Sappho - Stung with Love

STUNG WITH LOVE

SAPPHO was born after 630 BCE and died around 570. A native of the island of Lesbos, she resided in its largest city, Mytilene. Though a poet of considerable range, she is best known for amatory poems focusing on adolescent females. After her death she became a figure of legend and, in the Hellenistic period (323146 BCE ), was canonized as one of the nine lyric poets worthy of study. Though little of her poetry survived the Middle Ages, archaeological excavation has recovered numerous fragments. She is renowned as the first woman poet in literary history.

AARON POOCHIGIAN attended Moorhead State University in Moorhead, Minnesota, 19916, where he studied under the poets Dave Mason, Alan Sullivan and Tim Murphy. He entered graduate school for Classics in 1997 at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. After travelling and doing research in Greece on fellowship, 20034, he earned his PhD in 2006. His original poems have appeared in such journals as Arion, Dark Horse and Poetry Magazine.

CAROL ANN DUFFY is a British poet, playwright and freelance writer. Her poetry has received every major award in Britain, including the Whitbread and Forward Prizes for Mean Time and the T. S. Eliot Award for Rapture. In the USA she has received the E. M. Forster and Lannan Awards. Carol Ann has also written extensively for children and has edited many anthologies. She is the Poet Laureate.

SAPPHO

Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
AARON POOCHIGIAN

and with a Preface by CAROL ANN DUFFY

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This translation first published in Penguin Classics 2009

Selection, translation and editorial material copyright Aaron Poochigian, 2009

Preface copyright Carol Ann Duffy, 2009

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator and editor has been asserted

An extract from The Language of Women by Rachel Hadas is reproduced on page by kind permission of the author and of The Hudson Review, where it first appeared in issue 60:4 (Winter 2008)

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 9781101489895

Contents

Poems and Fragments

She was born after 630 BC on the Greek island of Lesbos. Plato honoured her as the Tenth Muse, and she was to inspire the naming of both a sexuality and a poetics. The Ancient Greeks celebrated her as their finest poet and reproduced her image on their coins and vases, and poets from antiquity to the present day have recognized her supreme lyric gift. The Roman poets Catullus and Horace, who probably read her work in its entirety, emulated and were influenced by her. Horace declared in his Odes that her poems merited sacred admiration. The list of poets who have translated her, written versions of her poems or written poems about her, is endless, but includes Ovid, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Alexander Pope, Byron, Coleridge, Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Edna St Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound and many poets writing in our own twenty-first century, notably the distinguished Canadian writer Anne Carson. Sapphos poems survive in fragments, some found as scrunched ingredients in papier mch coffins, and in a handful of more complete lyrics; but ninety per cent of what she wrote is lost to us now. She would have sung her poems, accompanying herself on the lyre, and she may well have invented the pctis, a variation of the instrument. It is from this ancient verse, sung to the lyre, that lyric poetry evolved. As one of a new wave of Greek poets, she was one of the first poets to write out of the personal, moving away from the narrative of the gods to the direct and human story of the individual and in doing so she transformed the lyric line. In these wonderful new translations by Aaron Poochigian we hear the voice of a great and enduring poet in our ear again. Sappho.

Because once on a time you were

Young, sing of what is taking place,

Talk to us for a spell, confer

Your special grace.

Sapphos style was melodic, intimate, sensual, and she wrote lyrics of love and desire, of loss and longing. As Poochigian notes in his superb and meticulous introduction, there is always something truly youthful about Sapphos spirit. She was a great celebrator, had a poets and a womans eye for the gorgeous; for flowers chervil, rose, marigold and sweet clover; for smells frankincense, aniseed, myrrh and honey; she loved the moon and The glitter and glamour of the sun; she loved, as her epithalamia, or marriage songs and other poems, show us, a good party, a gleaming feast. What is extraordinary, in reading these startlingly fresh, new versions, is how much life is conveyed by so little. Presented with only a tenth of what she wrote, we are vividly and deeply immersed in Sapphos world we walk with her on her island where the breeze feels as gentle as honey or where she sees an apple tree or hears a nightingale singing the note of desire. And this is achieved through a confident and shining poetic simplicity which has endured for over two thousand years.

The greatest poets are able, long after their deaths, to speak to our humanity and it is in her love poems that Sappho does this most clearly. These poems are earned out of her openness to desire, her willingness to love, her acceptance of a lovers suffering. In this, too, her spirit is forever young. Her love poems are why she endures and where we recognize ourselves: infatuated and jealous; smitten and fulfilled; brain and tongue shattered by love; wanting to die; remembering past encounters, all beautiful. Aaron Poochigians translations retain Sapphos intense sense of being singingly alive and of being on the side of youth, and loveliness, and love. They will find many new readers for the major woman writer of antiquity.

Carol Ann Duffy

Dates are birthdeath for people.