Sappho

Sappho (Attic Greek: Σαπφώ; Aeolic Greek: Ψάπφω; c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an Ancient Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is not has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete.

Quotes

Immortal Aphrodite of the shimmering throne, daughter of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I pray thee crush not my spirit with anguish and distress, O Queen. But come hither if ever before thou didst hear my voice afar, and hearken, and leaving the golden house of thy father, camest with chariot yoked, and swift birds drew thee, their swift pinions fluttering over the dark earth, from heaven through mid-space. Quickly they arrived; and thou blessed one with immortal countenance smiling didst ask: What now is befallen me and why now I call and what I in my heart’s madness, most desire. What fair one now wouldst thou draw to love thee? Who wrongs thee Sappho? For even if she flies she shall soon follow and if she rejects gifts, shall soon offer them and if she loves not shall soon love, however reluctant. Come I pray thee now and release me from cruel cares, and let my heart accomplish all that it desires, and be thou my ally.
- Fr. 1 Voigt (tr. E. M. Cox, 1924)
  - O thou of divers-coloured mind, O thou
    Deathless, God's daughter subtle-souled...
    Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee;
    Bid not ache nor agony break nor master,
    Lady, my spirit.
    - St. 1 (tr. A. C. Swinburne, "On the Cliffs", 1880)
  - Immortal on thy many-splendoured throne
    Hear, Aphrodite Queen, that art
    Zeus’ witching daughter; and with pain and moan
    Break not my heart!
    - St. 1 (tr. W. S. Marris, 1938)
  - 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!
    - St. 1 (tr. Anne Carson, 2002)
  - Shimmering,
    iridescent,
    deathless Aphrodite,
    child of Zeus, weaver of wiles,
    I beg you,
    do not crush my spirit with anguish, Lady.
    - St. 1 (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)
  - Why is my faithful maid distressed?
    Who, Sappho, wounds thy tender breast?
    Say, flies he?—Soon he shall pursue.
    Shuns he thy gifts?—He soon shall give.
    Slights he thy sorrows?—He shall grieve,
    And soon to all thy wishes bow.
    - Sts. 5 and 6 (tr. Mark Akenside, Ode on Lyric Poetry, c. 1745)
  - Even she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
    And she shall give thee gifts that would not take.
    - St. 6 (tr. A. C. Swinburne, "Anactoria", 1866)
  - Come to me; what I seek in vain
    Bring thou; into my spirit send
    Peace after care, balm after pain;
    And be my friend.
    - St. 7 (tr. Frederick Tennyson, 1890)

Come hither from Crete to this holy temple, where is your graceful grove of apple-trees, and altars smoking with frankincense. In it cool water sounds through apple-boughs; all the place is shadowed with roses, and from the quivering leaves sleep comes down. In it a meadow blossoms with spring flowers, where horses pasture, and there the breezes breathe sweetly....There, Cyprian, take chaplets and pour softly in gold cups nectar mingled with our feasting.
- Fr. 2 Voigt (tr. C. M. Bowra, 1961)

Some say cavalry and others claim
infantry or a fleet of long oars
is the supreme sight on the black earth.
I say it is
the one you love. And easily proved.
Didn't Helen, who far surpassed all
mortals in beauty, desert the best
of men, her king,
and sail off to Troy and forget
her daughter and her dear parents? Merely
Aphrodite's gaze made her readily bend
and led her far
from her path. These tales remind me now
of Anaktoria who isn't here,
yet I
for one
would rather see her warm supple step
and the sparkle in her face than watch all
the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored
in glittering bronze.
- Fr. 16 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965)
  - Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
    on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
    some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
    she whom one loves best.
    - St. 1 (tr. Richmond Lattimore, 1960)
  - 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.
    - St. 1 (tr. Anne Carson, 2002)

Look at him, just like a god,
that man sitting across from you,
whoever he is,
listening to your
close, sweet voice,
your irresistible laughter
And O yes,
it sets my heart racing—
one glance at you
and I can't get any words out,
my voice cracks,
a thin flame runs under my skin,
my eyes go blind,
my ears ring,
a cold sweat pours down my body,
I tremble all over,
turn paler than grass.
- Fr. 31 Voigt (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)
  - My muse, what ails this ardour?
    Mine eys be dym, my lymns shake,
    My voice is hoarse, my throte scorcht,
    My tong to this roofe cleaves,
    My fancy amazde, my thoughtes dull’d,
    My head doth ake, my life faints
    My sowle begins to take leave,
    So greate a passion all feele,
    To think a soare so deadly
    I should so rashly ripp up.
    - (tr. Philip Sidney, 1593)
      Compare: Catullus, no. 51

The stars hide away their shining form around the lovely moon when in all her fullness she shines (over all) the earth.
- Fr. 34 Voigt (tr. David A. Campbell, 1982)
  - The stars about the lovely moon
    Fade back and vanish very soon,
    When, round and full, her silver face
    Swims into sight, and lights all space.
    - (tr. Edwin Arnold, 1869)

Eros has shaken my mind,
wind sweeping down the mountain on oaks.
- Fr. 47 Voigt (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)

I loved you, Atthis, once, long, long ago...
You seemed to me a small, ungainly child.
- Fr. 49 Voigt (tr. C. M. Bowra, 1938)

A handsome man guards his image a while;
a good man will one day take on beauty.
- Fr. 50 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965)

But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.
- Fr. 55 Voigt (tr. H. T. Wharton, 1887)
  - Dead shalt thou lie; and nought
      Be told of thee or thought,
    For thou hast plucked not of the Muses’ tree:
      And even in Hades’ halls
      Amidst thy fellow-thralls
    No friendly shade thy shade shall company!
    - (tr. Thomas Hardy, 1901)

Of course I am downcast and tremble
with pity for my state
when old age and wrinkles cover me,
when Eros flies about
and I pursue the glorious young.
Pick up your lyre
and sing to us of her who wears
violets on her breasts. Sing especially
of her who is wandering.
- Fr. 58 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965)

O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.
Sweet is the god but still I am
in agony and far from my strength.
for I had hope (none now) to share
something of the blessed gods,
nor was I so foolish
as to scorn pleasant toys.
Now may I have
all these things.
- Fr. 63 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965)

Do thou, O Dica, set garlands upon thy lovely hair, weaving sprigs of dill with thy delicate hands; for those who wear fair blossoms may surely stand first, even in the presence of Goddesses who look without favour upon those who come ungarlanded.
- Fr. 81 Voigt (tr. E. M. Cox, 1924)
  -    Weave garlands, maiden, from the strands
       Of dill, and with soft gentle hands
    Set the delicious leafage round your head.
       The Goddess and the happy Graces
       Love to look on flower-crown’d faces,
    But turn aside from the ungarlanded.
    - (tr. C. M. Bowra, 1938)

Truly, I wish I were dead.
She was weeping when she left me,
and said many things to me, and said this:
"How much we have suffered, Sappho.
Truly, I don't want to leave you."
- Fr. 94 Voigt (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)

Sweet mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am o’erwhelmed through Aphrodite with love of a slender youth.
- Fr. 102 Voigt (tr. J. M. Edmonds, 1922)
  - Oh, my sweet Mother—'tis in vain—
    I cannot weave, as once I wove—
    So wildered is my heart and brain
    With thinking of that youth I love!
    - (tr. Thomas Moore, 1826)
      Compare: Landor, Simonidea (1806)

Like the sweet apple reddening on the topmost branch,
the topmost apple on the tip of the branch,
and the pickers forgot it,
well, no, they didn't forget, they just couldn't reach it.
- Fr. 105a Voigt (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)
  - Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
    A-top on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, somehow,—
    Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.
    - (tr. D. G. Rossetti, 1870)
  - Like the pippin blushing high
    On the tree-top beneath the sky,
    Where the pickers forgot it—nay,
    Could not reach it so far away.
    - (tr. J. M. Edmonds, 1922)

As the hyacinth which the shepherd tramples on the hill
Lies upon the ground and lying bloometh purple still.
- Fr. 105b Voigt (tr. J. M. Edmonds, 1922)
  - Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found,
    Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound,
    Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
    - (tr. D. G. Rossetti, 1870)
  - Like a hyacinth in
    the mountains, trampled
    by shepherds until
    only a purple stain
    remains on the ground.
    - (tr. Mary Barnard, 1958)

Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go?
I am gone and never come back to you.
I never return.
- Fr. 114 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965) [1]

Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet.
- Fr. 130 Voigt (tr. H. T. Wharton, 1887)
  - Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving King,
    The bitter-sweet impracticable thing,
    Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.
    - (tr. J. A. Symonds, 1883)
  - Love has unbound my limbs and set me shaking,
    A monster bitter-sweet and my unmaking.
    - (tr. C. M. Bowra, 1938)
      Compare: Tennyson, "Fatima", l. 1 (Poems, 1843) · Swinburne, "Fragoletta", st. 14 (Poems and Ballads, 1866); Bothwell, act 1, sc. 1 (1874); Tristram of Lyonesse, sec. 6 (1882)

I have a fair daughter with a form like a golden flower, Cleïs the belovedest, above whom I [prize] nor all Lydia nor lovely [Lesbos].
- Fr. 132 Voigt (tr. H. T. Wharton, 1887)
  - I have a child; so fair
    As golden flowers is she,
    My Cleïs, all my care.
    I’d not give her away
    For Lydia’s wide sway
    Nor lands men long to see.
    - (tr. C. M. Bowra, 1938)

The lovely-voiced harbinger of Spring, the nightingale.
- Fr. 136 Voigt (tr. J. M. Edmonds, 1922)
  - The dear good angel of the spring,
    The nightingale.
    - (tr. Ben Jonson, 1641)

If you are my friend, stand up before me
and scatter the grace that's in your eyes.
- Fr. 138 Voigt (tr. Willis Barnstone, 1965)

Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother.
- Fr. 140 Voigt (tr. H. T. Wharton, 1887)
  - Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all
    That radiant dawn sped far and wide:
    The sheep to fold, the goat to stall,
    The children to their mother’s side.
    - (tr. Rennell Rodd, 1919)
  - All whom morning sends to roam,
    Hesper loves to lead them home.
    Home return who him behold,
    Child to mother, sheep to fold.
    - (tr. A. E. Housman, 1922)
  - Hesperus, you herd
    homeward whatever
    Dawn’s light dispersed
    you herd sheep—herd
    goats—herd children
    home to their mothers.
    - (tr. Mary Barnard, 1958)
      Compare: Byron, Don Juan, canto 3 (1819) l. 107 · Tennyson, Leonine Elegiacs (1830–1884) and Locksley Hall: Sixty Years After (1886)

Neither honey nor bee for me.
- Fr. 146 Voigt (tr. H. T. Wharton, 1887)

When wrath runs rampage
in your heart
you must hold still
that rambunctious tongue!
- Fr. 158 Voigt (tr. Suzy Q. Groden, 1966) [2]

The moon has set,
And the Pleiades.
Midnight.
The hour has gone by.
I sleep alone.
- Fr. 168b Voigt (tr. Stanley Lombardo, 2002)

To have beauty is to have only that,
but to have goodness
is to be beautiful
too.
- Fr. ? (tr. Suzy Q. Groden, 1966) [3]

Quotes about Sappho

Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modem lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but flame. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.
- Joseph Addison, in The Spectator, No. 223 (November 15, 1711)

Sappho thou coverest, Æolian land!
  The Muse who died,
Who with the deathless Muses, hand in hand,
  Sang, side by side!
Sappho, at once of Cypris and of Love
  The child and care;
Sappho, that those immortal garlands wove
  For the Muses’ hair!
Sappho, the joy of Hellas, and thy crown,—
  Ye Sisters dread,
Who spin for mortals from the distaff down
  The threefold thread,
Why span ye not for her unending days,
Unsetting sun,
For her who wrought the imperishable lays
Of Helicon?
- Antipater of Sidon, in Anthologia Palatina, bk. VII, no. 14; tr. Andrew Lang, Grass of Parnassus (2nd ed., 1892), p. 173

When everybody says "lesbian," a word connected with Sappho and the island of Lesbos, that automatically means that your forefathers and foremothers are European, that George Washington is the father of our country and Columbus discovered America-all false assumptions.
- Gloria E. Anzaldúa, interview in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)

When Judy Grahn wrote of the Greek poet Sappho she suggested that she was not the first woman poet in Western civilization, not a solitary female voice rising out of an otherwise barren plain. On the contrary, Grahn said, hers was the surviving voice, the last voice in a long line of women poets and artists-Sappho's works so badly fragmented because they were systematically destroyed. Grahn wrote: “And what was the nature of Sappho's wealth? She praised it often enough: love, beauty, grace, flowers, appropriate behavior to the gods, lovely clothing, intelligence, tenderness. Her poems are filled with the color purple, the color gold, the sun, flowers, especially the violet and the rose, and altars, deer, groves of trees, and the stories of the gods. Love, she said, is a tale-weaver. Wealthy? We own no kind of money that would buy us Sappho's wealth. In her world, women were central to themselves; they had to have been to write as she did. She lived on an island of women, in a company of women, from which she addressed all creation. And oh, how they listened.”
- Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)

I wanted to hear
Sappho’s laughter
and the speech of
her stringed shell.
What I heard was
whiskered mumble-
ment of grammarians:
Greek pterodactyls
and Victorian dodos.
- Mary Barnard, "Static", Collected Poems (1981) p. 64

One of the earliest -- and perhaps the first -- rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho...Much of Sappho's poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer. Though Attic poets and playwrights tried to destroy her by attacking her as a courtesan or "Lesbian" pervert, the German classical scholar, Welcker, in his Kleine Schriften, declares that such attacks were sheer calumny. Nor did they succeed in their aim. More than twenty centuries have honored the "sweet singer" of Aeolia.
- Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as Force in History (1946)

(What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?) Sappho, what else did you write?
- Louise Erdrich interview (2016)

We knew...that Sappho had written love poems to women in 600 B.C.
- Judy Grahn Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1985)

Mascula Sappho.
- Masculine Sappho.
- Horace, Epistle I, xix, 28

Ἐπιδειξαμένου γὰρ αὐτῷ τοῦ Μυρρινουσίου Φαίδρου λόγον ὑπὸ Λυσίου τοῦ Κεφάλου συγγεγραμμένον ἐρωτικόν, οὐκ ἔφη θαυμάζειν, πλῆρες τὸ στῆθος ἔχων ὥσπερ ἀγγεῖον ἀλλοτρίων ναμάτων, ἤ που Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς (οὕτω γὰρ αὐτὴν ὀνομάζων χαίρει διὰ τὴν ὥραν τῶν μελῶν, καίτοι μικρὰν οὖσαν καὶ μέλαιναν), ἢ Ἀνακρέοντος, φησίν, τοῦ σοφοῦ.
- For when the Myrrinusian Phædrus showed him [Socrates] an amatory oration, composed by Lysias the son of Cephalus, he says, that he is not struck with admiration, in consequence of having his breast full like a vessel, of foreign streams, derived from "the beautiful Sappho" (for thus he is pleased to call her, from the elegance of her verses, though she was short and of a dark complexion) or "the wise Anacreon".
- Maximus of Tyre, Dissertations, no. 8 (18), sec. 7 (ed. William H. Race, 1997; tr. Thomas Taylor, 1804)

And of the flowers of Sappho few, but roses.
- Meleager, Garland; tr. J. M. Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, vol. 1 (1922) p. 165

Of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses.
- Meleager, in Anthologia Palatina, bk. IV, no. 1; tr. W. R. Paton, Greek Anthology, vol. 1 (1916) p. 111

Non veniunt in idem pudor atque amor.
- Modesty and love are not at one.
- Ovid, Heroides, no. 15, l. 121 (tr. Grant Showerman, 1914)

Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.
- Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 672

Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited.
- Marge Piercy "Why Speculate on the Future?" in My Life, My Body (2015)

Sappho speaks words mingled truly with fire; through her song she communicates the heat of her heart.
- Plutarch, Moralia, Dialogue on Love, 762, translated by Edwin L. Minar, F. H. Sandbach and W. C. Helmbold, Vol. IX (1961) p. 389

Living unloved, to die unknown,
Unwept, untended and alone.
- Christina Rossetti, "Sappho", in Dinah Roe (ed.) Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 2008) p. 6

The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness
That held the fire eternal.
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, "On the Cliffs", Songs of the Springtides (1880)

Translations

Philip Sidney, printed with The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (F1, 1593)

Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd: or, A Tale of Robin Hood (1641) act 2, sc. 5

William Bowles, in Poems by Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, collected by N. Tate (London: J. Hindmarsh, 1685) p. 85

John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, [with] the Odes, Fragments and Epigrams of Sappho (London: J. Watts, 1735)

Ambrose Philips, Pastorals, Epistles, Odes, &c. with Translations from Pindar, Anacreon, and Sappho (1748)

Thomas Moore, Evenings in Greece (1826) p. 18 [4]

Edwin Arnold, The Poets of Greece (London: Cassell, Fetter, and Galpin, 1869)

D. G. Rossetti, Poems (1870; 2nd ed., 1881)

J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1st series, 1873; 2nd series, 1876; revised 1883)

H. T. Wharton, 'Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, 2nd ed. (London: David Stott, 1887)

Frederick Tennyson, The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcaeus (1890) p. 91

Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

W. G. Headlam, A Book of Greek Verse (Cambridge UP, 1907) pp. 4–17

Rennell Rodd, Love, Worship and Death: Some Renderings from the Greek Anthology (London: Edward Arnold, 1919)

A. S. Way, Sappho, and the Vigil of Venus (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920)

A. E. Housman, Last Poems (1922) no. 24 · More Poems (1936) nos. 10 and 11

J. M. Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, vol. 1 (1922)

E. M. Cox, The Poems of Sappho (London: Williams and Norgate, 1924)

T. F. Higham, C. M. Bowra and W. S. Marris, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938) nos. 140–157

Douglas Young, A Braird o Thristles (1947) — into Scots

Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949; revised 1960)

C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) p. 197

Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (University of California Press, 1958)

Willis Barnstone, Sappho: Lyrics in the Original Greek with Translations (New York: Anchor, 1965; 2nd ed., New York UP)

Suzy Q. Groden, The Poems of Sappho (Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1966) [5]

David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. 1: Sappho and Alcaeus, LCL 142 (1982)

Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)

Stanley Lombardo, Sappho: Poems and Fragments (Hackett Publishing, 2002) ISBN 978-0872205918

External links

Encyclopedic article on Sappho on Wikipedia
Works related to Author:Sappho on Wikisource
Media related to Sappho on Wikimedia Commons
Fragment one
The Poems of Sappho, translated by Edwin Marion Cox (1925)
Sappho in Unicode-encoded Greek and English translation
Sappho the Tenth Muse