‘It is not very likely,’ declared Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt after their extraordinary discoveries during their first dig at Oxyrhynchus in 1896, ‘that we shall find another poem of Sappho.’1 Grenfell and Hunt’s subsequent excavations in fact uncovered many other new fragments of the poet but even they might have been astonished to know that, over a hundred years later, new pieces of her work are still coming to light.
The first of these recent discoveries, contained on two papyri found in the collection of the University of Cologne in 2004 (and published by Martin West a year later), was technically not a new poem at all. Instead, here was a larger, more complete version of No. 31 (58LP), previously known from a tattered fragment unearthed in Oxyrhynchus and now housed in the collection of the Sackler Library Oxford.2 In 2014, a perhaps even more remarkable development was announced by Dirk Obbink, head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project at the University of Oxford; new pieces of privately-owned papyrus, given to Obbink for analysis, offered a staggering nine new readable texts of Sappho – the largest find since Grenfell and Hunt’s excavations at Oxyrhynchus – with three containing previously unknown songs.3 In addition, it seemed that all of these fragments came from the second half of Book 1 of the Alexandrian editions of Sappho. These, it was now clear, were collected by alphabetisation, confirming Hunt’s theory on the ordering of her works by later editors.4
Of all the new finds, most excitement centred on the so-called ‘Brothers Poem’ (No.121). This contains five complete Sapphic stanzas which are thought to represent most of the poem (an additional opening stanza is now believed to have been lost).5 In the poem the poet reproaches an unnamed addressee for anticipating the safe return home of one Charaxus, presumably a merchant as he is expected ‘ship laden’ – a circumstance which, the speaker warns, should more properly be placed in the hands of the gods. The poem ends with the wish that another presumably younger, character Larichus, might revive the fortunes of both the speaker and her addressee.
Scholarly interest – and also some initial scepticism6 – was raised by the characters’ names: Charaxus and Larichus are both known from later sources as the apparent names of Sappho’s elder and younger brothers. The fifth century B.C. Greek historian Herodotus, recounts that Charaxus bought and then freed the courtesan Rhodopis on a trip to Naucratis in Egypt, returning with her to Mytilene, much to the horror of Sappho who, Herodotus tells us, later vilified her brother in her songs (see note on No.81).7 Other sources, such as Athenaeus, add that Charaxus was a trader or merchant, which again seems to fit with the Brothers Poem, while Strabo comments that Sappho called Rhopodis ‘Doricha’ in her poetry, a name which appears in No.81 (15LP) and possibly also in the very damaged fragment 7LP.8
Clearly the new fragment could be seen as representing a further piece of this story – Sappho’s own. But as ever with ancient lyric poetry, caution is advised. Later sources often extrapolated a poet’s biography back from their verse and, as discussed above in ‘Sappho and Poetry’, in a society in which choral lyrics represented an entire social group, the poet’s ‘I’ can be problematic. Certainly discussions of the poem have been divided, with some scholars believing the addressee to be Sappho’s mother. Others opt for her uncle, her brother Larichus, a third brother Eurygius or Rhodopis/Doricha herself,9 while a few dispute that the poem is about Sappho’s brothers at all, arguing that they might be fictional characters.10
It might be more useful to consider the place of the fragment in Sappho’s poetry as a whole. Like No. 21 (16LP), the Brothers Poem appears to rewrite Homeric epic; for instance, its three main protagonists – the speaker/Sappho, Charaxus and Larichus – could be seen to echo Penelope, Odysseus and Telemachus in the Odyssey.11 Other commentators note Sappho’s use of Homeric language, for instance the rare Greek adjective artemes or ‘safe’ which occurs in the Odyssey of Odysseus’s wish to return home from his voyage but also in the Iliad of the Trojan heroes Aeneas and Hector, as they return unharmed from battle.12 As in Nos. 20 (31LP) and 78 (1LP), Sappho appears to be transposing male epic diction to the context of a female lyrical world in which the more usually silent Penelope becomes the voiced poet/narrator. On the other hand, the wily hero Odysseus – and even the epic warriors of Troy – are transformed into the absent, unvoiced Charaxus.13 In translating such new pieces, it seemed important to apply the same approaches I had employed with the older Sappho fragments thirty-five years ago. For instance, for artemes, I settled on ‘unscathed’ to echo its use in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In addition, I slightly elongated the description of the ‘harsh storms’ to summon up the many gales that Odysseus faces on his own travels.
There were other issues too. As Obbink has noted of the new poems, ‘as many as four separate papyrus manuscripts contributed to the textual reconstruction of a single line’. He points to the fact that overlaps with existing papyrus fragments helped in this process yet could also produce ‘frustratingly different readings’. Suggestions from other textual scholars also proved both help and hindrance, with these varying readings ranked ‘in descending order of persuasiveness’ in Obbink’s critical apparatus.14 Obbink has not been immune to such fluctuations himself, changing his mind on his own readings of the texts, often significantly, from his first 2014 publication to that of 2016.
Another poem found on the same piece of papyrus as the Brothers Poem, which Obbink calls the Kypris or Cypris Song (here No.122), has proved even more problematic. The poem addresses Cypris or Aphrodite, the goddess of love and desire, also invoked by Sappho in several other fragments (see Section VI).15 The poem’s complex opening questions to the goddess about the nature of desire echo those of Nos.21 (16LP) and 78 (1LP), while the central images of its more fragmentary second stanza – a desire which shakes the body and loosens the limbs – can also be found in Nos.1 (47LP) and 2 (130LP). Interestingly, the new text overlaps with another previously known, if mostly very damaged, fragment, part of which I had previously translated in No.29 (26LP). With more of the text, some of its then conjectured readings can be challenged. Placed in its proper context of a ritual or devotional song, it becomes an entirely new poem.16
One of the main difficulties with the Cypris Song is the number of different readings of the piece, particularly its tricky opening interrogative line. As Diane Rayor comments ‘the foundation for reliable published translations is accurate Greek texts’.17 Rayor had already had to stop the press for her new volume of Sappho for Cambridge University Press in 2014 when the new fragments came to light. She then worked her way through three versions as Obbink’s text shifted and changed in the light of new readings and re-readings.18 For my own translation (No.122), I have followed Obbink’s latest 2016 text for its first stanza. However, at times I was reminded of translating Erinna’s Distaff for my 1996 volume Classical Women Poets when I ended up with an enormous piece of paper with each scholar’s emendations shaded in a different colour.19
Another new series of papyri, acquired by the private Green Collection in Oklahoma City, was published by Obbink in 2014. Believed to be from the same papyrus roll as the Brothers Poem and the Cypris (or Kypris) Song, these have also proved extremely fruitful – and challenging.20 One of the longer pieces is a new, more complete text of the extremely damaged fragment 9LP, which previously consisted of seven lines with about ten or so half-words in all. The new fragment is still quite damaged but now runs to twenty half-lines, with two mostly readable Sapphic stanzas. It now appears clear that the poet urges an addressee, ‘mother’, to make preparations for a religious festival (No.123).21 This is presumably that of Hera who, with Zeus and Dionysus, was worshipped at the Sanctuary of the Three Gods at Messon on Lesbos, and in whose honour women’s beauty contests were held there (she is also mentioned in the Brothers Poem, as well as in No.91 (17LP), on which see below, and No.127).22 For its translation, I have followed Obbink’s conjectures and, in its final lines, added a couple of my own, all marked by the use of square brackets, as in previous translations.
Another fragment in the group, fragment 16a (No.124), is also problematic. It may be the opening stanzas of a new poem that followed No. 21 (16LP), the Ode to Anactoria, in textual editions. Alternatively, in his latest textual edition of the new fragments, Obbink has argued that they might constitute a continuation of No.21 which many editors had previously thought complete.23 The opening stanza appears to chime with the theme and concerns of much of Sappho’s love poetry; the nature of desire and the ways in which the lover might find happiness. As Obbink has noted, it also features a typically Sapphic progression from generalised experience (‘No, it is not possible for anyone/to be completely happy…’) to that of the individual, whether or not identified as the poet herself.24
Its second stanza is far more incomplete but nevertheless contains some startling images. In line 6 of the fragment the words ep’akras, or literally ‘on the edges’, could refer to a Greek expression for ‘on tiptoes’.25 The following line appears to have an equally arresting reference to chion, in Homer used of fallen snow. This could evoke the figure of Kairos or ‘Opportunity’, the concept of acting at the correct time or seizing the day, which in Greek art and mythology was often portrayed as a young man running on tiptoes. But ep’akras was also used of being ‘on the edge’ of a changing season, particularly spring, which chimed with the later mention of (perhaps melting) snow. In addition, the verb which Obbink reads as ebas, or ‘you went’ echoes the eba (‘she went’) used of Helen’s desertion of Paris in No.21 (16LP).26 And so I added in some conjectures here to include the image of a lover leaving like fleeting snow in the spring.
Another, tiny fragment, No.126 (fragment 18a), is thought to be part of a previously unknown poem, although its reference to the night and stars (and possibly also an exhortation to drink), brings to mind Nos. 27 (197LP) and 111 (34LP). My approach to the translation of such tiny pieces here has been the same as that of my original edition, using free modernist poetic forms to represent a hanging, isolated image, frozen in time by its circumstance of survival (see ‘Sappho and Translation’ above).27
As well as fleshing out previously very corrupted texts, the new papyri also provide new insights into longer fragments, quite literally filling in some gaps in their lines. For instance, one piece offers two more words for the missing lines of the third stanza of No.21 (16LP), just as the poem turns from the example of the mythological Helen back to the passion of Sappho herself. Intriguingly, both of these words, ‘mind’ and ‘thinks’ (voemma and voesei), refer to cognition but stretching out the meaning any further is still a matter of conjecture.28
The missing opening word of No.80 (5LP) was assumed to be the goddess Aphrodite, addressed again as ‘Cypris’, alongside the Nereids or sea-nymphs of its first line. The new papyrus reveals the word to be instead a qualifying adjective for the nymphs, potniai or ‘revered’. Yet, true to form, there is already a scholarly debate over its reading, with some arguing that the word might be pontiai or ‘sea-dwelling’, an epithet often employed of ocean deities.29
In No.91 (17LP), the changes were even more radical. Previous texts of the fragment offered only the left hand side of the poem whereas the new papyrus has the left and right sides for most of its twenty lines, with only some central words missing, making it possible ‘to follow a narrative we could only guess at before’.30 And so, the previously conjectured opening invocation of Hera is now known to have been instead a call to celebrants to partake in her festival (see above). Such small but significant changes continue throughout the new text so I have now produced a new revised version of the fragment (No.127).
To general readers, it might seem disquieting that any translation of an ancient text is not definitive; that what they read in a published volume might not be static, monolithic, fixed. For a translator, too, it is sometimes difficult to have to accept that, having taken hours and hours of research and reading, of poring over a difficult and already disputed text, not to mention agonising over semantic choices in the target language, a translation might no longer be valid or, worst of all, no longer correct. Yet there can be pleasures in this sinuous, ever-flowing art. More than ever, translation becomes part of the dialogue. Translation moves the text forwards. As I wrote in my 2013 study Piecing Together The Fragments, ‘it is through translation that ancient fragments can revive their dead, silent language…translation can go further into scholarship’s uncharted regions, unperturbed by the unknown’.31
When it came to retranslating No.31 (58LP), the Tithonus poem, after the discovery of a new, almost complete text in Cologne, such statements proved prophetic. Previously, when working on the much more incomplete poem, I had felt a strong affinity to the fragment, so much so that it became the one exception to my rule of not filling in the gaps (although I added a page note to that effect). The poem’s reconstruction was greatly aided by its reference to the myth of Tithonus and Eös, the immortal Dawn, who gave her lover eternal life but neglected to offer him eternal youth until he was so shrivelled with age that he was transformed into the cicada. So, when West’s new, more complete, text appeared in 2005, it was very gratifying to discover that my conjectures followed this new poem quite closely. If translation is an activity that occupies the realms of inspiration and creativity, as well as the pages of the dictionary, then it was also cheering to find that it embraced serendipity as well.
Nevertheless, when I was asked to provide a version of West’s new text for Poet in the City’s ‘Sappho…Fragments’ event at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London in October 2013, the two texts had become so entwined in my mind that they proved harder to disentangle than I could have imagined. In the end, to distinguish a new version from my earlier reconstruction, I decided to use more formal, less conversational semantics in English than previously. Yet I still found it difficult to keep to the six couplets of West’s reconstruction without writing prose lines so the text was transmuted into an almost-sonnet of fourteen lines. Nevertheless, thirty years – and two millennia later – it still felt as if Sappho was at my shoulder as I wrote.
Such challenges underline the difficulty of producing any definitive version of these fluid and always shifting texts. The next few years might well see more fragments coming to light which will negate the translations here, both new and old. But this is not only to be expected but welcomed. Each new version marks a new staging point in an ancient text’s long, long history. Each one represents Pound’s ‘blood brought to ghosts’, each performs an act of poetic necromancy, conjuring up fresh, breathing poems.32 ‘Good luck in the gravedigging,’ Bernard Grenfell’s brother had scribbled on a postcard to the archaeologist before he left for Oxyrhynchus. Fortunately for all of us those graves are still offering up their secrets.
1. Grenfell & Hunt, p. vi.
2. P. Oxy. 1787.
3. A full discussion of their texts can be found in Burris, Fish & Obbink; Obbink 2014, 2015, 2016a and 2016b.
4. See Obbink 2016b, p.41.
5. See Obbink 2016a, pp.25-26.
6. For instance, before publishing the text and translation of the Brothers Poems in the TLS, Mary Beard wrote to Martin West for an opinion on the poem’s quality and authenticity. He replied: ‘My initial impression was that it was very poor stuff, and linguistically problematic. But the more I looked at it the more Ok it seems. It’s certainly not her best but it has her DNA all over it.’ Quoted in Obbink 2016b, p.53.
7. Herodotus, 2, 135.
8. Athenaeus, 13, 596cd; Strabo,17.1.33.
9. See Obbink 2016c; Stehle; Lardinois; Bowie.
10. See also Lidov who notes that the brother mentioned in No.80 (5LP) is not named as Charaxus while Charaxus in the Brothers Poem is not explicitly revealed to be Sappho’s brother.
11. See Kurke; Mueller.
12. Odyssey 13.43. See Bär. Iliad, 5.515; 7.308.
13. By contrast Ewen Bowie believes this and other songs were performed at male symposiums.
14. Obbink 2016a, 14 ff.
15. See Obbink 2014; 2016a, pp.26-27.
16. P. Oxy 1231 fr.16. These lines are also echoed in No. 124.
17. Rayor, 2016, p.400.
18. Ibid.p.396 ff. As well as Obbink’s own revisions, M.L. West also produced a significantly different text – and translation – of the poem’s first stanza.
19. See Balmer 1996; 2013 pp.116-117.
20. See Burris, Fish & Obbink; Obbink 2016a, pp.17-25.
21. P. Oxy. 2289 fr.4. Sappho also mentions a (her?) mother in Nos. 40 (102LP), 74 (98LP) and 110 (104aLP).
22. Although a half-word in the old fragment usually read as ‘Hera’ is here shown instead to read ‘wrai’ or ‘the seasons’ (particularly springtime).
23. See, for example, Campbell, 1982, p.67.
24. Obbink 2016b pp.48-49.
25. Obbink 2016a p.29.
26. On the use of eba in Greek women’s poetry, see Balmer 1996 p.17; 29; 60. 2013 p.119; 125.
27. A longer discussion can also be found in Balmer 2013 pp.92-96.
28. Obbink suggests ‘for she [Cypris?] with unbending mind/accomplishes easily whatever she thinks’ (2016a p.29).
29. See, for example, West 2014 p.5 who points out that Pindar uses the epithet of the Nereids in Pythian Odes, 11.2.
30. Rayor 2016 p.408.
31. Balmer 2013 p.231.
32. See Kenner, 1971 p.150.
33. Now in the Ashmolean Collection. An image can be found at http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk/POxy/VExhibition/images/postcard.jpg
| [ ] | denotes a conjectural meaning | |
| … | denotes a break in the papyrus | |
| ***** | denotes the end of a fragment |
The text used is Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel et Denys Page (Oxford 1955, repr. 1963).
The text used for the new fragments is that of Dirk Obbink in ‘The Newest Sappho: Text, Apparatus Criticus, and Translation’ from Anton Bierl and André Lardinois (eds.), The Newest Sappho: P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC inv. 105, frs.1-4. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 13-33.