts. Stylistically this poem invokes the same image as Fragment 122, using the same description, ‘tender’, and accompanying this with an exploitative move towards the environment. The flowers are to be ‘picked’ in Fragment 122, just as they are to ‘garland’ beloved women in other fragments, and to emphasise the beauty of the relationship between Sappho and this other individual in Fragment 94. Sappho consistently presents flowers as subjects to be acted upon and as tools by which to further her flattery of other individuals, enacting an exploitative tendency as well as an implied willingness to manipulate symbols of divine power in order to further her own wishes.
These agendas are not always entirely beneficial. Floral imagery can also be used as a means of deriding another individual, using connections with Aphrodite to persecute those whom Sappho personally dislikes. Sappho uses the metaphorical ‘roses of Peiria’, meaning poetic talent, to scorn another woman. Selective use of flowers in smaller fragments indicates the level of importance that a poetic persona holds and Sappho’s opinion of this individual. In Fragment 55, Sappho mocks a woman, whom Plutarch claims was a wealthy but uncultured individual: But when you die you will lie there, and afterwards there will never be any recollection of you or any longing for you since you have no share of the roses of Pieria; unseen in the house of Hades also, flown from our midst, you will go to and fro among the shadowy corpses.469 Unlike Sappho’s favoured women, this woman pales before a symbolic flower, an image accompanied by the unsympathetic foretelling of the woman’s death and lack of legacy. The poem outlines ‘shadowy corpses’ and ‘the House of Hades’ as the most prominent features of the wretched woman’s new setting, in contrast, presumably, to ‘our midst’. It is important to observe that “houses” are seldom mentioned in Sappho’s remaining poems. Her decision to align this scorned woman with the domestic patronymic of ‘the House of Hades’ excludes her from Sappho’s more typical settings where masculine or domestic elements
469 Fragment 55 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 98-99. Campbell quotes Plutarch directly underneath his translation of this poem, observing that Pieria is in Macedonia and is the supposed birthplace of the Muses.
204 are downplayed or removed. The Sapphic speaker unleashes the full extent of her symbolic authority in airing her criticism: she directs the other woman’s movements; names a male deity and places her directly under his power, in contrast to the speaker; assigns the woman to a domestic, rather than idealised and isolated space; remarks on her physical removal from the poetic circle, rather than including her in its number; and also places flowers on a higher ranking to this individual. In addition to being openly insulting, Sappho applies her symbolic engagements with nature and setting to fully emphasise this woman’s lower status.
Apples: Sappho and Schulman Apples, apple-trees, and apple branches all feature as subtle symbols for gendered control. It is likely that these were similar to apples available today, rather than pomegranates or other kinds of fruit that may have been historically translated as “apples” for lack of a more accurate substitute.470 Sappho refers to apples most directly in two poems: Fragments 2 and 105a; both of which feature images of young women and appeals to Aphrodite, suggesting that there is a link between love, femininity, and the fruit. Grace Schulman uses a very similar image, using apples as a reference point for the exploration of a young woman’s development in “Apples”. In Sappho’s fragments and Schulman’s poem, this image is charged with problematic images of consumption, cultivation, and lack of control, suggesting criticism of the social environments in which such allegiances between these and female bodies can be created.471 Sappho’s poems can be interpreted as subtly feminist through her divine
470 John L. Myres notes that in ancient Greece a number of different fruits were consumed. ‘Relics of forest-life are the wild fruits, and nuts, and their ‘tamed’ descendants – apples and pears, from Homeric times, cherries and peaches introduced from Cerasus and from Persia respectively; olives, figs, and grapes, fresh or dried as raisins. Plums and apricots came later and locally and were dried as now’: John L. Myres, “Ancient Groceries” Greece & Rome (64.22, 1953), p 4. 471 This is very similar to that used in Biblical symbolism, in which an unidentified fruit, often depicted as an apple, is taken from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. This “apple” represents temptation and also a problematic clash in the divine hierarchy; according to scripture, Eve is tempted into disobeying God and punished, along with the rest of humanity, for her act. Even though neither Sappho nor Schulman engage (openly in Schulman’s case, at least) with Biblical imagery or ideas, this parallel is interesting in that it shows a pervasive link between apples and boundaries. Possession and consumption of apples symbolises desire for power at the expense of another and in defiance of an existing hierarchy in this monotheistic religion and also in Sappho’s polytheistic beliefs.
205 allusions and isolated settings, whereas Schulman’s piece is much more openly so, contrasting the mercantile desires of an apple-seller with the speaker’s desire for freedom.
It is unclear whether Sappho’s Fragment 105a, in which a ‘sweet-apple’ ripens on the branch, was intended to be a small piece, or if this is all that remains of a larger poem. The poem begins in an orchard setting: As the sweet-apple reddens on the bough-top, on the top of the topmost bough; the apple-gatherers have forgotten it – no they have not forgotten it entirely, but they could not reach it.472 The fact that the speaker is ambivalently gendered and not referred to in the first person indicates that this poem may be exceptionally fragmented. In contrast to Sappho’s larger pieces, Fragment 105a foregrounds experiences of an objectified young woman, not a Sapphic speaker. When considered in the context of Sappho’s religious beliefs, popular myths and literary works of the time, this image of the ‘sweet-apple’ is connected to Aphrodite. The link in turn suggests that the apple is intended to represent a young girl, approaching maturity, who has not yet been wed. The fact that the girl has not been “picked” yet is not due to the fact that the apple is undesirable, but rather that it is out of reach from ‘the apple-gatherers’, her would-be male suitors. A woman is depicted as fruit that others wish to consume, but her would-be suitors are identified purely in relation to this desire. However, because the woman is presented first in the poem, and the male pursuers are identified afterwards and in relation to her, Sappho reverses the ancient Greek tendency to refer to women by a patronymic. A similar process takes place in Schulman’s poem, in which the only male presence in the poem, an ‘apple man’ or ‘apple merchant’, is identified entirely in relation to his crop of fruits which he sells to the first- person speaker.
Grace Schulman (1935-) is an American poet and critic, who has published several collections of poems and one collection of essays, titled First Loves and Other Adventures, as well as critical studies of the poet Marianne Moore. In her
472 Fragment 105a translated by Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 130-131.
206 poem “Apples”, published in The Broken String, the first-person speaker uses images of the titular fruit as a means to access memories, remembering her childhood and issues during her growth to maturity. Despite their sweetness, as in Sappho’s poems apples are tinged with bitterness, foregrounding issues of bodily commodification and threat to the independence of the female or feminised speaker and figures in the poems. The poem reads as follows: Rain hazes a street cart's green umbrella but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons, dry under cling film. The apple man,
who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit, exhibits four like racehorses at auction: Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.
I tried one and its cold grain jolted memory: a hill where meager apples fell so bruised that locals wondered why we scooped them up,
my friend and I, in matching navy blazers. One bite and I heard her laughter toll, free as school’s out, her face flushed in late sun.
I asked the apple merchant for another, Jaunty as Cezanne’s still-life reds and yellows, having more life than stillness, telling us,
uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast but for themselves, and building strength to fly at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,
whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table. Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies, let a loose apple teach me how to spin
at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.
207 Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted, savored and shared, and asked for more.
No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once, hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit, tasting of earth and song, I’d risk exile.
The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist for hail, put on a robe of dandelions, and run out, broken, to weep and curse – for joy.473 Schulman’s poem is arranged in regular stanzas of three lines, the first two of which have ten, eleven and nine syllables per line respectively, but this uniformity breaks into irregular syllabic counts as soon the speaker makes contact with an apple in the third stanza. The outward appearance of initial control of the structure is challenged by contact with the focal fruit. Structurally the poem is dissimilar to Sappho’s work, fraught with lacunae, but the structure here is equally telling of something withheld or missing, unsettled by overarching events. This can be said of much poetic language in general, but is taking place here to a greater extent; the speaker’s voice is artificially forced to fit, signalled by the use of enjambment and irregular sentence and syllabic lengths, incorporated into this pattern. It is the speaker herself who is being “withheld” in this process, unable to escape the apparently formulaic structure into which her thoughts, experiences and observations must be recorded. However, this does not prevent her from finding subtle ways in which to record her frustrations with this system, as demonstrated by the small syllabic subversions.
In the opening of “Apples”, the reader is confronted with a mercantile setting, rather than the peaceful, isolated spaces of Sappho’s fragments. The speaker watches as Rain hazes a street cart's green umbrella but not its apples, heaped in paper cartons, dry under cling film. The apple man,
473 Schulman, “Apples” in The Broken String, p 47-48.
208
who shirrs his mouth as though eating tart fruit, exhibits four like racehorses at auction: Blacktwig, Holland, Crimson King, Salome.474 It is not the speaker who occupies the first stanzas of the poem, but a man, identified wholly in relation to the fruit he sells, and aligned with consumptive, oral gestures. These apples are likened to ‘racehorses’, suggesting an air of prestige, and are given names, unlike the speaker. However, these apples are inherently feminised in this process. Bruce Thomas Boehrer comments in his study of the representation of animals in early modern literature that there has been a traditional ‘conflation of women with horses’, drawing in part from what he identifies as ‘sexual suggestiveness of the horse-and-rider configuration, in part from the shared dynamics of dominance and submission that traverse both gender and species relations, in part form the traditional status of both women and horses as property’.475The cling film about the apples’ bodies is a literal thin veneer of control, making the fruit visible yet detached from the external world, functioning within a separated space, as shown in the observation that they are ‘dry under cling film’ despite the rain.
In Fragment 2, Sappho invites Aphrodite to a sacred space, listing beautiful natural features and alluding to the exclusively female nature of the area: Hither to me from Crete to this holy temple, where is your delightful grove of apple-trees, and altars smoking with incense; therein cold water babbles through apple-branches, and the whole place is shadowed by roses, and from the shimmering leaves the sleep of enchantment comes down; therein too a meadow, where horses graze, blossoms with spring flowers, and the winds blow gently…; there, Cypris, take…and pour gracefully into golden cups nectar that is mingled with our festivities.476 In Schulman’s poem, as in Sappho’s Fragment 2, the apples are sealed off from the elements. Whereas Sappho’s apples are located safely in this sacred setting, Schulman’s are only protected by ‘a street cart’s green umbrella’ and ‘cling film’,
474 Schulman, “Apples”, lines 1-6 in The Broken String, p 47. 475 Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, p 44. 476 Fragment 2 in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 56-57.
209 and are subject to the vendor’s financial motivations. Schulman’s apples are inherently commodified, while Sappho’s occupy a space of subtle “ritualistic immunity”; apples are considered sacred to Aphrodite, and in this space can apparently grow unmolested. In Schulman’s poem, apples are vulnerable bodies that risk exploitation even at the hands of those who fear exploitation themselves, such as the first-person speaker.
The speaker is first reminded of her childhood when she bites into the ‘cold grain’ of the apple, picturing ‘a hill where meagre apples fell so bruised / that locals wondered why we scooped them up’. This natural setting, contrasted with the ‘matching navy blazers’ of ‘my friend and I’, invokes the same kind of peaceful solidarity and security that Sappho’s temple setting offers. The fact that the two girls are the only ones who see value in the bruised apples, one bite of which would make ‘her laughter toll, / free as school’s out, her face flushed in late sun’, indicates a sense of separation between youth and adulthood, innocence and experience, freedom and constraint. They are not part of the mercantile setting, despite partaking of its produce. The two girls are linked by a more natural image of the fruit to ideas of freedom and self-expression, uncaring of the concerns of the ‘locals’. However, the fact that this is only a memory suggests that there has been a change in the speaker’s circumstances, and the absence of her carefree friend compounds this sense of foreboding, despite the speaker’s references to ‘us’ rather than ‘I’ later in the poem.
The division between ‘I’ and ‘us’ also features in Fragment 2, in which Sappho calls for Aphrodite to ‘Hither to me from Crete to this holy temple’, but mentions ‘our festivities’ at the end of the piece. In both poems this contrast suggests that it is the experiences and feelings of the speaker that are predominantly an issue, rather than those of a group. As a result, the poems take on a personal tone, and there is less potential for wide-sweeping arguments against patriarchal authority. Instead, both “Apples” and Fragment 2 demonstrate lingering concerns for preserving the sanctity of individual desires and identity, separate from those of an outside world that is figured as masculine in both poems. In “Apples” the male figure is not referred to by the same term twice, but he is
210 always figured with regards to commodification, and therefore represents a problematic link between the speaker and capitalist society.
The man is called ‘apple man’, ‘apple merchant’ and finally ‘[F]ruit-stand vendor, master of Northern spies’, further emphasising his potential for disruption. Schulman’s description of this man as ‘master of Northern spies’ is complex, suggesting an overarching focus on the ability to perceive and interpret information, as well as to enter and exit forbidden spaces, such as the memories, thoughts and feelings of the speaker. There is a sense of intrusion here, with destructive potential. In addition, the delineation of origin suggests non- belonging. This liminal status is similar to the process of masculine exclusion symbolically taking place in Sappho’s fragment, evident in the fact that the holy space is ‘shadowed by roses’, which are a masculine image, even though they are also associated with Aphrodite. Susan Guettel Cole observes that To the Greek imagination, the landscape was infused with gender. The language classified the earth, continents, most mountains, islands, countries, cities, trees, lakes, and springs as feminine, and sky, ocean, most rivers and streams, winds, and flowers as masculine. The three major continents – Europe, Asia, and Libya – were female; the rivers that formed their boundaries were male.477 Fragment 2 is relatively balanced in terms of both masculine and feminine images from this list provided by Cole, but the fact that flowers ‘shadow’ the setting, and the prevalent position of both goddess and Sapphic speaker, suggest that this is predominantly a space for women.
Neither Fragment 2 nor “Apples” excludes men entirely from the body of the poem, but their presence is uneasy. The second apple that Schulman’s speaker bites has more life than the previous one, ‘jaunty as Cezanne’s still-life reds and yellows’, and speaks, …telling us
uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast but for themselves, and building strength to fly
477 Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience, p 22.
211 at any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,
whirl in the air, and roll off a tilted table. Fruit-stand vendor, master of Northern Spies, let a loose apple teach me how to spin
at random, burn in light and rave in shadows.478 The fruit vendor maintains control of the apples, despite their calls for independent movement and self-interest. The speaker reflects on the uncultivated state of these other apples, ‘uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feast / but for themselves’; foregrounding their existence outside of societal conventions and their decision to move as they wish. However, this self- confessed liberty is entirely dependent on the will of the male vendor, and the speaker must refer to him as ‘master of Northern Spies’ in her request for him to release an apple, to teach her how to think and act in the same way. The speaker’s every act in this poem has been dictated by the will of this vendor; her reminiscing, learning and realisations are all due to his decisions, and his relationship with a capitalist endeavour, even though no money is transferred in the poem. It is possible that the speaker exists outside this economic sphere, but her interaction with the vendor suggests that she must engage with it at some level in order to access the information that she desires.
In a later stanza, the speaker adopts a more commanding tone, similar to that used by Sappho in her call to Aphrodite, telling the vendor to ‘Bring me a Winesap like the one Eve tasted, / savoured and shared, and asked for more’. The isolated space of the apples under wraps and the vendor’s control is breached, since this demand does not recognise a mercantile process: there is no mention of purchase or polite request. The speaker demands the apple and dismisses the transaction that this must ordinarily entail. This image also openly acknowledges the danger of the information and experiences that she desires, connecting with the biblical image of Eve consuming the forbidden fruit. But the speaker recognises this as necessary in order to better experience life:
478 Grace Schulman, “Apples”, lines 15-22 in The Broken String, p 47-48.
212 No fool, she knew that beauty strikes just once, hard, never in comfort. For that bitter fruit, tasting of earth and song, I'd risk exile.
The air is bland here. I would forfeit mist for hail, put on a robe of dandelions, and run out, broken, to weep and curse — for joy.479 The speaker’s desire for intense emotion and experience outweighs any need for conventional acceptance or adherence to market values and practices, but her professed desire to experience these emotionally charged and potentially hazardous activities, strongly linked to the natural world, flowers and weather, is still only figured in the conditional tense. The end lacks certainty of action, even though there is a certainty of desire being articulated. However, in the context of the rest of the poem, this concern is downplayed in light of the speaker’s transition towards active articulation of desire, rather than passive inward reflection and obedient engagement with social conventions.
In Sappho’s Fragment 2, this certainty is also lacking. Since the poem has not been preserved in its entirety, it is unknown what the outcome of this call for Aphrodite truly was, nor is it known whether this poem foregrounded an appeal for control such as can be seen in Fragment 1. Sappho’s Fragment 2 was discovered on a broken potsherd and ‘seems to have been written by someone in the third century B.C.E., written without line breaks in the stanza, but with spaces after the stanzas’.480 Denys Page condemned this style of transmission, stating that the writer ‘was either very careless or very ignorant, or both’, but duBois credits this “careless” writer with survival of the fragment.481 Page’s condemnation should also be criticised because he ignores the ability for poetry to evolve and adapt depending on its means of transmission, and the inherent validity of such transmissions as poems in their own right. It is impossible to tell whether or not the scribe intended the alterations to be poetic, but to completely exclude this as a possibility is not only heavy-handed but ignorant of
479 Grace Schulman, “Apples”, lines 25-30 in The Broken String, p 48. 480 duBois, Sappho is Burning, p 27. 481 duBois, Sappho is Burning, p 27; quoting Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995, p 35.
213 how poetry can evolve. The artist has introduced new lacunae to the piece, and the spaces created offer opportunities for interpretation, guided by the images and ideas that remain. Due to the uncertainty of both the need for Aphrodite to be called to the temple, or the goddess’s response, if indeed she did respond, this poem places Sappho’s presence at the forefront of a ceremonial setting, subtly outweighing any masculine influences and subsuming other women’s presences in the area into part of her own person as ‘our festivities’. By referring to another poem in which apples grow in an isolated space, Fragment 2 reads as part of a larger effort on Sappho’s part to link the act of controlling and coveting a female body with not only the goddess of love, Aphrodite, but also Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance.
In Sappho’s Fragment 105a, Page duBois notes that the girl is described as ‘like fruit’ and that Sappho’s use of ‘the compound word glukumalon, “sweet-apple,” doubles the sense of both its separate components’.482 This move highlights the pervasive sense of division in this poem. The fact that the young woman is depicted as a fruit, rather than an individual with a name, adds to the generality of the poem, suggesting that this piece could have been targeted at any person, without restriction. The generalised nature of this piece indicates Sappho’s intention to connect this experience of being forgotten or ignored by male suitors to a wide range of female listeners. The professed “sweetness” of the apple removes some of the sting from this dehumanising reference, but also emphasises the desirable nature of this natural image.
Page duBois observes that in Aeolic Greek the word usdos, phonetically similar to the word odzos, meaning “branch”, can refer to offspring, linking the coveted, distanced woman with reproductive functions. This link is supported by traditional associations of apples with Aphrodite, references to which can be found in a range of ancient and classical Greek texts.483 Aphrodite interacts
482 duBois, Sappho is Burning, p 41.
483 These include Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, Book 13, 334-360 ff: ‘Hanging in the bridal chamber golden fruit [apples] . . . in place of the wedding-roses… Kypris [Aphrodite] together with the Erotes (Loves) decked out a fine bed for the wedding, hanging in the bridal chamber golden fruit
214 directly with apples in several prominent Greek myths, including the judgement of Paris, in which Paris is called upon to judge between the ‘rival charms’ of Athene the maiden, Aphrodite the nymph, and Hera the crone, and to roll an apple towards his chosen victor. Paris chooses Aphrodite, and the apple ‘symbolising her love bought at the price of his life, will be Paris’s passport to the Elysian Fields, the apple orchards of the west, to which only the souls of heroes are admitted’.484 To throw an apple is considered an act of declaring one’s desire for another person even in Classical Greece, as can be seen in one of Plato’s Epigrams: I throw the apple at you, and if you are willing to love me, take it and share your girlhood with me; but if your thoughts are what I pray they are not, even then take it, and consider how short-lived is beauty.485 Denys Page comments that in other Greek epigrams, ‘the apple [is used] as a symbol representing another common motif, that beauty is short-lived’, suggesting that this is a prevalent image in Greek literature.486 The apple is therefore not only a symbol, but also a mode of signification. This would add a sense of urgency to the process of acceptance, in the short poems of both Plato and Sappho, indicating that the distance between the lover and beloved figures is potentially destructive and wasteful.
By referring to an idealised woman as an apple and pairing this with a symbolic preoccupation with distance, exacerbated by the fragmentary state of the poem,
[apples] from the Nymphai's garden, a worthy lovegift for the bride; rich clusters of their leaves Harmonia and Kadmos twined through their hair, amid the abundance of their bridechamber, in place of the wedding-roses. Still more dainty the bride appeared wearing these golden gifts, the boon of golden Aphrodite’: [translated by] Rouse, Nonnus Dionysiaca,Books 1-15, p 455. Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Book 2, Aratus of Sicyon, History, 2.10.5: ‘[The statue of Aphrodite in Sikyon is] carrying in one hand a poppy and in the other an apple’: [translated and with a commentary by] J.G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Volume 1, p 86. Pausanias also describes Nemesis in Book 1, Attica, Rhamnus, 1.33.3: ‘Of this very marble Phidias wrought an image of Nemesis. On the head of the goddess is a crown ornamented with deers and small figures of Victory: in her left hand she carries an apple bough, in her right hand a bowl, on which are worked figures of Ethiopians’: [translated and with a commentary by] J.G. Frazer, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Volume 1, p 51.
484 Robert Graves, Greek Myths, London: Cassel, 1955, p 21. 485 Plato “Epigram VII” quoted in [ed.] Denys Page, Further Greek Epigrams: Epigrams before A.D. 50 from the Greek Anthology, not included in Hellenistic Epigrams or The Garland of Philip, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p 166. 486 [ed.] Page, Further Greek Epigrams: Epigrams before A.D. 50 from the Greek Anthology, not included in Hellenistic Epigrams or The Garland of Philip, p 163.
215 Sappho reflects on the division between a woman’s body and sexuality, her ability to determine her own fate, and her role as an object of fascination for the ‘apple-pickers’. Page duBois reflects that Sappho’s use of the term, in the grammatical context of the rest of the poem, implies ‘the inevitability of the picking of fruit, since the very name of these persons, the noun that establishes their existence, includes both the name of the fruit and the name of their labour’.487 In Schulman’s poem too, the ‘apple man’ is distinguished entirely with respect to the feminised fruit, but this definition evolves later. In contrast, Sappho’s ‘apple-pickers’ remain entirely that, and are not afforded a more prominent role in either Fragment 2 or 105a. In the context of Fragment 2, it is implied that the ‘apple-pickers’ would be entirely unwelcome in this space, but in Fragment 105s, they are free to forget or harvest the girl as they please. It is this problematic hierarchy of power that Sappho subtly displaces, by reading both poems in relation to one another.
Page duBois asserts that in Fragments 2 and 105a there is a narrative of desire enacted through distance. In the latter fragment, duBois claims: The poet’s gaze in the simile enacts the drama of desire and withholding, presence and absence. The fragmentary status of these lines enables us further to thematise reading as desire. The reader assumes the position of the thwarted gatherers, of the assumed suitors, of the poet; the act of reading is an attempt to constitute the missing fruit, the missing maiden, to bring them to life in words that must always betray the materiality of the real.488 This assessment is persuasive, and the material “distance” between the speaker and her desires emphasised by the fragmentary state of the poem itself. Not even the poem has been preserved in its entirety; its corpus has been broken, distanced from its composite parts, just as the desired woman in the poem is held aloft, away from her suitors and from all but the gaze of the speaker. In this sense, it is not just the ‘sweet-apple’ that is of importance in this poem, but also the branch upon which the apple is suspended and this distance enacted physically in the poem.
487 duBois, Sappho is Burning, p 42. 488 duBois, Sappho is Burning, p 52.
216 The apple branch, rather than apple, connects with popular Greek figurations of the goddess Nemesis instead of Aphrodite. Robert Graves observes that Nemesis, goddess of the sacred grove who, in late myth, became a symbol of divine vengeance on proud kinds, carries an apple-hung branch, her gift to heroes. All Neolithic and Bronze Age paradises were orchard-islands; paradise itself means ‘orchard’.489 In Classical Greek mythology, Nemesis is pictured carrying an apple-bough in one hand, and a wheel in the other, and wears a silver crown adorned with stags; the scourge hangs at her girdle. She is a daughter of Oceanus and has something of Aphrodite’s beauty.490 Apples are commonly associated with desire, and this particular branch symbolises ‘divine vengeance on proud kinds…a gift to heroes’.491 The connection between apple branches and a perceived prize is fitting in Sappho’s fragment, in which the ‘sweet-apple’ is consoled with talk of being simply out of reach, rather than forgotten. However, linkage between the apple and Nemesis threatens to undermine traditional interpretations of this poem entirely: is this poem actually about revenge, and merely masquerading as a poem intended to console a young woman? Vengeance is not typically a theme for which Sappho has been known, let alone in this particular fragment, but by closely reading Fragment 105a, in which a maiden approaching sexual maturity is represented as an apple forgotten on a branch, awaiting harvest and consumption, this theme becomes more apparent. While apples may generally be aligned with the passions of Aphrodite in Greek literary symbolism, a branch would have been more closely aligned with Nemesis. This would encode the girl’s abandonment and her impending “harvest” from the branch by one of ‘the apple-gatherers’ with a more problematic and tense atmosphere, in which the consumption of the girl’s body, symbolised in the picking of the fruit, subtly calls for vengeance.
Relatively little is known about Nemesis and how she was worshipped, which creates additional issues of understanding in this poem, and intensifies the
489 Graves, Greek Myths, p 21. “Proud kinds” is here used to delineate proud individuals and castes. 490 Graves, Greek Myths, p 125. Graves refers to the following sources for his description of Nemesis: Pausanias: I.33.3; Homer’s Cypria quoted by Athenaeus p. 334b; Apollodorus: iii10.7. 491 Graves, Greek Myths, p 21.
217 physical and symbolic roles of lacunae in this poem.492 It is likely however, that even if this poem was intended to represent a symbolic, coveted body of a young women as an apple, that to strive for success in attaining her, as in attaining revenge, is necessary for the apple-pickers. By likening the young woman to revenge, or perhaps by only speaking of revenge and not a woman at all, Sappho’s poem subtly moves out of an expected sphere of focus in her work, but by distancing her own voice from the poem by not using a first-person speaker, at least in the section that we still have to this day, she would not risk censorship.
Aphrodite and Nemesis have been likened to one another in appearance, and here too they are alike due to their association with apples and apple-branches, both of which are applied as symbolic images in Sappho’s fragments. In Fragment 2 ‘cold water babbles through the apple-branches’, linking the masculine image of a stream, or potentially the feminine image of a spring, with Nemesis and vengeance, indicating that in this poem, either male or female figures could be viewed as culpable in the persona’s eyes. The flexibility of this image signals that the speaker is focused entirely on her own comfort in this sacred space, rather than that of other women or men. It is possible to interpret a proto-feminist theme in this creation of a predominantly female space in Fragment 2, but this poem is directed more towards creating a space in which Sappho is most able to articulate her desires, summon Aphrodite, and exclude any who she wishes.
492 David M. Greene observes that in Renaissance art and literature images of Nemesis were frequently mixed up with Fortuna, Fate, Kairos and Venus Marina, and many emblematic illustrators prior to 1600 failed to agree on a proper iconographic tradition for the goddess, namely because she did not have a real pictorial currency in post-classical western civilization. He does remark, however, that Aristotle mentioned the term “nemesis” as meaning somewhere between envy and malice, i.e. righteous indignation in Nichomachean Ethics, II, II08a35; Eudemian Ethics, II, I22Ia3; Magna Moralia, I, II92b8: David M. Greene, “”The Identity of the Emblematic Nemesis”, Studies in the Renaissance (1.10, 1963) p 30. References to Nemesis survive predominantly in literature rather than statuary, including the works of Pindar, in which a prayer to Zeus to grant Pindar’s patrons success and ward off diseases mentions the term νέμεσις to mean ‘the neutral sense of “apportionment”’ but also to refer ‘to the dispensation of woes in particular’: Peter Samaras, quoting Pindar Olympian 8.84-86 in “Nemesis and the Double Intention of Zeus at Pindar Olympian 8.86” Phoenix (3/4, 62, 2008), p 261. The goddess is aligned with notions of fairness, particularly with regards to suffering.
218 Conversely, the sweet-apple at the end of the branch in Fragment 105a is a figure that could potentially harbour a great deal of resentment regarding her situation and distance of her would-be suitors. Her isolation is to an extent self- imposed by the length of the branch, but also imposed upon her by the apple pickers’ lack of resourcefulness. By focusing on the branch, Sappho subtly indicates that it would not be beyond the scope of the persona’s feelings to desire vengeance against those who have placed her on this isolating pedestal. The subtle link between Aphrodite and Nemesis foregrounds issues inherent in a patriarchal system in which women did not have any choice in their husbands, and where the movements of women were frequently dictated by male members of their families and laws sanctioned by male heads of government.
In all three poems, a perceived need for independence is highlighted through use of apples, used as images of control and commodification. By likening these natural images to contrasting images of captivity and control, the female speakers and feminised bodies of the apples are connected to broader desires for self-determination. However, these poems are all relatively pessimistic. Their endeavours are presented as self-serving and limited in scope, and any criticism of their respective societies is cautious. Even though there is very little concrete evidence to suggest that Sappho supported notions of female privilege and authority in ancient Greece, subtle suggestions in her work indicate a lingering desire for control over access to certain spaces, and a sense of discontent over the way in which women were married or not married against their will. In Schulman’s “Apples” there is a similar sense of discontent, but over a perceived sense of conscription within societal expectations of maturity and demure behaviour, at the expense of innocence and freedom of movement and expression. Schulman and Sappho both connect images of apples to intense experiences, privileging the desires of their speakers above those of the figures that surround these.
Horses: Sappho and Schulman Equine imagery in Grace Schulman’s and Sappho’s poetry subtly highlights gender hierarchies in poetic settings, privileging the interests of women. Sappho
219 refers to horses four times in her remaining fragments, including in her famous Fragment 16, in which the Sapphic speaker claims that Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth: but I say, it is what you love493 In this piece, horses are depicted as tools of war and masculinity, but this is not the case in Sappho’s Fragment 2, in which the poet invokes a broader tradition of Greek literature and mythology, by means of her divided setting and physical distance. A similar, subtle sense of difference is enacted in Schulman’s poem “Horses on the Grass”, in which both feminine and masculine deities are critiqued, but the outcome is considerably more favourable for the feminine, active image of the horses.
In Fragment 2 Sappho creates separate spaces for male and female figures, engaging with the works of other Greek writers in the process. Sappho refers to grazing horses in Aphrodite’s holy temple: therein too a meadow, where horses graze, blossoms with spring flowers, and the winds blow gently… there, Cypris, take…and pour gracefully into golden cups nectar that is mingled with our festivities.494 Giulana Lanata notes that this scene is similar to one in Hesiod’s Theogony, in which ‘Poseidon possesses one of the Hesperides “on a soft field and in the middle of spring flowers”’. Lanata also reflects that the scene is akin to images of the “horses of Aphrodite”, representing the girls ready for love in a new fragment of Anacreon, and also from a quatrain in the ephebic collection of Theognis, where commentators generally refer to Anacreon, but there are also similarities with Sappho: ‘O youth, like a horse, since you are sated with fodder, turn again to my stables, desiring a good rider and a beautiful field and a fresh spring and shady woods’.495 In the works of Sappho, as well as in other ancient Greek writers, horses can represent male or female youths and sexuality.
493 Fragment 16, lines 1-3, in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 66-67. Other poems in which Sappho refers to horses include Fragment 2 and Fragment 44, when ‘men unmarried led horses beneath the cars’ during the marriage of Hector and Andromache. 494 Fragment 2, in Campbell, Loeb Classical Library: Greek Lyric I, p 56-57. 495 Guilana Lantana “Sappho’s Amatory Language” in [ed.] Ellen Greene, Reading Sappho: contemporary approaches, p 16. Lanata refers to Hesiod’s Theogony I. 279, Anacreon’s Fragment 346, lines 8-9, and Theognis II 124 ff.
220 Interestingly, even myths of Sappho herself are connected with such images of horses. Gregory Nagy observes that the theme of a white rock, such as the white rock of Leucas from which Sappho supposedly threw herself according to legend, ‘recurs in a myth about Kolonos…The myth of Skironites/Skyphios [Poseidon’s first horse], features themes of leaping, sexual relief, and the state of unconsciousness’.496 While Nagy speaks of Anacreon’s works, his comments are applicable to Sappho and her subtle references to horses.
In Theocritus’s Idylls XIV. The Love of Cynisca, a dialogue between two middle- aged men who have met on the road, one of whom had fallen in love with a woman named Cynisca, reveals a relationship between distance and gender, and connects this to equine imagery. The distance between the speaker and the desired woman is strongly marked not only in the setting of the piece on a road, in the process of travelling, but also in speech. Even though Cynisca is the main focus of the piece, she does not speak independently. Indirectness permeates the scene as Aeschinas, the disappointed lover, obliquely refers to himself by quoting what an oracle told the Megarians, to describe his rejection: Thrace had fine horses, Sparta fine women, and Syracuse fine men, but Argos surpassed them all; and as for Megara, she was out of the reckoning altogether.497 Aeschinas wryly reflects on his abandoned state, describing himself as ‘altogether beside the reckoning, like miserable Megara’ in his disinterested lover’s eyes, linking this image of Thracian horses and the amorous speaker.498 However, he doubly places himself in a position of superiority, despite his romantic rejection: through his comparison to the fine Thracian horses, and also to Megara.
Cynisca’s romantic rejection of Aeschinas results in both characters’ physical
496 Gregory Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990, p 232-233. 497 Theocritus, Idylls, XIV The Love of Cynisca, line 44 in [translated by] Anna Rist, The Poems of Theocritus, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978, p 129. Aeschinas bemoans Cynisca’s departure from him, reflecting that he could be ‘Thracian-cropped’ (short-haired) for all she knew, further strengthening this connection to the oracle’s speech. 498 Theocritus, Idylls, XIV The Love of Cynisca, line 44 in in [translated by] Rist, The Poems of Theocritus, p 129.
221 dislocation, one fleeing and the other travelling to become a soldier, further connecting the equine image to negotiations of space and a latent sexualised threat in the eyes of the female character. By comparing himself to a horse, Aeschinas’ perception of his own superiority is revealed and given an anxious inflection. Cynisca’s reaction speaks of rejection and even fear in her flight, similar to another woman’s fear of horses in the Idylls to be discussed later. In contrast, Sappho’s horses are contained and docile, enclosed within a space in which the speaker is clearly in control. Horses in Theocritus and in Sappho can suggest sexual tensions and struggles for authority that can result, depending on the settings or descriptions in which they are mentioned.499 In Classical Greek mythology horses occasionally appear as violent and carnivorous figures when deities are insulted or patriarchs disobeyed, turning on their masters or another hapless victim and devouring them, suggesting a further link between horses and unstable hierarchies, focused on the powers of men over women, and deities over men.500 Sappho’s calm horses, presented in a peaceful setting, suggest not only that the poet upholds a perceived “natural” order in the settings of her poems, but also that her poems’ hierarchies are acceptable not only to the gods, but in the eyes of mortal authority figures, irrespective of whether this is the case in reality.
499 It is worth briefly considering the physical differences between Thrace and Lesbos when examining the implications of spaces in which horses are present. Geographically the two areas are very different. Greek Thrace is an ancient region that is nowadays composed of parts of Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Bounded by mountains and sea, Thrace has three major agricultural plateaus with fertile land and rivers, which would have been ideal for raising horses. In contrast, the island Lesbos is much smaller, forested and mountainous with a relatively low percentage of grassland. Horses would have been difficult to breed and care for in large numbers in such a location and are much more likely to have been stabled in areas such as those sacred meadows described in Sappho’s poems. For further discussion of the geography of Thrace see: http://www.photius.com/countries/greece/geography/greece_geography_thrace.html Viewed 14 June 2012. 500 Lycurgas, King of the Edonians, was driven mad and led to Mount Pangaeum to be pulled apart by wild horses after insulting the god Dionysius. Hippomenes punished his daughter Leimone for having a premarital affair by imprisoning her with a horse that was maddened by hunger to the point of eating her. Glaucus, King of Corinth, and Diomedes, King of Thrace, were also devoured by their horses: Yiannis G. Papakostas, Michael D. Daras, Ioannis A. Liappas, Manolis Markianos, “Horse Madness (hippomania) and hippophobia”, History of Psychiatry (16.4, 2005), p 467-468. Glaucus was punished by Aphrodite for preventing his mares from breeding and feeding them human flesh, in order to make them faster in chariot races, giving a sexual element to this punishment. It is the disruption of a perceived “natural” order, be it respect for deities or sexual impulses, which results in violence from the horses. Sappho’s enclosed and becalmed horses suggest that both of these areas are being properly upheld.
222
The setting of Fragment 2, in which a female deity and speaker have prominence, and natural images of masculine and feminine trees, flowers, fruits and running water are balanced in favour of feminine precedence, suggests that the horses in this poem are intended to be interpreted as feminine. This would be appropriate, since even though horses are associated with warfare and masculinity in another of Sappho’s poems, comparison to women is also traditional. The ancient Greek writer Philocylides claimed, to popular belief, that women’s characters and morality stem from four sources: beautiful women from horses, industrious women from bees, dirty but decent women from pigs, and violent, mean women from dogs.501 Hundreds of horses are mentioned in Greek mythology, some even by name, suggesting the power, wealth and glory of their owners, mortal and immortal alike.502 Alternatively, horses have been used by other writers as references to humans; Theognis characterises male and female characters as horses in his work, and Ibycus calls himself a horse too old for racing when speaking of being in love.503 Sappho’s horses, surrounded by the beauty of the meadow and the presence of Aphrodite, add an element of prestige to this scene, but also a sense of peace. The horses are grazing; they are neither tacked nor harnessed to a chariot. There are no suggestions in the poem that they are tame.
The implication that these are feminised, untamed horses, thriving in a setting isolated from male influences and under the rule of Aphrodite only, is a stark contrast to the works of Anacreon.504 In Anacreon’s “Thracian filly” and
501 Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998, p 33. 502 The most famous named horse in Greek mythology is the winged horse Pegasus, but others include some of the steeds of Helios, Ares, Zeus, Poseidon and Eos. In the Iliad 5.711 Hera harnesses ‘the gold-bridled horses’ to go to battle, reflecting not only her wealth, but also on her freedom to go to war under her own standard. 503 Theognis 1248-1252 and 1267-70, the male eromenos is compared to a horse, and at 257- 260 a woman calls herself a lovely mare who carries a bad rider. Ibycus calls himself a horse in PMG 287. 504 Horses have been alternately linked with masculinity and femininity in Greek mythology and can be viewed as a potentially hermaphroditic image, as well as a polymorphic figure through the presence of human-horse hybrids in Greek mythology. The origins of centaurs in Greek mythology is uncertain, but it appears that ancient Greeks viewed them as the offspring of interspecies breeding, further connecting horses with sexuality: Alex Scobie, “The Origins of
223 “Herotime” poems, young women are compared to grazing horses at liberty, and their freedom called into question. An exploitative gaze dominates both poems, in which sexual conquest over Herotime and the unnamed girl in the “Thracian filly” poem is paramount to the speaker’s interests. Theocritus also links horses with sexuality in Idyll XV. The Women at the Adonis Festival, in which the festival for Aphrodite’s doomed love for Adonis serves as the background for two women’s discussion. The two women, accompanied by Praxinoa’s child and their two maids, partake in the festival and discuss their husbands at the same time. The highly sexualised focus of this scene is almost immediately accompanied by references to horses and the fear that they inspire in both women, as well as complaints about their husbands. Gorgo refers to the dangers posed by ‘the crush and the horses, Praxinoa, I’ve scarcely got here alive’ in the opening of the scene, and horses feature again when Praxinoa states that ‘Ever since I was a girl, two things have frightened me more than anything else, a horrid chilly snake and a horse’, as they watch the crowd and its agitated horses pass.505 Horses invite fear for both characters, and Praxinoa links this with the more overtly phallic image of a snake.506 Such fear is not entirely unexpected, particularly considering the fact that an old woman in the same scene also
‘Centaurs’”, Folklore (89.2, 1978) p 142. This physical alignment between horses and humans as one entity, if not necessarily as a sexualised image, is not unique to the Greeks. The Mayans, upon meeting the Spaniards with their guns and horses, believed that horse and rider were a single entity. The Incas were similarly convinced. The Greeks also combined women with birds to produce the fearful image of the Sirens; yet another human-animal hybrid that has anxious connections with sexuality. 505 Theocritus, Idylls, XV The Women at the Adonis Festival, lines 4; line 57. 506 Another parallel can be drawn here with apple imagery discussed earlier and implicitly also with the Biblical temptation of forbidden fruit offered to Eve by a serpent in the Garden of Eden. Even though Sappho does not engage with Christian or Jewish religious thinking, her imagery is reminiscent of these tensions and likely to be familiar to later readers. Horses do not occupy a place of prominence in the Garden of Eden, but do occasionally feature as important figures in the Bible, including as the mounts of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelation: Death, Famine, War and Conquest. In addition, horses are described as creatures of warfare, associated with powerful displays of violence and virility, the most dramatic example of which can be found in the book of Job: ‘Do you give the horse his might? Do you clothe his neck with a mane? Do you make him leap like the locust? His majestic snorting is terrifying. He paws in the valley and exults in his strength; he goes out to meet the weapons. He laughs at fear and is not dismayed; he does not turn back from the sword. Upon him rattle the quiver, the flashing spear, and the javelin. He paws in the valley and exults in his strength; he goes out to meet the weapons. With fierceness and rage he swallows the ground; he cannot stand still at the sound of the trumpet.’: Job 39: 19-24. This demonstration of equine strength and potential for violence is also masculinised, as the horse is called by a male pronoun, creating a very similar image to that of horses in Greek mythology as creatures for war and the dangerous sport of chariot racing.
224 mentions Troy.507 Sappho’s poem does not refer to sexual conquest, but focuses on the broader capability of the speaker to control the setting, and implicitly, those who live or linger within this space. Both Anacreon’s and Sappho’s speaker can be interpreted as exploitative figures in this sense, but Sappho’s work is subtler and can be read as a criticism of the very kind of sexual desire that is described in Anacreon’s poems.
In the “Thracian filly” poem, Anacreon adopts the voice of a desiring male speaker, addressing a young and sexually innocent woman as ‘Thracian filly’, dehumanising her, but also endowing her with the beauty, youth and vitality of the animal. The speaker threatens to take her freedom away and to compel the filly to do his bidding, fulfilling roles conventionally expected of horses in ancient Greece: Thracian filly, why do you look at me sideways and flee stubbornly – do you think that I don’t know anything clever? Let me tell you, I could easily throw a bridle on you, and holding the reins I could turn you around the turnposts of the racecourse. But now instead you graze in the meadow and play, skipping lightly, since you have no skilled horseman to ride you.508 The speaker scorns the innocence of the girl and offers to exploit this, alluding to his ability to traverse spaces that she may otherwise consider safe. Distance is not created in this poem; its absence is what creates tension in a feminist reading. Patricia Rosenmeyer considers the young girl to be engaged in innocent
507 The Fall of Troy, detailed in Homer’s Iliad and the background for Odysseys’ return to Ithaca in the Odyssey, features a huge wooden horse in which Achaean soldiers were concealed and then able to break into the fortified city by pretending that the massive construction was a gift. The unwitting Trojans dragged the horse within the walls, only to have the Greeks emerge in the night and ransack the city. The image of the Trojan horse is here associated not only with violence and masculinity, but also deceit and conquest. 508 Anacreon PMG 417 (Gentili fr. 48) in Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. “Girls at Play in Early Greek Poetry” The American Journal of Philology (2.125, 2004), p 170.
225 play, viewing the meadow a safe haven, while the voyeuristic male narrator considers such a space to be in need of invasion and male conquest.509 Rosenmeyer compares this kind of sanctuary to Sappho’s Fragment 2, observing that this is another place ‘where men are excluded and the play may be sensual but not explicitly sexual in nature’.510 This interpretation of space does not give due weight to Sappho’s references to fruit-bearing trees and call to the goddess of love. Sexual desire is entrenched in this space, but it is controlled by Sappho’s speaker, who has the ability to invite or not invite Aphrodite to the ritualistic setting. The freedom of the speaker, combined with her control over the setting and who may or may not enter, suggests that the feminised grazing horses may refer to young women, similar to Anacreon’s poem, who can alternately be screened or exposed to desire at the speaker’s whim. This is not a “safe haven”, but a space under another’s control and into which the speaker has already invaded.
Anacreon’s fragmentary poem about a young woman named Herotime and her growth to maturity is cautionary, referring scathingly to the woman’s promiscuity. Meadows and horses symbolise Herotime’s physical and emotional development, and also her transgression from societal standards of female behaviour. In the opening of the poem, Herotime is safe in her mother’s care, but she runs away. The loss of a female protector heralds a change in Herotime’s fortunes, eliciting mocking criticism from Anacreon’s speaker. Initially the speaker is flattering, but the tone shifts once Herotime leaves the meadow: Nor… and in addition you have timid wits, O beautiful-faced of children. And your mother thinks that she tends you carefully inside her home, but (really) you graze in the meadows of hyacinth where Kypris tied down lovely mares, (loosed) from the yoke.
509 Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. “Girls at Play in Early Greek Poetry”, p 172. 510 Ibid.
226 And you leapt into the middle of the crowd, so that many of the citizens feel their wits fluttering. O much-trafficked, much-trafficked Herotime…511 Eva Stehle, Claude Calame, and Patricia Rosenmeyer argue that the meadow is a ‘space of Eros’ in which Aphrodite’s influence, symbolised by her horses, leads to sexual experience, forming a boundary between childhood and adulthood, virginity and its loss.512 In Sappho’s Fragment 2, the same tension can be identified in Aphrodite’s summoned presence, images of grazing horses, and restriction of masculine elements from and within the piece. However, the ‘lovely mares’ of Anacreon’s poem are contained within the temple grounds, and the speaker’s control over this is unchallenged. Sappho’s Fragment 2 preserves the sanctity of the meadow, keeping the horses grazing in peace, and excluding the images of domesticity and the public sphere mentioned in “Herotime”.
It is interesting to observe that even though it would be more commonly expected that a female poet would refer to a domestic space, this is not the case in Sappho’s works. It is within a ritualised space that the speaker appears to feel most in control, creating an atmosphere of peace and certainty. In Fragment 2 the speaker invites Aphrodite to enter, but at the same time is determined to specify when this entry may take place; ‘during our festivities’. A thinly-veiled order has been issued here, stressing the relationship between Sappho and Aphrodite, mortal and immortal, as one in which the poet is capable of issuing demands.
A similar relationship between mortals and immortals is also created in Grace Schulman’s poem “Horses on the Grass”. This poem comes from a section titled “Names” in her collection Burn Down the Icons, and is accompanied by pieces similarly focused on natural imagery, linked to human identities, and tensions
511 Anacreon PMG 346 (Gentili fr. 60) in Patricia A. Rosenmeyer. “Girls at Play in Early Greek Poetry”, p 174. 512 Claude Calame [trans. Janet Lloyd] The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p 156; Eva Stehle “Retreat from the Male: Catullus 62 and Sappho’s Erotic Flowers” Ramus (1.6, 1977) p 94; Patricia Rosenmeyer, “Girls at Play in Early Greek Poetry”, p 176.
227 inherent in this imposed unity.513 Unlike most other poems in this section, Schulman does not use a first-person speaker. Instead, the poem describes the turmoil of a maple tree’s monarchical presence in a lawn, contrasted with the freedom and mobility of horses, from a third-person omniscient point of view. The poem that sequentially follows “Horses on the Grass”, titled “That Maple”, continues this theme of a problematic, towering presence in the area, suggesting that it must be removed in order to facilitate female self-expression. “Horses on the Grass” reads: From the tower window the moon draws a silver maple’s shadow across a spangled lawn; horses rear, manes lashing the air, front legs floating. Half monarch, half shadow, the tree aspires to the sky; one branch, cracked by lightning, scrapes the earth. Reflected on the grass, bent twigs are curved hooves, galloping as the moon rises.
Divided it stands in wholeness, mourning its victories, praising the god of trees, the king of horses.
The tree holds souls in a bark prison poised like a runner at the starting line— and bolts free, wildly
513 Schulman, Burn Down the Icons, p 32; p 29-38.
228 pawing the ground those roots lie under.514 The poem is strikingly dissimilar in terms of atmosphere to Sappho’s Fragment 2, but the poets both use images of horses in an open space as a means of criticising symbols of authority, connected with gender. Schulman’s anonymous, ambiguously gendered speaker describes a night scene in which the moon rises over a silver-maple tree: From the tower window the moon draws a silver-maple’s shadow across a spangled lawn; horses rear, manes lashing the air, front legs floating.515 Unlike Sappho’s peaceful, grazing horses, Schulman’s equines are agitated and active, disturbing the serene setting otherwise established in the poem’s opening. This lack of peace, in contrast to Sappho’s fragment, suggests that the masculinised maple tree, aspiring to monarchy and godhood, has compromised the speaker’s control over the setting. Despite the horses’ aggression, their front legs are ‘floating’, suggesting an ethereal, elegant aspect to the scene, indicating that it is appropriate for these figures to challenge the aspirations of the maple. Schulman denotes the maple tree as ‘Half monarch, / half shadow’, suggesting that this transition is partially complete, hence the tension in the scene.516 The tree’s rise to power is entrenched with misery, entrapment, and incomplete metamorphosis: …. the tree aspires to the sky; one branch, cracked by lightning scrapes the earth.517 The inability of the tree to complete its transformation leads to the final stanza’s criticism, asserting that this hardship is a form of imprisonment. This image is
514 Schulman, Burn Down the Icons, p 32. 515 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, lines 1-7 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32. 516 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, line 8 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32. 517 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, lines 9-12 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32.
229 contrasted with further equine imagery, suggesting a need for balance between the two: The tree holds souls in a bark prison poised like a runner at the starting line – and bolts free, wildly pawing the ground those roots lie under.518 The identity of the souls is not revealed, but the tensions between the horses and maple come to a head, resulting the maple taking on equine traits by bolting and ‘pawing the ground’ in order to access its roots. Both are anxious gestures, and when undertaken the tree appears to subsume the horses within itself, just as it has engulfed the souls. The ending does not create peace or a balance between the two natural images, but results in the loss and subsuming of one into the other.
The horses vanish from the poem in the final stanza of “Horses on the Grass”. The description of the maple as ‘a bark prison’ indicates that no resolution has been met, and the image of the futile pawing at the earth recognises a need for further action. The problematic influence is identified as ‘those roots’ from which the maple stems. The inability to access these roots, even at the end of the poem, results in no positive conclusion being reached; the maple is still caught between reality and ideology, and the female presence has been silenced entirely. Schulman has paired the image of the stricken tree with the horses by means of a lunar analogy, similar to those found in ancient Greek legends and cults, with the result that this oppression of the equine presence reflects a rejection of feminine power in general: Reflected on the grass, bent twigs are curved hooves, galloping as the moon rises.519 The tree has been broken, presented as ‘bent twigs’ and a reflection, rather than entire entity. It is through this process of breakage that the feminine image of
518 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, lines 21-25 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32. 519 Grace Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, lines 13-16 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32.
230 the horses and moon are able to assert the most control. The poem’s emphasis on the ‘curved’ hooves and their connection to the moon is strongly reminiscent of ancient Greek myths, in which horses and the moon have been paired in lunar horse cults. Robert Graves observes that in earlier Greek myth the sun yields precedence to the moon – which inspires the greater superstitious fear, does not grow dimmer as the year wanes, and is credited with the power to grant or deny water to the fields. The moon’s three phases of new, full, and old recalled the matriarch’s three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman), and crone.520 Worship of the moon in Greece has historically been paired with worship of horses, due to their “moon-shaped” hooves, but also with women and the growth of young women to physical maturity. The winged horse Pegasus was considered sacred to the ‘triple-goddess’ of the moon, because the horse with its moon-shaped hooves figured in the rain-making ceremonies and the instalment of sacred kings; his wings were symbolical of a celestial nature, rather than speed.521 Later Greek mythology, likely familiar to Sappho, connects images of horses with sexuality, but also with sexual unavailability. 522 Schulman’s division between the ambiguously gendered horses and maple is enacted through an equine link with the moon and the maple’s praise for ‘the god of trees, the king of horses’, suggesting subtle allegiance with female divinity and male deity as well as kingship.523 This poem is therefore not intended to critique gender-
520 Graves, Greek Myths, p 13-14. Graves’ work on Greek goddesses heavily influenced and is influenced by his poetic pseudo-historical work The White Goddess, but his observations on Greek mythology are still relevant to this discussion. 521 Graves, Greek Myths, p 17. Interestingly, Pegasus has historically been used as a symbol for poetry: the wild, untamed Pegasus representing raw poetic inspiration and the golden bridle that he wears representing reason, logic, and restraint needed to better understand poetry. 522 This can be seen in the myth of Poseidon’s rape of Demeter, in which Demeter, disheartened by the fruitless search for her daughter Persephone, is chased by Poseidon and transforms into a mare to avoid his amorous advances. Undeterred, Poseidon turned himself into a stallion, resulting in Demeter later giving birth to the horse Arion and nymph Despoena. Graves suggests that this myth records a Hellenic invasion of Arcadia: Demeter was pictured at Philgalia as the mare-headed patroness of the pre-Hellenic horse cult. Horses were sacred to the moon, because their hooves make a moon-shaped mark, and the moon was regarded as the source of all water; hence the association of Pegasus with springs of water. The early Hellenes introduced a larger breed of horse into Greece from Trans-Caspia, the native variety having been about the size of a Shetland pony and unsuitable for chariotry. They seem to have seized the centres of the horse cult, where their warrior-kings forcibly married the local priestesses and thus won a title to the land; incidentally supressing the wild-mare orgies.: Greek Myths, p 62. 523 Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, line 20 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32.
231 based hierarchies in general, but to focus on processes of deification and worship of both male and female figures.
The ritualistic setting of Schulman’s poem is similar to that of Sappho’s Fragment 2 since by invoking the moon in the opening stanza, the piece takes on a peacefully worshipful tone. The ‘tower window’ is used as a vantage point for the beautiful scene that unfolds, ‘a silver-maple’ throwing shadows ‘across a spangled lawn’ is surrounded by horses. In Fragment 2, the persona speaks, presumably, at the side of an altar, referring to apple trees and the roses that shadow the area. Horses invoke a sense of peace and security for feminine figures. In both poems the speaker is focused on the internal hierarchies of these settings and the influences of an external deity on these. In Schulman’s work, unlike Sappho’s, this space is eventually traversed. The desire for freedom has been passed on to the maple tree that has subsumed the feminised images of the horses, but it is poorly understood, suggested by the fact that it ‘bolts free, wildly’ and paws at the ground, but does not appear to elicit any change from this process.524 The poem that follows, “That Maple”, continues this struggle by recognising in the opening lines ‘You are right, that maple / ruined the landscape; it was out of place’.525
The division between the two poems, in which tensions created by “Horses on the Grass” and its pessimistic ending are only answered in the first lines of “That Maple”, is a form of fragmentation. The lacuna created by the division of these two poems into separate pieces, despite their connected themes and images, indicates a pervasive need for an independent female speaking voice to rise in this “gap” between the poems. The full version of the poem reads: You are right, that maple ruined the landscape; it was out of place. How it stood in the middle of things, hunched on the lawn screening a marble nymph, her raised arms making circles in water.
524 Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, line 24 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32. 525 Schulman,”That Maple”, lines 1-2 in Burn Down the Icons, p 33.
232 Out of the far reach of the eye I never saw its branches; eyes rose over them to mountains, painting images on spindly twigs.
You know trees as they are; I gave leaves and dressed it in gold like a love. I remember a musical wind, the crash-on-crash of thunder; I never saw lightning vein sky silver and crack a branch that lashed the lawn and tracked the earth like a heart.526
“That Maple” features prominent use of the first-person, as Schulman’s persona freely condemns the presence of the maple in the scene: How it stood in the middle of things, hunched on the lawn screening a marble nymph, her raised arms making circles in the water.527 Far from being an oppressive presence, the speaker merely finds the maple tree to be a nuisance that she can act upon. Not only has a female voice risen in this lacuna, but it has gained prominence. The reiteration of ‘You know’ and ‘You are right’ suggests certainty in knowledge, as well as stability. The female figure of the marble nymph is portrayed as a victim of the tree, hidden from view by its bulk, but the speaker is unaffected, instead reflecting on her previous actions towards similar trees:
526 “Horses on the Grass” and “That Maple” are published in sequence in both Burn Down the Icons and Schulman’s later collection Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002. “That Maple” appears in Burn Down the Icons at p 33, and in Days of Wonder at p 8, while “Horses on the Grass” is on p 32 and p 7 respectively. 527 Schulman, “That Maple”, lines 3-6 in Burn Down the Icons, p 33.
233 You know trees as they are; I gave one leaves and dressed it in gold like a love.528 The speaker’s relaxed tone in her dialogue recognises her ability to act upon the tree and bestow leaves upon it, suggesting a deified role on her part, similar to the lunar deity alluded to in “Horses on the Grass”. There is an affectionate and dismissive tone to her words, compounded by her lack of compassion for the tree when it is struck by lightning and destroyed: …I never saw lightning vein sky silver and crack a branch that lashed the lawn and tracked earth like the heart.529 Lightning has already attacked this maple tree in “Horses on the Grass”, ‘one branch, cracked by lightning / scrapes the earth’, but the damage has been completed in the aftermath of this speaker’s rise to prominence.530 The maple’s own voice, indirect in the first poem, is now entirely distanced and lost in the second piece.
Both masculine and feminine hierarchies, based on gods, goddesses and monarchs, have been destroyed in these two poems, leaving the female speaker with control over their transmission. Schulman creates a space in which her first-person speaker is able to silence warring forces and assert control over both poems, using the lacuna between both poems to rearrange the hierarchies and create another voice. Feminised horses, as in Sappho’s Fragment 2, are not necessarily protected from external forces by the speaker, but are to fall under her authority, along with other elements in these poems, emphasising the importance of control over space and speech in these isolated settings.
528 Schulman, “That Maple”, lines 11-14 in Burn Down the Icons, p 33. 529 Schulman, “That Maple”, lines 17-22 in Burn Down the Icons, p 33. 530 Schulman, “Horses on the Grass”, lines 11-12 in Burn Down the Icons, p 32.
234 Conclusion Lacunae pervade much of Sappho’s work, with the result that some of her smaller fragments have been afforded relatively little scholarly attention, on the basis that these are too physically stunted to offer much information. However, smaller, broken works, examined in this chapter, can provide evidence of consistent trends across her oeuvre. The fact that some sections have survived and that these use similar natural images and settings as those found in larger, more intact pieces, suggest that these techniques may have featured prominently across Sappho’s entire, though now lost, body of work. Selectively isolated and ritualistic settings, gendered natural images, accompanied by any intentional lacunae, would have challenged listeners’ expectations in Sappho’s own lifetime, consequently emphasising the speaker’s control. It is this legacy of subtle control that has been adapted and applied by Grace Schulman through animal and plant based imagery, as well as divisions in setting.
Space is actively defined and its selective boundaries and rules enforced in Sappho’s and Schulman’s examined works. Ritualistic, isolated, and peaceful settings are subtly encoded with gendered imagery, creating hierarches in which Sappho’s speaker occupies a position of primacy that is endorsed and sustained by natural imagery and exclusionary settings. Lacunae among the poet’s fragments emphasise this sense of distance between the speaker and the reader, as well as the symbolic distance in a hierarchical sense. In addition, Sappho’s selective use of natural imagery, encoded with references to gender via mythology and ancient Greek social conventions, supplant notions of patriarchal authority and support the imposition of Sappho’s desires and control over certain spaces.
Such a move in Sappho’s own lifetime would have challenged restrictive, prevailing views of women. For this reason, it can be argued that Sappho was not a strictly demure or passive poet in the eyes of her contemporary audiences. In fact, these poems illustrate tendencies to challenge and construct hierarchies in even innocuous, peaceful settings and stock images. Similarly, Grace Schulman manipulates connections between her speakers and their
235 surroundings to reveal deep-seated concerns about development and control, particularly of patriarchal figures over female, while still embracing scenes emblematic of vulnerability and femininity. For both poets, outwardly tender memories framed by beautiful settings are underpinned by successful struggles for control and independence from other hierarchies, resulting in new hierarchies, in which the poetic speaker has full primacy, being created and consolidated.
236 Chapter Six
Taking Back Sappho: Cronin, Kizer, and Wright
Introduction Many women poets, writing in English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have grappled with ideas of Sappho via creative adaptations of her poetry, mythologies, and contextual details. It is no longer considered controversial to engage with Sappho as a lesbian figure; much poetry and scholarship has been dedicated to this facet of her life and work. In addition, there is greater openness, shown in recent translations of her work examined in earlier chapters, to interpretations of Sappho as a poetically terse and thematically harsh figure. Despite this increasingly permissive atmosphere in modern Australian and American poetic circles, the works of many later women poets have not yet been recognised as having Sapphic engagements via images of bodily violence, lack or presence of voice, and fixation on control.
The absence of such critiques will be addressed via close references to the works of three poets not typically associated with Sappho or Sapphic themes, demonstrating technical and ideological connections with the poet. English- language poets Judith Wright, Carolyn Kizer, and M.T.C. Cronin, and their focus on bodily manipulation in some poetry, comparable to that in Sappho’s Fragment 1 and other works, will be highlighted. Cronin, Kizer, and Wright have adapted elements of Sappho’s poetry to empower female personae, even in dismal poetic settings, reminiscent of the Phaon legend and Fragment 31. Some poets have also used these as a basis to deliver openly feminist critiques. These creative adaptations of Sappho’s technical and thematic approaches also represent more stages of Sapphic engagement: openly celebrating the poet’s desires for control in her work, its translations, and her transmission; and adapting these to suit other agendas. To identify these poets as Sapphic is to not only read another layer of intertextual depth in their works, but to also recognise the evolution of Sappho’s literary legacy, beyond the scope of wholly supportive, communal and loving poetry between women. Poetry that
237 selectively empowers a first-person female speaker, engages with fragmentary bodily imagery, and results in control over a particular settings, can also be described as inspired by or adapted from Sappho’s poetics.
Judith Wright Australian poet Judith Wright (1915-2000) uses poetic figures akin to Sappho’s speakers and idealised female characters to challenge ideas of ownership and control over female identities, with a particularly scathing focus on patriarchal and heterosexual figurations. In “Naked Girl and Mirror” and “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, taken respectively from The Other Half (1966) and Woman to Man (1949), first-person speakers challenge figurations of female passivity and physical desirability by aggressively rejecting, then repossessing, images of softness and heterosexuality, depicted as interactions between the primary persona and a mirrored image. Alienation of the “other”, reflected image functions as a form of bodily breakage, creating parallels with the frustrations and power plays used and examined by Sappho. Wright’s fragmentation of her speakers’ bodies is comparable to that of Sappho, but her feminist critique goes much further than Sappho’s ambiguously proto-feminist commentaries, engaging strongly with ideas posited by Adrienne Rich.
Wright’s female figures strongly echo Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”; promoting women-only relationships that hostilely confront heterosexual imagery. The Sapphic angle to this stems from the prevalence of one female figure, in spite of the outwardly communal atmosphere being generated as the poems progress, as well as a preoccupation with bodily fragmentation and violence. Rich directly attached her definition of such a supportive, lesbian existence to the historical image of Sappho’s “school for girls”, promoting ‘female friendship and comradeship’ and explorations of the ‘erotic’ beyond heteronormative parameters.531 There is an overtly sexualised, objectifying note to Wright’s descriptions of female bodies in these
531 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in [eds.] Stevi Jackson, Sue Scott, Feminism and Sexuality, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, p 136.
238 poems, extended by the speaker as she regards her reflection, as well as the nameless figures whom she criticises.
In “Naked Girl and Mirror” and “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, Wright demonstrates a primary motivation for Rich’s essay: her speakers feel an acute loss of control and resentment due to changes in their bodies and societal perceptions of these. The poems deal with love and women-only relationships, but are orientated primarily around anxieties for control. Lynda Hart comments that desire, like theatre, takes place in a fantasy that one person constructs with others, and that this, ‘like any communal experience, requires a relinquishing of control.’532 Hart refers here to desire for love, and in Sappho’s fragments this statement is supported to a lesser extent. Control may initially appear to be lost, but this is proven to be illusory by the overall structure, form and content of each fragmentary poem, despite situations that outwardly appear to be beyond the speakers’ control. Likewise, Wright’s speakers appear to have lost control over their perceptions of their own bodies, warped by objectification that is portrayed as symptomatic of heterosexual desire. In both poems, Wright’s speakers feel that they must reject their physical selves in order to escape these pressures, but slowly combat this compulsion. Their conclusions support Rich’s fierce criticism of the indoctrination of heterosexual romance among women, ‘beamed at her from childhood out of fairy tales, television, films, advertising, popular songs, wedding pageantry’, and described as ‘a tool ready in the procurer’s hand and one which he does not hesitate to use’ to enforce female acceptance of male sexual desire.533
In “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, the first-person speaker confronts her “other”, reflected self, illustrating a hostile breakdown of self-identification: This dark grotesque, this my familiar double I meet again among the lights and sawdust. This is the changeling head that weights my shoulders,
532 Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p 9- 10. 533 Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, p 134.
239 this sidelong china smile that masks my trouble: and there is no escape in the brass music, no loss of self among the moving crowd. Ah, my clown-lover, how shall we dissemble?534 Wright’s speaker showcases her bodily fragmentation, referring to a ‘familiar double’, ‘changeling head’, ‘my shoulders’ and ‘china smile’, and combines this with an intriguing ‘no loss of self’. Like Sappho’s speaking personae, Wright’s speaker is constantly self-aware. She consistently applies possessives, firmly asserting control over the contested body. Like Sappho’s speaker in Fragment 31, Wright’s persona in this uncomfortable setting maintains a strong sense of individual control, but is frustrated by how exterior forces threaten to shift her self-perception. Just as the Sapphic speaker in Fragment 31 cannot tear herself away from the heterosexual scene before her, Wright’s speaker laments that ‘there is no escape’, and must depict further imagined physical dissections in order to find consolation.
The second stanza repeats the line ‘I do not fear’, referring to ‘the small rat-teeth of time’ and ‘the splintering blow of death’. Fear is directed towards the ‘faces in the frame’, indicating that the speaker does not fear natural forces, but societal perceptions.535 The frightening prospect of fragmented bodies not created by the speaker, nor controlled by her, is strongly reminiscent of Sappho’s urgent desire to maintain control over all bodies present in her poetic settings. Wright channels Rich’s condemnation of patriarchal and heteronormative forces: These are the foe, the faces in this frame, the twisted images that from the mirror grimace like hatred, wrenching us awry till love’s a club-foot pander, sly and lame. 536 Wright’s discriminatory reference to a disabled body is both insensitive and inappropriate, but it also emphasises her speaker’s hostile, vicious obsession with physicality, and the dangerous potential of degrading perceptions of others’ bodies. Hatred and compulsion surround the speaker and her reflection,
534 Judith Wright, “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, lines 1-7 in Judith Wright: Collected Poems, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994, p 46. 535 Wright, “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, lines 8-9; 11. 536 Wright, “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, lines 11-14.
240 but she gives the instruction ‘Look in the mirror’ by way of response, instigating reconnection with herself and therefore, the other female figure in the poem.
The speaker’s resolution echoes Rich’s argument that There is a nascent feminist political content in the act of choosing a woman lover or life partner in the face of institutionalised heterosexuality. But for lesbian existence to realise this political content in an ultimately liberating form, the erotic choice must deepen and expand into conscious woman identification – not lesbian feminism.537 Wright’s speaker must consciously choose to accept her own reflections, embrace her own bodies, and simultaneously attack the heterosexual gaze in order to overcome this hostile atmosphere. Rich criticises the absence of choice rather than heterosexuality as a whole, urging awareness of the history of female resistance.538 Wright demonstrates conscious exercise of such a choice through her adaptation of Sapphic speakers and bodily imagery, constructing women-only relationships with not only her speaker and reflection, but also direct identification with Sappho’s speaker in Fragment 31.
Sappho separates from her “dying” body in Fragment 31 by describing its destruction, and then ironizes this move by continuing to speak. Wright’s speaker undergoes a similar process as the outside faces, termed ‘twisted images’, become increasingly malevolent, ‘wrenching us awry’ until both figures are separate, crippled, and disconnected - features treated problematically with contempt by Wright’s speaker - as directed by the crowd.539 However, the speaker maintains control over her own voice as she documents the assault. The speaker’s dignified tone and consistent possession of the shifting body images portrays the destruction of beauty as less important than loss of self-expression. Such an interpretation is strongly reminiscent of Sappho’s treatment of eloquence, particularly prominent in Fragment 58 and Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus, in which the Sapphic speaker would rather commit suicide than lose eloquence as well as control over Phaon. Wright’s persona firmly maintains connection
537 Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, p 140. 538 Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”, p 141. 539 Wright, “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, lines 11; 12. A.
241 with her aging appearance, no longer heterosexually desirable, despite the persecution she now faces from the crowd. In addition, the crowd remains depersonalised and voiceless, ‘Silent, unleashed and savage’, a ‘nameless’ entity that ‘sways in its coil and waits’.540 Like Sappho, Wright’s eloquent and persistently self-controlled speaker contrasts sharply with a dehumanised threat. Sappho excludes images of hostile crowds from her own work, preferring to solicit and direct the responses of specific audiences, and Wright ultimately does the same by collapsing the image back into the psyche of the speaker, returning to the speaker and reiterating the poem’s focus on her experiences, rather than the crowd’s verdict.
The final four lines of “The Mirror at the Fun Fair” show that despite the entrapment of the speaker and her silent double, they remain separate from the whims of the serpentine, hostile crowd, elevating both female speaker and female image: The crowd repeats, repeats our crooked faces; our bird-thin hands, our desperate eyes that stare, and, “Hate,” each lover cries to his companion. “O hate that is my pain. O desolate fear.” The hostility of the crowd and its calls for separation and rejection by the speaker of her reflection, aged by the ‘rat-teeth of time’, are not triumphant. The speaker claims the unflattering descriptions and fragmented body parts, giving voice to the crowd only to illustrate its weakness. Like in Sappho’s “old age” poems, turmoil is presented as unavoidable, but despite the pessimism that tinges the scene, the speaker maintains a sense of self-control and value. She is not a member of the crowd, but can remark on its hostility, and decisively not turn that same loathing towards her fragmented body in continuing to identify with her reflection.
Fragmented bodies undergo a much more violent struggle in Wright’s “Naked Girl and Mirror”, as the speaker forcibly rejects her reflection and socially expected heterosexuality, but later comes to re-establish a supportive, women-
540 Wright, “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, lines 15; 16; 16.
242 only connection with herself. The speaker’s transition from child to adolescent to woman is fraught with frustration, anger, and fear, all of which are attributed to heteronormative, covetous gazes. The persona breaks down her reflection into component parts, and structures these around a timeline of biological impulses, recognising loss of independence and vulnerability to public gaze as a result. She is entirely unwilling to be connected to this reflection and works to sever all connections, forcing distance between the two figures in a self- destructive and highly pessimistic struggle for control over her future.
The opening and closing stanzas of “Naked Girl and Mirror” are forceful and isolating, though self-determinative. The speaker assigns possessives to the body she sees, but denies the sexually desirable reflection voice, treating her with suspicion and contempt. However, the final stanza offers concession to her reflection and sharp rebuke to the heteronormative context that has sparked the scene, indicating self-acceptance and redirected condemnation: This is not I. I had no body once – only what served my need to laugh and run and stare at stars and tentatively dance on the fringe of foam and wave and sand and sun. Eyes loved, hands reached for me, but I was gone on my own currents, quicksilver, thistledown. Can I be trapped at last in that soft face?
[…]
Yet I pity your eyes in the mirror, misted with tears; I lean to your kiss. I must serve you; I will obey. Some day we may love. I may miss your going, some day, though I shall always resent your dumb and fruitful years. Your lovers shall learn better, and bitterly too, if their arrogance dares to think I am part of you.541 While Sappho tends to celebrate the physically desirable attributes of beautiful
541 Wright, “Naked Girl and Mirror”, lines 1-7; 29-34 in Judith Wright: Collected Poems, p 239- 240.
243 female bodies, Wright’s speaker is preoccupied with the heterosexual social expectations that come with this biological transition, echoing Rich’s theories that these must be challenged by supportive and consciously chosen female- only relationships. The speaker’s simultaneous love and rejection for the mirror image, as well as refusal to apply a possessive to her reflected body, adapt as she learns to empathise with the other female figure and attribute blame for her frustration and fears to another source. At the same time however, Wright demonstrates a distinctly Sapphic approach towards hierarchy of voice and emotion.
In “Naked Girl and Mirror” an entrenched cycle of pain and rejection creates a “you” who cannot speak, placing the speaker, like many of Sappho’s own, in a position of heightened expression. The speaker is severe in her distinctions between “you and I”, reflecting issues within not only the supportive women- only communities of Sappho’s alleged school, mentioned by Rich, but also the power plays within Sappho’s circle, recorded in some fragments: No, I have been betrayed. If I had known that this girl waited between a year and a year, I’d not have chosen her bough to dance upon.542 This image is reminiscent of Sappho’s Fragment 105a, in which an idealised young woman approaching sexual maturity is likened to an apple ripening on the bough of a tree, out of reach and forgotten by male harvesters. Threat of commodification as an object to be attained and then consumed accompanies this image, and Wright’s speaker angrily attributes such a risk to both the beautiful body and ‘your lovers’. Problematically, Wright’s speaker continues this cycle of commodification by breaking up and rejecting her reflected body in a brutal move of self-destruction. However, this is a criticism that Sappho herself attracts, particularly in her anticipated physical coercion of a desirable woman in Fragment 1. By recognising the desirability and vulnerability of the woman’s body, its change from “genderless” childhood and free, “natural” action, Wright’s speaker echoes Fragment 31, despairing over the loss of a beloved woman to marriage and the implied threat to the speaker’s control.
542 Wright, “Naked Girl and Mirror”, lines 15-17.
244 Like Sappho, rather than mourning the displacement of the beautiful woman in this poem, the speaker establishes not only a figure to blame for her discontent, but also articulates her eloquent emotive turmoil, emphasising her sense of superiority over not only the heterosexual male lovers, but also her reflected body. Wright combines both Sapphic imagery and Rich’s heterosexual criticism to present a more overtly feminist poem than Sappho, and a more openly self- serving ideological agenda than Rich.
Despite her lack of control over the reflected body’s development and initial lack of desire for control over the reflected body, Wright’s speaker remains in charge of all its breakages. The relationship between the female speaker and female body has not truly been severed, but damaged by the speaker’s resentment of heteronormative directives. At the same time however, the speaker easily breaks down the bodies of those who would admire hers into ‘hands’ or ‘eyes’, rejecting any possible creation of complete wholeness or unity in the poem, and demonstrating an enduring sense of control over the situation. She dissects the reflected woman into composite body parts, but permits her to speak: ‘“Look under these curled lashes, recognize / that you were always here; know me – be me”’. Ultimately the speaker concedes to ‘serve’ and ‘obey’ this mirrored image, foreshadowing the kind of acceptance seen in “The Mirror at the Fun Fair”, but forgiveness and acceptance are denied to the figure’s heterosexual lovers and ‘dumb and fruitful years’ of childbirth, echoing Rich’s sceptical treatment of heterosexual desires and Sappho’s consistent, subtle maintenance of control in unfavourable poetic settings.
Carolyn Kizer Carolyn Kizer’s “Food of Love”, published in 1984, is reminiscent of Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode, as the poet reflects on love as an act of selfish consumption. The speaking persona completely subsumes and dismembers the voiceless, beloved figure. An American poet born in 1925, Kizer’s work often explores feminist ideologies and potential sites of conflict for these, particularly with regards to conventional, patriarchal roles for both men and women, but at the same time,
245 is not averse to combining images of sentimentality, humour and femininity.543 In “Food of Love,” the speaking persona articulates her desires literally at the expense of the life of another, ambiguously gendered individual. The tone is ominous and assertive, claiming I’m going to murder you with love; I’m going to suffocate you with embraces;
I’m going to hug you, bone by bone, Till you’re dead all over. Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.544 The ironic interaction between characteristically loving actions and malicious intent highlights an intention not only to reflect on the potentially destructive nature of obsessive love, but also the one-sided benefits that such obsession can offer the pursuer. The repetition of “I” also constantly reaffirms the speaker’s sense of independence, contrasting herself with the inanimate, voiceless “you”.
The Aphrodite Ode’s speaker has much in common with Kizer’s murderous lover due to this personal focus. The sense of suffocation, combined with the gesture of hugging, compounds the inescapable nature of this situation, as the persona declares her intention to completely subsume the other figure entirely within herself, in the name of “love”. The poem can even be considered a critique of Sappho’s obsessive need for control, as illustrated by Fragment 1. The progressive fragmentation of the beloved body is combined with cannibalistic urges, rendering the speaker’s pursuit of control and exercise of desire an inherently destructive, anti-utopian process. Peace is not the end result, nor even a desired outcome. Aggression is stated outright, but the motivation and means of this infliction of pain and death are contradictory. The speaker acknowledges that her love will destroy the beloved, but does not
543 Carolyn Kizer’s poem “Pro Femina” is an excellent example of this ironic, satirical style, reflecting on the obstacles confronting Western women historically and up to the date of publication in day-to-day life, but particularly when writing: ‘Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown / In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man!’: Part 3, lines 34-35. Neither male nor female figures escape blame when examining these obstacles, and femininity is not condemned in as much as its abuse: ‘…Still, it’s just as unfair /To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity /When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret: / Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity.’: Part 3, lines 23-26. 544 Kizer, “Food of Love,” lines 1-5.
246 appear to feel guilt or remorse, instead choosing to reiterate how this destruction will be carried out.
The beloved figure, though nameless, is transformed by consumption, and steered towards a new interpretation: ‘You will become my personal Sahara’.545 The figure is now not only rendered an environment, upon which to be built and modelled into something else, to suit the speaker’s own desires and whims, but is a personal Sahara, secluded from the rest of the world. Kizer links this image with Sapphic settings, such as those discussed in the previous chapter; new spaces are created, in which the speaker alone has power, but these are not necessarily idealised settings. Love in this poem is not only transformative and possessive, but also powerfully isolating. Ironically, the beloved figure has been turned into a barren landscape, rather than transformed into a generative, idealised space. However, this does not dissuade the speaker: I’ll sun myself in you, then with one swallow Drain your remaining brackish well… …But in the total desert you become You’ll see me stretch, horizon to horizon, Opulent mirage!
Wisteria balconies dripping cyclamen. Vistas ablaze with crystal, laced in gold.546 By turning the nameless, voiceless, and sexless figure into a desert, the persona is transformed into a more glorious vision of herself, held entirely in the captive gaze of the unwilling beloved. Vision triggers this transition, and the imagery, ‘dripping’ and blazing with intensity, emphasises the extent of the persona’s transformation. The tone of the poem shifts to match this transformation, moving from relatively simple descriptions to much more florid options. But this elevation of language does not detract from the fact that this relationship being portrayed is almost entirely parasitic. Not only does the speaker draw her inspiration from the silent beloved, but she is in turn nurtured and benefited by this connection: she becomes stronger as the beloved grows weaker. There is
545 Kizer, “Food of Love,” line 6. 546 Kizer, “Food of Love,” lines 7-8; 13-17.
247 aggression in the act as well, since not only will the speaker ‘drain’ the beloved, but With my female blade I’ll carve my name In your most aspiring palm Before I chop it down. Then I’ll inhale your oasis whole.547 The intentional pun on ‘palm’ as either a tropical tree or the sensitive part of a human hand suggests not only that the persona is willing to act with violence toward the focal figure, but also that she will willingly turn her into a natural resource; one that she has no scruples in exploiting. As a tree, the beloved is unable to fight back, or alternatively, has been reduced to only one component part of a human body, and has implicitly already undergone a process of isolation and systematic destruction. The image invokes the ancient Greek myth of Daphne who became the laurel tree to avoid Apollo’s lust, as well as the nymph Syrinx who turned into water reeds to escape Pan.548 The speaker takes on the pursuit role of both male deities, enacting the same desires and aggressive compulsions, but applying a ‘female’ blade’ instead. Transformation into a tree in these myths was intended to escape the amorous, domineering intentions of the male deities, but while it was successful in these myths, it does not appear to have been the case for the beloved in Kizer’s poem, since the speaker is still able to ‘inhale’ and consume the beloved’s body.
Kizer indicates that violence is not exclusively the realm of masculinity; the blade is wholly female despite its masculine mythic origins, and presumably wielded by a female speaker. However, the poem’s violence is only imagined, as is the warlike imagery figured in Sappho’s Fragment 1. The speaker in the Aphrodite Ode is able to reveal her eloquence and connections to the goddess, espousing her own talents and semi-divine status, through reflections upon an unwilling source. In addition, the Ode depicts Aphrodite as an ally in several
547 Kizer, “Food of Love,” lines 9-12. 548 The pursuit of Daphne is recorded by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, 1.452 ff, and that of Syrinx in Ovid’s Metamorphoses at 1.689 ff. Many women and nymphs are transformed into trees in Greek mythology, including Minthe, Leuke, Side, Sperkheides, the Heliades sisters, Klytie, and Lotis, invariably as the result of male sexual desire or jealousy by other women: [translated by] Frank Justus Miller, Ovid Metamorphoses Books I-VIII, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1916, p 35; 51.
248 later translations. Kizer’s ‘female blade’ and Sappho’s goddess-ally are comparable also in that they are both actively possessed, despite their contradictory natures. The phallic implications of a ‘female blade’ suggest that Kizer’s persona has a more “masculine” role in the relationship, acting not only assertively, but with aggression and a desire to penetrate the skin of the beloved, writing her name on the other figure’s palm. The physicality and control inherent in such a move are clear. However, this blade has been immediately and unmistakably defined as ‘female’, intending therefore to merge both feminine and masculine conventions in pursuit of this focal beloved. Obsessive love is an equalising factor in Kizer’s figuration, but only with regards to the power of an individual. This power is not extended to multiple figures and is similar to Sappho’s interpretation of herself as Aphrodite’s ally; her access to Aphrodite and the goddess’s paraphrased empathy for Sappho’s situation simultaneously deny this same access to the beloved woman or man, depending on the translation. Love does not inspire feelings of mutual respect and equal access to control and influence over the other; it is the active lover, who merges both masculine and feminine qualities that is able to articulate herself and attain what she desires.
In both Sappho’s and Kizer’s poems, the voiceless beloved is attributed with some movement of their own, but this is not necessarily voluntary, and is presented entirely in the speaking persona’s terms, to suit the persona’s agenda: So you will summon each dry grain of sand And move towards me in undulating dunes Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine: A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores; Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere, Surprising life! And I will be that green.549 Just as in Sappho’s Fragment 1, the actions of the beloved appear, on face value, to be voluntary, but in the context of both poems it is far more likely that the
549 Kizer, “Food of Love,” lines 18-24.
249 individual is responding to coercion. In the case of Sappho’s beloved, this action is foretold by Aphrodite, but initiated entirely by Sappho.
In Kizer’s poem, the action is alluded to and initiated by the speaking persona alone, representing an elevation of the original manipulation identified in Sappho’s work. Contrasting images of barrenness and greenness emphasise the connection further, as the persona attributes herself with life, lushness and strength, while comparing the beloved to a dry husk, unable to sustain any life aside from the persona: When you are fed and watered, nourishing With shoots entwining trellis, dome and spire, Till you are resurrected field in bloom, I will devour you, my natural food, My host, my final supper on the earth, And you’ll begin to die again.550 The persona freely acknowledges her parasitic status, but is unconcerned by it. Unlike Sappho’s persona, this speaker is explicit about her manipulative and destructive desires. In the Aphrodite Ode, it is implied that the speaker either does not view herself as exploitative, or that she simply doesn’t care; seeking the fulfilment of her immediate desires at the cost of all else, and simultaneously strengthening her own voice in the process.
M.T.C. Cronin Australian poet M.T.C. Cronin explores love and violence in several of her poems in My Lover’s Back: 79 Love Poems. While the majority of these pieces celebrate a sense of community in romantic relationships, comparable to those traditionally associated with Sappho, some of her more ‘manipulative’ poems can be aligned with this dissertation’s control-orientated interpretations. “My Table of Maims” presents a competitive, unsympathetic romantic power play between two personae of unknown sex, resulting in no certain victory, but implied success for both parties. The hostile atmosphere alluded to in the title of the poem, bluntly
550 Kizer, “Food of Love,” lines 25-30.
250 consumptive and referring to physical injury, is established further in the opening lines: You started this war with me Breach me And then fought for passion On Sunday afternoons Which once were quiet551 Sappho’s Fragment 1 demonstrates a similar obsessive, coercive desire, as her Aphrodite claims that the unwilling beloved will come to love, even if initially unwilling. Sappho’s calls for the goddess to ‘be my ally’ links to war imagery in “My Table of Maims”. Cronin mirrors this coercive, romantic relationship, but collapses the lover/beloved distinctions in Sappho’s work.
Conflict springs from interaction between the quotidian, ‘quiet’ ‘Sunday afternoons’ and ‘passion’; domestic peace is disrupted and active, aggressive edges characterise love as a theme. Cronin’s personae draw borders, but also conflate distinctions. The line ‘breach me’ could be an observation or demand, and the opening line may be a plaintive comment or challenge. Such a technique counters the one-sided desires in Sappho’s Aphrodite Ode and the Phaon legend, but does not entirely reject Sappho’s plays for control. Rather, Cronin adapts these techniques such that gender roles are rendered unimportant or indistinct, privileging instead the active, even violent expression of desire above all else. Interestingly, despite the poem’s collapse of lover/beloved roles and certainty of sex, the poem’s speaker maintains a Sapphic form of control: specifically, she denies voice to the other lover. The same process appears in Fragment 1 and the Ovidian epistle: the desiring female persona articulates feelings of unjust isolation, inspired and exacerbated by love or sexual desire, and similarly, Cronin’s ‘you’ remains silent despite the speaking persona’s vehemence.
Silence is associated with both figures before conflict begins; Sunday afternoons ‘were quiet’ beforehand. However, as the fighting for ‘passion’ begins, only the
551 Cronin, “My Table of Maims,” lines 1-5.
251 speaker gains a voice. Her declarations are ambiguous, but could be taken as demands or statements of fact. Like Sappho’s speakers, Cronin’s persona is in complete control of this setting, despite the apparently equal terms of the lovers’ struggle. Unlike in Sappho’s translations, passion is a mutual condition, and the voiceless figure is not defenceless: In this time and space You lie fully armed The vanity of weapons showing off The weakness in your hands The shadow of your sword Cutting me from life552 Fragment 1’s beloved figure had only denial as her weapon, and Aphrodite removes this. Conversely, Cronin equips the silent lover with the only weapons in the poem, but also limits this figure with physically weak actions and attributes: the lover must ‘lie’ rather than stand, with hands giving a show of ‘weakness’ rather than strength. Despite the “egalitarian” struggle, Cronin’s speaker subtly assigns herself more power in the setting.
The images ‘vanity of weapons’ and ‘your sword’ are implicitly masculine, drawing on warrior and Freudian imageries to define the other persona. Cronin encodes the masculine connotation with references to weakness and silence, subtly disjointing her early equality and raising the feminine speaker to a position of primacy. Despite being a victim who is cut ‘from life’ by the masculine figure, the ability to condemn is only afforded to the feminine figure. Violence and sexuality are unified in the phallic image of the sword, but are also paired with ‘weakness’, indicating an aim to collapse this hierarchy and instate another.
Cronin describes her speaker’s perceived plight with a description curiously applicable to Sappho: Here the world Has forgotten my birth
552 Cronin, “My Table of Maims,” lines 10-15.
252 And my heart is the tired story
But this is a war I covet I follow every demand of suffering553 The Phaon legend and Sappho’s sexual notoriety are among the most enduring and ironic aspects of this poet’s legacy, and parallels can be drawn between this popular image of Sappho the poet and Cronin’s ambivalent persona. The speaker turns away from the struggle to focus on her own origins and their unknowable nature, again emphasising her control over defining and accusing other figures. Despite the lamenting tone of the lines, the speaker’s desires and actions are the primary foci. Cronin acknowledges how even such dismal situations can still derive power, and the speaker remains in control of the setting.
The speaker is also akin now to Sappho’s representation of Helen of Troy in Fragment 16, in which Sappho supports Helen’s decision to leave her husband and sail for Troy: Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is what you love.
Easy to make this understood by all. For she who overcame everyone in beauty (Helen) left her fine husband
behind and went sailing to Troy. Not for her children nor her dear parents had she a thought, no – ] led her astray…554 The missing portion of text implies that Aphrodite led Helen astray, but importantly, Fragment 16 lists war imagery only to dismiss it in favour of
553 Cronin, “My Table of Maims,” lines 16-20. 554 Fragment 16, lines 1-12. Translated by Anne Carson.
253 female sexual, romantic desire, represented by Helen. Cronin’s speaker is similar to Sappho’s Helen in this sense, but war is not dismissed entirely, and instead adapted to demonstrate the speaker’s resolve and her control over the situation and the silent, masculine lover.
Cronin’s persona alludes almost masochistically to passionate pains. Importantly, her emotion is only ever called ‘passion’. Implicitly, due to its publication in a collection dedicated to love poems, this passion is love or sexual desire, but it could also be a passionate desire for control, authority, or autonomy. This is certainly indicated in the lines discussed above. Passion in “My Table of Maims” is destructive, but the personae are well equipped to deal with this, and a sense of mutuality prevails, but is tempted with subtle references to the feminine speaker’s upper hand in the conflict, established in techniques also used by Sappho. The end of the poem restores mutuality; the persona claims that suffering is consciously undertaken because she knows …we all just want To go somewhere with someone We sit and drink tea And I can’t remember you What is heavy Becomes light I wait in your throat555 Domestic peace in the form of sitting and drinking tea is desired, but it is not clear whether this gentle setting is or can be attained. The speaker retains her control over clarity or ambiguity in these definitions, indicating on-going struggle. The lines ‘What is heavy / Becomes light’ are reminiscent of a biblical verse, in which relief in exchange for a different form of worship is promised.556 This subtle reference to a shift in power and need for adaptation reflects the Sapphic persona’s gentle usurping of Aphrodite’s divine power in Fragment 1. A new hierarchy is subtly introduced; the speaker’s “burden” of unrequited desire
555 Cronin, “My Table of Maims,” lines 21-27. 556 Matthew 11.28: “Come unto me, all you that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”, King James 2000 Bible. Freedom in this instance is promised to the Jews, burdened with excessive rites and rituals and labouring to appease God. A new form of worship is offered and a sense of peace and rest.
254 lightened by recognition of her primacy over not only her own desires, but also over the other, masculine lover. Cronin’s reference to ‘your throat’ links this shift in power to voice, as well as division between the body and speech, the physical and the mental. The speaker has now subsumed the speaking potential of the companion figure, accumulating additional influence not only over her speech, physically blocked by the speaker, but also over her body. Violence has been imagined and defined only by the feminine speaker, and the weapons inscribed to the masculine figure not applied destructively. The desire for ‘someone’ or ‘something’, rather than a certain sex or gender, emphasises the poem’s focus on equality, but is undercut by Cronin’s Sapphic, control- orientated reflections.
In her poem “Betrayal”, Cronin connects love to intense images of agony and bodily fragmentation, akin to those explored in earlier chapters, but still promotes feelings of mutual cooperation. The opening of the poem is strikingly hostile and could have been taken directly from an archaic war poem: The vibrant cries of the tortured, so much without words, the scream so unlearned.557 In a move reminiscent of “My Table of Maims”, distinction between speech and silence is highlighted, and allusions made to violent action. The ‘tortured’ are ‘without words’, at the bottom of the poem’s hierarchy, while the speaker records the suffering and demonstrates her freer position of authority.
Cronin then directs readers’ attention to a maternal image connected with peace and purpose, as opposed to wordless screams. Wistfully, the unidentified persona reflects that Rarely do we occupy that place so close to the womb – the world so full of meaning
and harsh questions.558
557 Cronin, “Betrayal,” lines 1-3.
255 The ‘place close to the womb’ may be the heart, a neutral space, but the allusion is based on a strongly feminine point of orientation. Such a contrast between the ‘world so full of meaning’ and this feminised space risks interpretation as an overly simplified gender binary of female and male, inward and outward, peaceful and warlike. Cronin’s definition though, in which her feminine speaker has primacy in the face of a violent exterior, expands this interpretation beyond such terms. The idealised ‘place so close to the womb’ is identified as a broken and indirect body part, akin to Sappho’s itemisation of her body in Fragment 31 in the face of a “betrayal” in the form of the loss of a beloved, coveted girl. In Cronin’s “Betrayal” however, it is another’s body that has been broken: In my hands rubs ash of your body, burned,
unworded, without answers… Love, anyway, is unbetrayable, Even if you ever do speak.559 Unlike Sappho in Fragment 31, Cronin imagines destruction of the betraying figure and compounds fiery destruction of her physical form with repeated references to denial of speech. The speaker copes with her beloved’s betrayal by denying him or her both voice and physical form other than ash, and firmly dismisses any possibility of further betrayal should the figure ever be able to speak. The tongue of Fragment 31’s speaker breaks and a ‘fire’ runs under her skin; Cronin’s speaker literally reverses these sufferings and turns them back, silencing and burning the perceived traitor. Cronin’s Sapphic engagement in “Betrayal” is a reversal and escalation of Sappho’s images, also presented as a love poem, and equally preoccupied first and foremost with preservation of the speaker’s control and primacy, even in dismal situations.
Silence and voice are intrinsic parts of both “Betrayal” and “My Table of Maims”, and several of Sappho’s most well known poems. Cronin echoes these ideas in Sapphic terms, and even escalates their application in order to promote her
558 Cronin, “Betrayal,” lines 4-7. 559 Cronin, “Betrayal,” lines 8-12.
256 speakers’ views and desires. Speech and activity, though initially appearing available to the other persona in each poem, are subtly withheld. Cronin’s engagement with Sappho represents a close engagement with voice and body fragmentation as a means of exercising control over situations that would appear, on the surface, to be egalitarian or dire.
Conclusion M.T.C. Cronin, Carolyn Kizer, and Judith Wright, among potentially many more poets, have engaged with techniques readily identifiably in Sappho’s poetry to bring about conclusions similar to those found in some of Sappho’s most well- known poems and legends. Unlike many canonically recognised Sappho- inspired poets, these writers do not strictly engage with images of love, beauty and community, with peacefully emotive resolutions. Instead, these poets engage with settings fraught with tension and layered with references to the speakers’ control over the situation, despite exterior, challenging elements. Outwardly empowering references to other personae and, in particular, other women are demonstrated to be primarily self-serving, as in Sappho’s poetry, although these poets are distinctly more overt in their feminist criticisms of normative heterosexuality and patriarchal forms of control over women’s bodies. Cronin, Kizer, and Wright all use “unsightly” images of broken bodies, war and hostility, but encode these with a female-centric focus that empowers particular individuals and destabilises those who would challenge this authority, in a distinctively Sapphic process of self-aggrandisement, but in some cases, with a broader focus on challenging restriction and commodification of women’s bodies while ironically enacting these same processes.
257 Conclusion
Introduction The idea that the ancient Greek poet Sappho has been tremendously influential to English-language poetry and poetics is certainly not new. In this investigation however, I have attempted to broaden the scope of this idea and identify the extent of her influence on later women’s poetry. The scope of Sappho’s influence has previously been thematically underestimated, due to historically reductive readings and translations of her work. In the preceding chapters, some myths and fictions of Sappho have been examined, and surprisingly subversive content revealed. These images have not strictly portrayed Sappho as a passive, demure, feminine figure, interested solely in romantic love and celebration of beauty. Rather, this is only one possible interpretation. Another vision of Sappho as a proto-feminist, self-interested individual, contemplating her own reception and ability to control her life in her advancing years, is illustrated in these same materials, and reimagined in later creative works.
Subtle Feminism Subversive content in Sappho’s work has been described as “subtly feminist” in two ways. Firstly, feminist references have been subtly encoded via selection of detail and language in Sappho’s original and translated texts. Secondly, some feminist references can be considered “subtle”, because they have not been afforded much critical detail. The latter references are overt when read in Sappho’s original poems, and would have been considered such by her first audiences, but have not always been translated as such, which has resulted in their sometimes sporadic translation. Poems previously described by scholars, such as Charles Bowra, as apolitical can been shown to contain political reflections, through direct criticisms of political figures and hierarchies established within the poems. Not only are many of Sappho’s poems layered with political themes, calls for control and recognition of her abilities, but also they have long been interpreted as such by other poets, who have not been similarly recognised.
258 The exact impact of Sappho’s subtle feminism in her own lifetime is difficult to determine, but her importance is substantiated by the fact of her preservation. Importantly, she has maintained a sense of autonomy even in some of the most heavy-handed translations, thanks to her selective use of imagery, pronouns and places, perhaps even intentionally fragmenting her own poems in order to create pockets of influence and power. Sappho’s voice is readily identifiable, clearly enunciating self-interest, and even political agendas, using religious rites to empower her speakers even in bleak poetic settings. The poet’s engagement with lacunae speaks of conscious manipulation and sophistication, which can continue to be examined in later translations and creative engagements with her work.
In this project, a combination of sources has been examined to illustrate my vision. Close readings of some of Sappho’s most well known fragments, as well as the lesser researched pieces, reflect that Sappho used similar techniques in much of her work to present a selectively empowered image of herself. In so doing, different forms of subtle feminism have been identified in Sappho’s translations and in the works of women inspired by these.
Historical Subversions Some of Sappho’s poems have been available in English since 1555, when Sir Philip Sidney produced the first English translations of her work. However, her poetry had been available in French for longer, and Ovid’s Heroides, featuring the Epistula Sapphus, was translated into French in the fifteenth century BCE.560 Reading and translating Sappho is a highly interactive process, moving between languages and negotiating with different interpretations, derived from different cultural backgrounds. Louise Labé’s sixteenth-century readership in Lyons would not have been the same as Grace Schulman’s twentieth century American readership, but both poets engage with control and desire via Sapphic imagery.
560 Octavien de Saint-Gelais translated Ovid’s Heroides into French some time in the late fifteenth century, prior to his death in 1502. This version was ‘widely disseminated in dozens of manuscripts and early imprints’ and was ‘probably available in early sixteenth-century England’: Anne E.B. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476-1557, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2009, p 86.
259 Similarly, the treatment of Epistula Sapphus and Sappho’s poetry by Lady Mary Wroth, Carolyn Kizer and M.T.C. Cronin, though similar in themes and ideas, is conveyed in different tones and to different intended audiences. Sappho’s poetic legacy extends to multiple audiences; a feature central to her direct appeals to readers and figures in her poetry.
Sappho’s privileged social, religious and economic status may explain her obsessive fixation on control, identifiable in the works of her admirers. She is the first recorded European poet to have used the first person, and it is dedicated to articulating the desires and demands of her speaker, often at the expense of others present in the poem, or decisively excluded from its setting. Her personal, confessional and extremely passionate poetic voice was a major source of inspiration in the development of the English-language lyric tradition, but so too have been her occasional cruelty and selfishness. Much recent scholarship has examined Sappho’s lesbian desire, but Sappho’s literary legacy includes more than poetic expressions of love and sexual desire. She can be considered subversive in her context and those of many later scholars, translators and poets, on the basis of her self-interest and self-deification alone.
Sappho’s scholarly treatment in English and in other languages has not always strictly adhered to her original Greek texts. Another objective in this investigation has been to examine some of the implications of translation practices and theories on Sappho’s transmission and reception. The overarching focus on control and equivalence, inherent to the process of rendering the long- dead poet’s words and phrases into those understandable by a twenty-first century, or sixteenth-century audience, demands attention. The ideologies of later scholars, critics, translators and poets have been layered over the top of Sappho’s work, to the extent that it is often hard to tell where the views of the poet end and those of other writers begin. In particular, gender ideologies pertaining to the rights, roles, voices and values of women have been closely aligned with Sappho and her poetry, often resulting in the heterosexualising of both, or the construction of an artificial myth of almost maternal compassion and a spirit of women-only community. This project has attempted to “detangle”
260 some of these beliefs from Sappho’s work, offering an example of the extent of such layering in my own breakdown of a translation of Fragment 31. This example is intended to show the complexities inherent in translation, and to also demonstrate how remarkable it then is that a subtle focus on control has been maintained in so many of Sappho’s later versions, as well as pose an argument for publishing more “open” translations.
Technical Subversions Among the most subtle subversive elements in her translated work is Sappho’s fixation with voice: her narrating personae, in her most physically complete poetic fragments, are not only intensely personal in tone and thematic fixation, but also obsessed with their own feelings, emotions, and experiences. Similarly, the absence of voice in Sappho’s poems is attached to a broader intention on the poet and speakers’ parts to deny agency to anyone other than the speaker. Rather than fixating on Sappho’s use of an emotional first-person voice as evidence of her complete focus on beauty and intense feeling, this technique should be examined with closer reference to the strictly controlled structures and images also present in these poems. In this investigation, such a process was undertaken, with the result that a consistent focus on control, even in some of the most intensely and outwardly emotional poems, could be identified as a process intended to elevate the speaker’s authority within and beyond the scope of the poem. This would be done on the basis of her obvious eloquence and intelligence, demonstrated by her layered references to political events, religious practices, and engagement with popular literature at the time. It has been argued that Sappho was not a political poet, but the levels of self- consciousness apparent in some of her fragments, and her snide references to ancient Lesbian political leaders, suggest that this claim simply isn’t true.
Sappho has been characterised as the “original” woman poet. She has inspired generations of poets, male and female alike, to emulate or imitate her styles, fixations, and tones. However, in the previous chapters, this role as a mentor or role model has been shown to be fraught with issues. Sappho was a leader and even something of a tyrant in several poems. Later women poets have generally
261 shied from this interpretation, but those examined in this investigation have shown less squeamishness. However, even without acknowledging these obsessive, controlling qualities, women poets declaring their affiliation with Sapphic poetry have historically been subject to criticism. There is an additional layer of danger to this process, aside from popular criticism. Replicating the works and ideas, or the mentoring role of one such as Sappho, is to run the risk of being “absorbed” by her and to be denied an independent legacy. Sappho's indomitable spirit and personality, resonating even in the most restrictive and conservative translations of her work, is not only a potential site of inspiration, but also one of subjugation. By fusing poetic voices with Sappho, proposing alternative Sapphic fictions, later women poets are able to assume the literarily deviant role of 'woman writer'.561 However, as this investigation has shown, a poet does not need to emulate Sappho’s techniques and themes entirely, but can instead adapt these for their own individual gains, and still be very much participating in a form of Sapphic legacy.
Sappho’s Subversive Legacy The sheer scale of Sappho’s influence on the works of later women poets, working with translations of her poetry, myths, or partial biographical details, should not be understated. The women poets with whom Sappho has been compared, and the poems which have been paralleled, have not previously been treated in such a way. It has been the intention of this investigation to highlight the extent to which Sappho has influenced women poets from a range of time periods, and how this influence has, in particular, been used to further subtly subversive content. Carolyn Kizer, M.T.C. Cronin, Judith Wright, Grace Schulman, Lady Mary Wroth, and Louise Labé have not all been traditionally aligned with Sappho or Sapphic themes. By exploring their works with close reference to subversive structures, images, and speaking voices found in Sappho’s poetry and myths, comparisons can be more readily examined, and a much broader legacy of Sapphic poetics can be identified.
561 Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, p 6.
262 Kizer, Cronin, Wright, Schulman, Wroth, and Labé are not only Sapphic poets, but also poets who have “taken” Sappho away from popular perceptions. These perceptions have varied over time and in different geographies, but at no point in any of their contexts has a vision of Sappho as a blatant self-publicist, controlling and authoritative speaker, been prominent. However, this empowered image is exactly what all five poets have embraced. In addition, by looking at Louise Labé’s references to Sappho, the theory that Labé herself wasn’t a poet can be strongly challenged. The fact that these references are so subtle and uniform, focused on the need for authority and control over one’s own life and desires, indicates that these poems were written by one person, rather than a furtive collective. Ironically it is through her references to Sappho and similarly fragmentary transmission that Labé’s identity can be more firmly established.
Sappho has not been a poet in her own right for more than a thousand years. The works of these later women poets, addressing themes and techniques employed by Sappho, do not represent theft, but a kind of reclamation. Joan DeJean is very accurate in her assertion that ‘Sappho is a figment of the modern imagination’.562 When we speak of Sappho today, we are not referring to a person, but to a mythologised poetic heritage, modelled around the works and largely fictionalised figure of a woman that have been rendered virtually unrecognisable by time and creative reworkings. A considerable range of different imaginings and popularised perceptions of Sappho have risen in different geographical and historical contexts; all with dubious bases in fact, and all with varying levels of dedication to the clues provided by Sappho's poetry. Who Sappho may have been in her own lifetime has been outstripped in terms of importance by her role as an inspirational figure for later poets, playwrights and authors. However, male scholars, translators and poets have largely filled the role of transmitting and interpreting Sappho’s poetry, biography and myths. The works of Louise Labé and Lady Mary Wroth are of particular importance in that both women “took back” Sappho from an almost exclusively male field of
562 Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, p 1.
263 analysis. The sophistication of their engagement emphasises Sappho’s own focus on eloquence and intelligence, combined with emotional elevation, as the primary means of “justifying” their presence in literary circles. However, encoded into this in the works of all three poets, is a subtle and consistent need for articulation of desires, including a desire for greater control over their own destinies, and even the lives of others.
It is tempting to assert that the best way in which to gauge Sappho’s original poetic intents, and therefore to form a clearer, more accurate image of her as a poet, woman, and individual, is to return to the original Greek texts. However, such an act is not only unnecessary in the scope of this study, but also difficult enough to make this step ideologically problematic. Emily Apter asserts that approaches to translation have changed over time, so that Where translation studies habitually concerned itself with questions of adequatio; that is to say, the measurement of semantic and stylistic fidelity to the original literary text, now it might emphasise language over literature, determining semantic loss and gain as a result of linguistic erosion or extinction.563
Arguably, this has never been an issue for Sappho, since many English-language translators have been noticeably keener to put their own spin on the translations of earlier individuals, rather than go straight to the poet as a source. Contextual values, particularly with regards to the sexual roles and rights of women, have been imposed, stemming from a combination of both Sappho’s own, patriarchal and relatively oppressive context, and an almost equally patriarchal setting in the sixteenth century onwards.
Denys Page and Charles M. Bowra, whose major Sappho texts were produced in 1955 and 1961 respectively, outline the lingering interpretation of Sappho as a “feminine” poet, obsessed with love, beauty, and her own feelings, rather than politics, the rigours of public life, or philosophical thought. It is this perception that this thesis most strongly challenges. Page’s and Bowra’s apparent desires to portray Sappho in such a restrictive way, contrary to evidence in her prosody
563 Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, p 5.
264 and poetic themes and images of more subversive interests and intentions, highlights a prominent issue in historical receptions of Sappho and her work, namely patriarchal perceptions of what constitutes “women's poetry”. This project represents another angle from which these views can be challenged. Central to the perceived desire are interpretations of Sappho's work as wholly personal, inspired by actual events from her own life, spontaneity, lack of self- reflection, and inherently gentle and loving. Regarding Fragment 1, Page asserts we must not forget that the smile and speech of Aphrodite are given to her by Sappho: it is Sappho herself who is speaking, and the smile must be Sappho’s too, laughing at herself even in the hour of her suffering. – This everlasting sequence of pursuit, triumph, and ennui is not to be taken so very seriously.564 His claim is in direct opposition to my own interpretation of the “Ode to Aphrodite”: this poem does not only support a perception of Sappho as a gentle, loving women, fixated on feminine beauty and emotional experiences. Page presents Sappho as personally invested in her work: each poem detailing an episode from her own life, rather than an imagined event. In his examination of Fragment 31, Page claims that Sappho depicts her persona’s physical turmoil dispassionately, as though she were an interested bystander, in order to avoid unseemliness through excessively emotional displays.565 He does not recognise the creative layering of persons that takes place in this poem, nor its symbolic manipulations of perception, obsession with control, nor possessive acts of self- destruction in order for the persona to regulate her own body. Page also asserts that it is the man in Fragment 31 that is the focus of the poem, as he appears in the first line, rather than the female love object mentioned soon afterward, although he does not qualify the nature of this focus.566 This move indicates heteronormative intent on Page's part, which is certainly not unique to this critic, but indicative of a larger issue inherent in translating Sappho's work during its earliest years of reception in English.
564 Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955, p 15-16. 565 Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, p 26-27. 566 Page, Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry, p 28.
265 Re-assessing Translations
Later translations and creative adaptations are much more likely to embrace “empowered” translations of Sappho, in which the poetic persona is both openly lesbian and sexually desirous, but interestingly, the most powerful aspects of Sappho’s voice have been retained since her first English translations. Technical aspects, such as voice, tone, privileging of the persona’s thoughts and feelings, and subtle power plays inherent in the phrasing of these, consistently depict Sappho as a manipulative and self-absorbed individual, obsessively seeking control and celebration of herself over others. However, Sappho’s translations should be considered cultural products, before they are read as linguistic products, due to the high levels of exchange between interpreters’ and Sappho’s values and contexts, as well as the sometimes liberal incorporations of Sapphic fictions, myths and references to previous translations of the same poems. There is no question of the adequacy of these translations to be made: some are clear deviations from the original texts’ prosody and content, while others are much closer to both. No translation can completely encapsulate Sappho’s original intentions, because there is so little left of her. Ideological issues inherent in translating texts from one language to another, repeatedly, and across a range of time periods and nations, also make this idea impractical.
Several critics have proposed that to read translations of Sappho is to necessarily adopt a hierarchical standpoint; contrasting the most and least faithful translations. For the purpose of this study, such an action is neither necessary nor applicable. The translations addressed here are those that have enjoyed either critical or popular acclaim, or would have been among the easiest versions of Sappho's work to acquire from the earliest publications of her translations in English. The evolution of these translations is not in dispute; rather their continuity of particular images, tones and ideas, irrespective of their apparent discrepancies. Evidence of these maintained traits can be used to illustrate an enduring image, or series of images, of Sappho and her work, as well as her motivations. In particular, as shown in this dissertation, a distinctly subversive, even subtly feminist set of ideas can be identified in her work, and
266 consequently, in the works of later women poets writing in response to Sappho, Sapphic heritage, or ideas initially addressed by Sappho.
Sappho has been transmitted into English in a variety of translations, all of which are embedded with notions of control in some way. Despite the guises that some translators have imposed on her poetry, by “playing up” the feminine and beauty orientated aspects of her work, removing lesbian desire and focusing on the image of Sappho as lovelorn heroine, dismal suicide or nurturing mother, some women poets, writing in a range of geographical and temporal contexts, have been able to identify more challenging tones and images in her work. Not all of these poets have had access to Sappho’s Greek texts, which are also questionably authentic, but all have been able to access one or more of the translated versions available in their native language at the time.
As I have mentioned, the scope of potential influence on later women poets, and male poets, must not be underestimated. Sappho’s themes, as this investigation has demonstrated, include not only overt declarations of desire and identity as a means of self-empowerment, but also subtle manipulations of setting, speech and imagery, suggesting an underlying preoccupation with control on a broader scale. Sappho, as she appears in translation, is not content with control over her own body; she demands the obedience and respect of others around her, but not necessarily in outright declarations of such.
This focus on Sapphic subtlety opens a new line of discussion when reading Sappho. Parts of her poetic control stem from her structural sophistication, evident in her use of tightly regimented Sapphic stanzas to dictate who may speak and how figures may act or listeners respond. In addition, her control extends to how, where and when she introduces other characters, and how she offers praise to some, yet ignores others. This tension between acceptance and rejections is able to take place in otherwise innocuous poems, presenting a proto-feminist model for early poets who may have otherwise been unable or unwilling to publish such ideas. The full extent of this school of subtle Sapphic control has not yet been ascertained, hindered in no small part by poor records
267 of different poets’ levels of access to Sappho’s poetry and their ability to read this in its translated or untranslated states. What can be said for certain however, is that women poets writing in English from the sixteenth century BCE onwards, thanks to the printing press, may well have had access to Sappho and her subtle forms of control and articulation of selfhood. These poets may then have been inspired to encode similar ideas in their own work, with alterations to suit their own formulations of self.
Conclusion Discoveries of new Sappho fragments continue to take place. In 2004 a new papyrus was uncovered, providing another partial poem and a missing part from another poem previously recovered. In 2014, two more poems were recovered. Future poetic responses will appear, including potential evolution and further adaptation of Sapphic imagery and themes, and representing another stage in her poetic legacy to be documented. It is possible that future archaeological discoveries of more fragments of Sappho will paint a clearer picture of her poetic intentions. This may lay to rest some theories about her purported character, or could create even more openings for interpretation. My investigation represents one such interpretation, already supported by the body of work available thanks to archaeological recovery, and additionally promoted by evidence of other poets identifying such an interpretation and reflecting on this in their work. More poets will write about Sappho in the future, offering opportunities for adaptation of this investigation itself.
In addition, Sappho’s poetic legacy should not be confined to only poetry written by women in purely emotional, supportive, and communal tones. Aggressive self-awareness and desire are equally present in Sappho’s poetry, and have most definitely been identified by earlier and later period women writers. The full extent of this influence begs further investigation, but this thesis has identified several core areas in which subtle Sapphic control can be found and interpreted, offering a guide for later research, as well as starting points in several different geographical areas and time periods.
268 By examining Sappho in translation, as well as in her original Greek form, it is possible to identify frequently violent, possessive, and obsessive themes in her work. The subversive effects of these are compounded by evidence of Sappho’s strong interest in control, prevalent in her structural style and selection of imagery. Even in some of her smallest, most broken pieces, such as Fragment 125, these ideas can be readily identified. In addition, the mythology that has built up around Sappho and her heterosexual envisagement, spurred on by Ovid’s Epistula Sapphus, can in fact complement this interpretation, based on underlying issues of control and articulation of desire in these pieces.
Despite her often heavy-handed and biased translation and biographical reinventions, Sappho has been passed through generations as a poet still largely focused on self-preservation. Her strategies for articulating and promoting self- interest, sexual and romantic desire, and identifying herself as opposed to other figures, have inspired many later writers, including women poets writing in less than permissive times. The most recent recovery of another piece of Sappho’s poetry has filled in gaps that had long been subject to speculation; Sappho’s subversive techniques continue to be unearthed and reimagined in others’ works, and their evolution, as part of Sappho’s poetic legacy, deserves continued examination.
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287 Appendix
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Wide Range Chapbooks Supported and Funded by the Judith E. Wilson Fund Faculty of English, University of Cambridge Series Editor: John Kinsella
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Contents
Parian Sappho To Counter Fragment One Sappho in sequence Picking up the Pieces Apple A Token from Sappho to Phaon Worship Sappho to Alcaeus
289 Parian Sappho
Your hands and feet are cut to fit, dotting lines to mark the split of rotting grammar under sand. All lost, the rhymes are lines pushed to your lips and stuck: sample selfish love. We fret as half-known symbols feed new strains, do not eat what we cannot name for sure. Slips of gloss where rips meat-deep are hushed and sealed to strung-up bones, we taste the resin’s cloying tones and wait: the deadweight tug can loose blunt agony, fresh-dug from rubbish pits, but second-hand longing still only feeds your curators.
290 To Counter Fragment One
“Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?” - Sappho's fr.1, translated by Anne Carson.
Relentless Aphrodite, your words are death, take your Sappho and go. Her words frame ours, all pain is folly. Lady, my heart stills and splits under centuries of aspic worship. It softly rots where once you heard Sappho roar desire, righteous golden spite now dulled to a comb's edge. Yoke your car, goddess. Bloodied fragments cut us through, cleaned and glazed by old, closed minds. Go to your father's house, leave us game, passing Sappho's bones and jigsawing pieces into some shared tongue, so lips curl triumphant, parting again to mime devotional desire, bowed under bloodless rule, ripped on the rocks of Leucas, hearts crazed with laughter. Mired canon still drags inwards and downwards.
Though I twist, you've clung to me, a mouldering fox fur, formaldehyde trailing every turn. Wired muzzles bear toothless symmetry,
291 but we speak in dead tongues, goddess, beating some other's heart. O Lady, your gentle hands have held us through all friendly fire.
292 Sappho in sequence
Cracked along the spine, you were found wheezing in another's mouth pulled from sea and sand, contentious fragments to trade your echoes.
Bitten into chunks half-tasted, long chewed the fold is mirrored, rifts are flattery: necrotic interest and theft even more so.
You vex / he stoops to repeat Swollen / the untrue and unnatural of baseness / scandal against her other / sweet name which minds / gossiping generations have invented
Gonglya, Atthis, Anactoria, I will lift your arms see how they dance, so we may wake lyre hangs in my arms collection so now pass the plectora, I will sing you proof that eats fragments, of sylph-bodies between the belly rising to the bite splitting light, snagged we shriek and swap pieces,
293 between song and season, bare feet stained, sticky-sweet desecration watch their sparrow eyes and jigsaw arms legs take your place among them, hands and heads this fabulous legacy; our carrion-soft chimera my girls will eat you alive.
294 Picking up the Pieces
Pliant as a newspaper in their open hands, fingers read your edges, but your rush of pigments splinters bodies better to hide you. But in passing I know you as author of newspaper intrigues; you bury bodies with paper-thin hands, smearing rosy pigments across murderous edges, summoning sharper edges should anyone confront you. Hiding behind new pigments, you shred newspaper to fragments with clawing hands. Unrepentant, you name those bodies - Cleïs, Atthis, Sardis - stolen bodies; you recorded only their edges, bending their hands to better caress you, crushing them like newspaper down to bare pigments thick with sand, but those pigments are dug up and the bodies, curled like newspaper, recount your savage edges. In seizing you we seem closer to death, hands only shards under others’ hands dripping the same bloody pigments.
295 By collecting all that’s left of you, I rearrange the bodies that you flung in pits on desert edges, pieces padded out like newspaper. But bare hands can exhume bodies and forensic pigments, rewriting edges framed, trapping you like clippings from a newspaper.
296 Apple
Οἶον τὸ γλυκύµαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ' ὔσδῳ ἄκρον ἐπ' ἀκροτάτῳ· λελάθοντο δὲ µαλοδρόπηες, οὐ µὰν ἐκλελάθοντ', ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐδύναντ' ἐπίκεσθαι. – Sappho, fr. 93.
I watch you swing from branches, flushed sweet-apple red in orchard peace, he glimpses your late-blooming skin just out of reach; not forgotten only distanced, he plucks, not I, but my gaze will swallow you whole.
297 A Token from Sappho to Phaon
“…do not overpower my heart, mistress, with ache and anguish, but come here…” clinging to those rocks, cliff’s fresh rise from shore steering broke-crescent bone speaks another story bloody lungs rising we travel under waves chipping at amber you watch and wait the place where Zeus nursed fruit lining up a fall Aphrodite’s plunge falling sun, we take the mark out of island, patrol sea for no certain song placed departing tongue split. Wax wings fringed and shedding flowers in your red wake.
298 Worship
We came and again I called you here to me, but still you didn’t answer. The thought of me has grown hateful to you Women dance around the altar, my voice and their footfalls scare the horses, obeying the haughty one I watch them grazing under boughs of apple trees, soft fruit freckling grass. and you have forgotten me… But still you don’t reply: I weave garlands from your roses for each girl’s neck, … or you love another more. each still wanting to please you, now their voices rise in song only I hear, You have no share in the roses of Peria Your Cyprian smile won’t guide us, so I choose your sister for my ally, find yourself a voice already she reaches for me, golden apples shaking with mute treason.
299 Sappho and Alcaeus
The kalathos with your face was maybe strung beside a hearth or temple. While it plays Sylvan historian no honey-smile or violet hair remain; your stare almost cracks glaze as Alcaeus waits at your side. His hand is high not to drink, but strum the lyre clung to his side, set in Attic clay by twin fires. Forged eyes hint at a murder scene to be replayed, no evidence lingers, bodies lined for storage while your gaze lifts as though to count each floral twist along your shared deceptive weave in that cherished ceramic frame.
300
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