Transcribing the poetry of one language into another is always a difficult task. For poetry is a distortion of language, the stretching of vocabulary, syntax and rhythm until they form new shapes – the creation of a language within a language now twice rather than once removed from the translator’s reach. But as well as the difficulties faced by any translator of every poet – metre, word order and critical interpretation, amongst others – the translator of Sappho’s poetry has first to deal with some fairly basic technical problems.
Although over two hundred fragments of her work have survived, some seven hundred lines in all, this represents a mere fraction of her complete output which probably amounted to five hundred poems. This severely limits the nature of any linguistic or critical analysis that can be made about her work, analysis which might in more normal circumstances provide the translator with important clues for their craft – the possible shading, for example, of a morally ambiguous term.
Secondly, the very process of that survival has caused several difficulties. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Sappho’s poetry was known almost entirely from quotations in other classical writers, mainly anthologists, grammarians and literary commentators, for the most part writing a couple of centuries or more after Christ – nearly a millenium away from Sappho’s original compositions. These quotations vary in length from a complete poem to a single word and their most common intention, to prove a point about dialect or metre, often has little to contribute to our understanding of their original context or literary skill.
In more modern times, a significant body of Sappho’s work has been found on papyrus fragments, most of these in the sands of Oxyrhynchus, to the west of the Nile. But these too present their problems. Damage or wear to the papyri mean that the reading of certain words or phrases is ambiguous and a great deal of scholarship is devoted to ascertaining exactly what Sappho might have written. And while several contain almost complete poems, many more are far less rewarding. The last known use of the papyri, torn into strips for wrapping around mummified bodies, means that a great deal of Sappho’s poetry reads only as follows in (a) below (88LP):
| a) | …you would wish… | b) | …it must… |
| …little… | …to tell… | ||
| …be carried… | …loved yo… | ||
| …you know too… | …feeling… | ||
| …has forgotten… | …to think… | ||
| …someone might say… | …last time… | ||
| …I shall love… | …morning… | ||
| …as long as there is… | …the door… | ||
| …concerned… | …near me… | ||
| …a firm friend… | …you never… | ||
| …painful… | …again… | ||
| …bitter… | …let me… |
Compare this to the second passage and the difficulties intensify; for where (a) represents the remnants of a poem considered worth preserving in antiquity in one of the great libraries of the east, whatever its later fate, (b) is a tattered piece of Basildon Bond retrieved from the rubbish blowing around a modern city street. The problem for scholar, literary historian and translator alike is how can we, or even how should we, convey the difference?
In the past, one solution has been to work around the fragments, filling in the gaps in order to make a more complete poem for the reader. The danger here is that over a large body of work in which most of the fragments are in the state above or even worse, a false voice emerges which has little to do with Sappho and much with the translator’s own preconceptions or literary aspirations. Fortunately, the tendency in more recent years has been to present only what the original text supplies, unless the sense is quite clear and/or a sufficient body of scholarly opinion is agreed on its interpretation. Throughout these translations, I have followed this practice, indicating any conjectures with square brackets. Similarly, breaks at the start, end or during fragments of papyri are denoted by the use of dots. This also serves to distinguish between fragments that are found on papyrus, and those that are derived from quotations in ancient commentators, for the latter all commence with capitals.
Even where a substantial piece of text exists, with a relatively undisputed reading, as for example, No.78 (1LP), thought to be the only complete poem to survive or No.20 (31LP), the translator’s path is still strewn with obstacles. Ancient commentators praised the smoothness of Sappho’s style, the ‘euphony’ of her language, the choice and juxtaposition of her words. Unfortunately, this quality is one of the most difficult to capture in the transition from Greek to English; Greek has a far more flexible word order, a greater ability to mark emphasis, to use assonance or alliteration or to suggest ambiguity. In antiquity Sappho was also known for her skilful and innovative use of metre. Again this is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to render into English, as metre in Greek poetry is measured in length, in English by stress.
As in all Greek poetry, the oral origin of Sappho’s work can also create a sense of distance for the modern reader. The poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey, often composing as they sung, used a string of stock epithets such as ‘the wine dark sea’ or ‘rosy-fingered dawn’ almost as mnemonics for their audience and themselves. A century or so later, Sappho and her lyric contemporaries, although working in a new and revolutionary genre, were still bound by the conventions and limitations of oral performance, if not composition. It is therefore not unusual for Sappho to repeat the same few adjectives throughout a poem, often within a few lines of each other, in a manner which might well seem unimaginative and dull to those of us more used to the luxury of the written word with all its opportunities for a second, third or fourth reading. It should also be noted that the Greek lexicon is far less extensive than English with the result that its vocabulary is far more flexible, allowing the same adjective to work in several different contexts with several shades of meaning. This is particularly the case in colour terminology; the Greek word chloros, for example, can mean anything from dark green to pale yellow (see note on No.20 [31LP]).
The difficulty for the translator is whether to recreate the repetitive sound and intention of the original Greek by reiterating the same word in English or to convey the ambiguity of Greek expression by substituting alternatives at each recurrence. In practice, the decision tends to be a case of considering each instance on its individual merits. For example, in No.78 (1LP), the repetition of the adverb aute ‘again’ is clearly a deliberate intention of style (see Page, pp.12-14), as Sappho mocks herself in her portrayal of Aphrodite’s playfully exasperated response to yet another call for help in the poet’s conquest of a loved one. In the fourth and fifth stanzas of No.74 (98LP), Sappho repeats the adjective poikilos to describe the headband she would like to obtain for her daughter. This instance is slightly complicated by the fact that the papyrus is damaged and a large block of text probably originally existed between the two stanzas. However, although poikilos could be translated in several different ways, such as ‘many-coloured’, ‘spotted’, ‘embroidered’ or ‘finely-wrought’ (although the latter more usually in the context of metalwork), I decided to repeat the phrase ‘brightly-coloured’ in order to contrast more strongly the specific headband which Sappho wishes for her daughter in the present with the purple band mentioned in the second stanza – an abstraction of the past and bound up with Sappho’s memory of her mother.
Given such ambiguities, the preconceptions of those who attempt to interpret them come more and more into play. The most prevalent of these, which focus on Sappho’s position as a woman, and their effect on readings of her work have already been discussed in the introduction above. Needless to say such assessments have had even more influence on the way in which her poems have been translated. For example, those who are worried by the eroticism of Sappho’s poetry and seek to argue for a more spiritual tenure to her language have translated the Greek word stromne in the last stanza of No.32 (94LP) as anything from a ‘mat’ to a ‘couch’ whereas the term specifically refers to a bed – the place where you would spend the night. In the same stanza, the noun pothos has been translated as ‘all that they wished for’ or ‘longing’. While technically correct (the term embraces any feeling of want for something absent), here as elsewhere in her poetry Sappho uses the word in the specific sense of sexual desire, particularly in conjunction with the verb exienai, ‘to come to the end of’, a phrase which, as Denys Page has pointed out, echoes an Homeric expression for sexual fulfilment (Page, p.79). At the opposite end of the spectrum, other translators have added their own speculations to the incomplete text of this stanza in order to provide a rather more titillating version of Sappho’s eroticism: ‘gently your desire/for delicate young women was satisfied’, reads one, for example (Barnstone, p.71), echoing the lurid fantasies of Baudelaire, Verlaine and the other fin de siècle poets.
There is also a tendency for translators to trivialise the power of Sappho’s writing by using a rather florid language perhaps thought appropriate for the work of a woman poet. For instance, the Greek adjective agapetos which describes an object of affection, something or someone that is worthy of love, is often translated as the rather trite ‘darling’ or ‘my darling’. Again, in the last section of No.31 (58LP), the noun habrosune has been translated by ‘delicacy’ or ‘refinement’. The Greek is problematic for it can mean ‘material splendour’ or even ‘luxuriousness’, as well as referring to the freshness of youth, with the sense of ‘charm’ or ‘delicateness’ more usually reserved for descriptions of literary style. In my translation, I have opted for ‘intensity’ because this seems to convey the meaning of vigour, as well as the riches of existence which the speaker is loath to leave behind, with none of the moral censure that ‘luxuriousness’ or ‘sensuality’ might convey.
The aim of my translations throughout has been to reproduce Sappho’s poetry as faithfully as possible through a careful study of both text and critical readings, with the intention of avoiding, if the sense will allow, the twin pitfalls of addition and preconception. As for form, with the longer fragments and particularly with those poems that are almost complete, I have attempted, wherever possible, to retain the essence of Sappho’s original. My aim here has been to ensure that the English text on the page approximates as directly as is practical, syllable for syllable, to that of the Greek. The brief fragments, however, are not so straightforward. A string of half-lines (as in No.29 [26LP]), a single word (No.55 [185LP]) or a second-hand description of a point of style (No.27 [197LP]) would be of little interest or use to the modern reader. Here in order to convey a sense of torn papyri or truncated quotation without losing any of their impact, I have taken the liberty of using freer, more modern forms of layout. These, I believe, are not only arresting to the reader but capture the essence of a splintered conversation or incomplete declaration of love, the intensity of an isolated metaphor. I have also tried to capture, without embellishment, the sensuality of Sappho’s poetry, the clarity and strength of her style, the ease of her expression and the logical progression of her thought. In short, by preserving the form, content and tone of the original Greek, I have attempted to allow Sappho to speak for herself.