Margaret Reynolds - The Sappho Companion

Born around 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho is now regarded as the greatest lyrical poet of ancient Greece, ironic and passionate, capturing the troubled depths of love. Her work survives only in fragments, yet her influence extends throughout Western literature, fuelled by the speculations and romances which have gathered around her name, her story and her sexuality.

This remarkable anthology brilliantly displays the way different periods have taken up Sapphos haunting story, bringing together many different kinds of work. We see her image change, re-created in Ovids poetry and Boccaccios tales, in translations by Pope, Rossetti, Swinburne and Baudelaire, and in the modern versions of Eavan Boland, Ruth Padel and Jeanette Winterson.

Margaret Reynolds is a writer, academic, critic and broadcaster. Her 1992 edition of Elizabeth Barrett Brownings Aurora Leigh won the British Academys Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Her other books include the acclaimed Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. She lives in Gloucestershire and is a Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, and was formerly a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

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Epub ISBN: 9781446413760

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Published by Vintage 2001

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Selection, introduction, essays and editorial apparatus Margaret Reynolds 2000
The Acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page

The right of Margaret Reynolds to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

First published in Great Britain in 2000 By Chatto & Windus

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For Jeanette Winterson,
with love

come, my sacred tortoiseshell lyre
speak, and let my music
give you voice

Sappho, Fragment 118

Orpheus, son of Apollo, was the most famous musician the world has ever known. Animals crowded round to hear his song and even the lion lay down tamely at his feet. Mountains would heave their rocky foundations and move towards the sound; trees would bend and pull up their roots to follow his music.

When his wife Eurydice died, Orpheus pursued her into Hades and so charmed the god of death with the music of his lyre that his prayer was granted and Eurydice was restored to life. But Orpheus forgot the one condition that he should not look back as they made their way up and out of the underworld. With Eurydice now lost to him for a second time, the music of Orpheus lyre was so sad that it broke the hearers heart. Alone on the mountainside Orpheus mourned, and day after day the people who lived nearby wept to hear his wailing song. Then one day the sound was heard no more. Some said that the gods, unable to bear the sounds of his lamentation, had struck him with lightning; others that Orpheus had been torn apart by wild beasts, tormented by the pain of his song, or by Maenads, half-crazed women who wandered over the mountains.

However that may be, Orpheus lyre floated down the River Hebrus and out into the wide sea, playing all the while, and its sweet music echoed across the water. At length the lyre was cast up high on the shores of the island of Lesbos, where it lay neglected until it was overgrown with vines and half-buried under falling leaves. But the winds of the island are known for their melodies, and the nightingales of Lesbos are said to sing more sweetly than those of any other place in the world

At the beginning of the twentieth century an American visitor to the island of Lesbos said that every family on the island had a daughter named Sappho. Today, although you can meet Iphigenias in Greece, Electras and Cassandras, and even Jocastas, you hardly ever meet a Sappho. It is not a name that features in the dictionaries scoured by new parents in any country.

I did once know a girl called Sappho not in Greece, but in Oxford. It was in the early 1970s and she was an American, a renegade hippie who had run away from her respectable family, worked in a circus and done the drug scene, and who now wanted to settle into domesticity with her undergraduate boyfriend. Her real name was Sue. Another Sappho that I know of was Sappho Durrell, the daughter of Lawrence Durrell (who figures in this book) and herself a writer. Sadly, though she made the ancient Sappho one of her literary models, her personal history all too closely resembled that of her namesake, for she led a difficult and unhappy life and ended by committing suicide in January 1985 at the age of thirty-four.

Other than that, I can think of the Ladies of Llangollen (Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby), who were celebrated in the early nineteenth century for their romantic friendship and whose dog was called Sappho. Radclyffe Hall had a parrot called Sappho in 1926, but it bit her and ended up being sent to the zoo. More recently Kate Flint, an academic colleague, once had a cat named Sappho. She liked to sleep high up on top of the kitchen cupboards, from where she would take a flying leap on to the floor. I never did find out if this was how she got to be called Sappho, or whether the practice began after she had acquired the name, but I do know that Kates other cat was called Mrs Pankhurst.

So even in this very small sample of Sapphos, the name conjures up allusions to an activist-feminist, to a Sapphist or a romantic friend, to a writer and a suicide, to a non-conformist free spirit, and to an illustrious woman whose name was venerated by the inhabitants of her native island. In this book you will find other examples of all these kinds of Sapphos, and you will meet many more.

The real Sappho, if not the first Sappho, was a poet. And her name was not Sappho as we pronounce it at all. Today, in English, she is all soft sibilants and faded fs, but in fact she is Psappho. In ancient Greek and, indeed, even in modern Greek if you hear a native speaker say her name, she comes across spitting and popping hard ps. Ppppsappoppo. We have eased off her name, made her docile and sliding, where she is really difficult, diffuse, many-syllabled, many-minded, vigorous and hard.

Psappho lived on the island of Lesbos, off the coast of what is now Turkey, at the end of the seventh and the beginning of the sixth centuries BC . Beyond these bare facts, we know very little about her poetry, hardly anything about her life, not much more about her society, nothing to speak of about her character and nothing whatsoever about her personal appearance. But this lack of facts has not stopped people virtually from that day to this making up stories about her. Quite the contrary. As you will see in reading this anthology, Sappho is not a name, much less a person. It is, rather, a space. A space for filling in the gaps, joining up the dots, making something out of nothing.