ἵνα μαθὼν αὐτὸ ἀποθάνω

I was asked a few nights ago what I loved about Sappho and I realized I couldn't answer that question without translating her, which is not a thing I do best at three in the morning while half-asleep (though it could be argued there is no better time, especially if what you are trying to translate is the fragment about the moon and the Pleiades or the one about Anaktoria and the most beautiful thing or the one which is a prayer to Aphrodite and her sparrows, the poet asking once again: fight at my side, goddess, stand with me). I often find it difficult to write about people I love because I do not want to get them wrong; it's easy to compress someone into a character sketch, the two or three details that make the best story, a mask to hang their name on. I did not always believe I was so unreliable, but then I picked up this philosopher on my shoulder and even actual Wittgenstein went through periods of being intensely skeptical that language could communicate anything at all. So with writers, perhaps I think it's most accurate if I let them speak for themselves, which of course is no use here if the listener doesn't know classical Greek.

δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

The moon has sunk down
and the Pleiades, it is mid-
night, and the hours go by
and I lie alone.

I translate those four lines a little differently each time and none of them is correct. I have still said nothing about Sappho, about whom we know almost nothing that is not drawn from her poems, even the name that is supposed to belong to her daughter, Kleis. Lyric poets speak in the first person, so intimately observed that it is almost irresistible to imagine their work as autobiography, as ancient commentators took it. Anakreon had a boyfriend named Bykchis, Archilochos gave classical heroism the two-fingered salute and left his shield on a battlefield in Thrace. Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, in the city of Eressos, a little earlier than 620 BCE; it is said that she died around 570. She was almost certainly not the wife of Kerkylos of Andros, as the tenth-century Suda would have it, because the name means "Big Prick from Man Island." It is equally unlikely that she killed herself for love of a boatman named Phaon, although there is a very good essay by Greg Nagy examining what about the story (beyond an affirmation of her heterosexuality, as the purported name of her husband plays on her traditionally identified sexual preferences—the poems speak of desire for men and women both; more often women) resonated with the ancient world. Violet-plaited holy honey-smiling Sappho, her contemporary Alkaios called her, ἰόπλοκ᾽ ἄγνα μελλιχόμειδε Σάπφοι. An epigram attributed to Plato runs:

Ἐννέα τὰς Μούσας φασίν τινες. ὡς ὀλιγώρως.
ἢν ἰδέ· καὶ Σαπφὼ Λεσβόθεν, ἡ δεκάτη.

Some say there are nine Muses. How careless of them.
Look: there is also Sappho from Lesbos, the tenth.

Even that is only her name in Attic Greek. What they spoke on Lesbos in the seventh century was Aeolic Greek, which sounded so strange to Plato and his fellow-citizens that a character in one of his dialogues even labels it barbarian, the ultimate term of cultural dismissal (βάρβαροι, people who don't even have a real language, just flaps of nonsense syllables), and indeed, if you have been brought up like most classical scholars nowadays on the Greek of fifth-century Athens, you stare at your first page of Sappho and wonder what the hell. All the stresses are pushed forward, half the vowels have softened and darkened into alpha; there are no rough breathing marks, but older letters like digamma (ϝ) hang on at the beginnings of words that in all other Greek dialects lost them long ago. Betas bubble up in front of words beginning with rho. The hard taps of tau are suddenly plosive pi's. Moon in Attic Greek is σελήνη. On Lesbos, it's σελάννα. The poet's name on her own tongue was Ψάπφω, Psáppho. There's a word to hold in your mouth. There is nothing sighing about it. She is direct about what she loves.

( Sappho fr. 16 )

The voice of the poems is a woman who speaks fearlessly to gods. Aphrodite might be another friend or lover, a trusted confidante, wryly familiar with the trials of the poet's heart; she could break it by proxy if she chose.

( Sappho fr. 1 )

( Sappho fr. 2 )

These are what I think of as work-print translations: I am trying not to get in the poet's way. I have no idea if the technique works or if I am only making her sound simple when what I want is the directness, the clear-voiced (λιγύφωνος) passion and the honesty of the images, because she does not cut away to blowing curtains when what she wants us to feel is the frenzy in her skin.

( Sappho fr. 31 )

( Sappho fr. 47 )

( Sappho fr. 49 )

I started this post at three in the morning and I was half-asleep by the end of it. By afternoon, it's still such a slight selection of her surviving work; what we have are so many fragments, scattered throughout the arguments of ancient authors or disinterred from papyri in the desert. She speaks so strongly out of the past and yet no one can get a hold on her: I am sure some nineteenth-century scholar tried with results I don't want to know about, but it is impossible to imagine filling in more than the lacunae of a few letters, writing the rest of the poem around an image as spare and arresting as a beautiful child with a form like golden flowers or as the sweet apple blushes on the highest branch. There's no hymn to Aphrodite that can make her notice any of us. Myself included. She became what she wrote.

Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον.

Eros the limb-loosener drives me once again,
sweetbitter, irresistible, stealing.