{"id":2206,"date":"2019-09-27T14:13:18","date_gmt":"2019-09-27T14:13:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2206"},"modified":"2019-12-08T12:55:55","modified_gmt":"2019-12-08T12:55:55","slug":"the-divine-madness-of-love-stanley-lombardos-sappho","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2206","title":{"rendered":"The Divine Madness of Love \u2013 Stanley Lombardo\u2019s Sappho"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me, Stanley Lombardo\u2019s translations of Sappho are a fire-new revelation[1]<\/a>. Not reading any dialect of Ancient Greek, I\u2019ve been wholly dependent on translations for my sense of her work. Several have moved me over the years, of course \u2013 haunting versions of fragments 16, 31, and 168 in particular. Apart from these, and Michael Longley\u2019s lovely incorporation of Fragment 104(a) into his elegy \u201cEvening Star\u201d, I\u2019ve read her as if through distorting glass. I\u2019d admired the intricacy of Poem 1 in a cerebral way but it never came alive for me as poetry. Then I read this:<\/p>\n

Mind shimmering, deathless Aphrodite,
\nchild of Zeus, weaver of wiles,
\nI beg you, do not crush my spirit
\nwith anguish, Lady,<\/p>\n

but come here now, if ever before
\nyou heard my voice in the distance
\nand heeded my prayer, left your father\u2019s
\ngolden house,<\/p>\n

yoked your chariot pulled by sparrows
\nswift and beautiful over the black earth,
\ntheir wings a blur as they streaked from heaven
\nthrough the middle air \u2013<\/p>\n

and then you were with me, a smile
\nplaying about your immortal lips
\nas you asked what was it this time …<\/p>\n

\u201cMind shimmering\u201d \u2013 so much more arresting and alive than traditional openings along the lines of the Loeb \u201cOrnate throned\u201d \u2013 depends on a variant reading of the Greek[2]<\/a>. At the same time it shows Lombardo\u2019s ability to combine subtlety with explosive force. We register the intense ambiguity of \u201cmind shimmering\u201d in a general way \u2013 how the first word sweeps together Aphrodite\u2019s mind and the minds of her subjects[3]<\/a>, how \u201cshimmering\u201d combines suggestions of blazing beauty, inconstancy and deceit \u2013 even as we\u2019re hurried on to what comes next. Powerful, driving stresses, especially those in initial position, the sharp contrast between stressed and unstressed syllables and smooth phonetic transitions from one word to another give the first two lines a headlong momentum. The rhetorical magniloquence of the apostrophe makes us look forward in anticipation of a resounding statement to come. Then in the third line the abrupt change of register and tone to the intimate intensity of \u201cI beg you, do not crush my spirit\u201d brings a kind of transformative shock, the imagined voice suddenly dropping from declamation to a murmur or whisper made urgent by strong stresses on \u201cbeg\u201d, \u201cdo\u201d, \u201ccrush\u201d and \u201cspi<\/strong>rit\u201d with their plosive b, p, d and the \/k\/ of “crush”. This forward drive and starkly emphatic manner sweeps us on even as we register contradictions and ambiguities that make us feel the ground unstable under our feet, keeping us off balance and keeping our responses unsettled and alive.<\/p>\n

The second stanza brings new transformations of key and viewpoint. The use of the conditional and the vagueness of the timescale (\u201cif ever<\/em> before\u201d) creates an imaginative distance even before the startling change from Sappho\u2019s viewpoint to that of Aphrodite who hears her calling from far off in the mortal world:<\/p>\n

but come here now if ever before
\nyou heard my voice in the distance<\/p>\n

The clarity with which Lombardo presents this shift can be seen by comparing M. L. West\u2019s rhythmically lame version of the same lines:<\/p>\n

but come, if ever in the past you
\nheard my voice from afar and hearkened.<\/p>\n

Stanza three brings another electrifying change of gear. Though we\u2019re theoretically inside the hypothesis of if ever before<\/em>, there\u2019s nothing distant or hypothetical about the manner of narration: Aphrodite\u2019s flight is shown with god\u2019s eye immediacy. The energy and exuberant beauty of lines 10 and 11 triumphantly override any incongruity in the image of a chariot drawn through the air by sparrows. \u201cSwift\u201d and \u201cbeautiful\u201d explode out of the line with careless absoluteness. As everywhere, rhythm makes a powerful contribution: this line, like so many of them, kicks off with a strong stress[4]<\/a>. But the end is equally important \u2013 the alliterative contrast of\u00a0 brightness and power with the blackness of the earth (some versions have the much weaker \u201cdark\u201d instead of \u201cblack\u201d).<\/p>\n

The most startling shift comes in stanza four, with the face to face presence of the goddess. There she suddenly is, or rather there she\u2019s suddenly remembered as having been<\/em>, laughter-loving Aphrodite in all her vivid indeterminacy, her smile shimmering between tender amusement, motherly indulgence, mockery and triumph, bringer of joy or anguish as she wills, an irresistible power that the speaker in her love-struck madness can only pray to get on her side. At one moment it seems to me that Aphrodite\u2019s imagined speech sounds as gently and indulgently teasing as Sappho could wish; the next, spoken in a way that goes equally well with the grain of the brilliantly realised speech cadences, it sounds exasperated. Remembering that Sappho\u2019s love-struck madness itself comes from Aphrodite, I even find myself thinking of the blitheness of Homer\u2019s gods in face of human misery or of the lines of Racine\u2019s Ph\u00e8dre, \u201cCe n\u2019est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cach\u00e9e: \/ C\u2019est V\u00e9nus toute enti\u00e8re \u00e0 sa proie attach\u00e9e\u201d.\u00a0 Such ambiguities dramatise the confusion of the speaker\u2019s own feelings. Even more, they present the helplessness of a mortal\u2019s dependence on the gods. The more you look at this poem in Lombardo\u2019s version the more you realise how packed with power it is, how much it\u2019s the vividness with which it presents a single living voice and situation that makes its implications ripple so widely. There\u2019s humour and self-directed irony (\u201cWhat was it this time<\/em>\u201d) and as the poem develops in stanzas I haven\u2019t quoted we\u2019re invited to look at Sappho\u2019s reactions and behaviour critically as well as with sympathy.<\/p>\n

I think all these are true responses, yet everything I\u2019ve said is a kind of betrayal of my reasons for saying it. What excited me about the poem in Lombardo\u2019s translation was how fast it made my mind move, what diverse thoughts and feelings it crowded together in its headlong course, how it seemed to set my imagination leaping in many different directions at once. All this was both a joy in itself and, more specifically, a potent implicit dramatization of the speaker\u2019s feelings and situation. Laboriously analytical prose can\u2019t in its nature capture the speed and shimmering lightness with which thoughts and impressions play into each other in a poem like this.<\/p>\n

Poem 1 is at one extreme of completeness (28 continuous lines). At the other extreme, Sapphic fragments preserved as quotations in the writing of much later classical authors may be as short as a single word, perhaps no more than a place name (\u201cAega\u201d), a personal name, or a bare noun like \u201cdawn\u201d. Whatever such may mean to the scholar, on their own they don\u2019t offer much foothold to the simple lover of poetry. I\u2019m glad they\u2019re here though: reading through the volume as a whole, even very short fragments, perhaps only two or three words long, can incandesce imaginatively, their own light fed by that of the others around them. Fragments as short as one or two complete lines long often have considerable beauty on their own, and more quite lengthy passages have survived than I\u2019d realised. Translating both, Lombardo achieves a striking combination of polish with freshness and natural vigour.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Hackett Publishing for permission to quote the first thirteen and a half lines of Lombardo\u2019s translation of Sappho\u2019s Poem 1.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Sappho, Complete Poems and Fragments, translated by Stanley Lombardo, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., www.hackettpublishing.com<\/a> , 2016. This is an expanded version of his 2002 Sappho, Poems and Fragments.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> One source quoting the poem \u2013 Dionysius of Halicarnassus \u2013 gives its first word as poikiloTH<\/strong>ron\u2019. The Oxyrhynchus papyrus gives it as poikiloF<\/strong>ron\u2019. \u201cThron\u2019\u201d gives \u201cchair\u201d or \u201cthrone\u201d, \u201cfron\u2019\u201d gives \u201cmind\u201d. \u201cPoikilo\u201d has a wide range of meanings, covering purely physical applications to fabrics, metal-work etc, like \u201cmany-coloured\u201d or \u201ccunningly wrought\u201d, and also more abstract senses such as \u201cintricate\u201d, \u201ccomplicated\u201d, \u201cchangeable\u201d, \u201cdiverse\u201d, \u201cabstruse\u201d, \u201csubtle\u201d, \u201cartful\u201d, \u201cwily\u201d, applied by classical authors to such things as the structure of a labyrinth, abstruse knowledge, the song of the sirens, the wiles of Odysseus and Prometheus, doubtful hopes … I\u2019m indebted to Liddell and Scott\u2019s Greek dictionary for these meanings and contexts. I have no idea whether \u201cthron\u2019\u201d or \u201cfron\u2019\u201d is more likely to represent what Sappho originally wrote, but I\u2019m sure that \u201cmind\u201d gives the richer sense.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Aphrodite\u2019s<\/em> mind shimmers. Her<\/em> shimmering dazzles the minds of those she makes fall in love.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Strong initial stresses seem to give a particularly driving start to four beat lines like these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me, Stanley Lombardo\u2019s translations of Sappho are a fire-new revelation[1]. Not reading any dialect of Ancient Greek, I\u2019ve been wholly dependent on translations for my sense of her work. Several have moved me over the years, of course \u2013 haunting versions of fragments 16, 31, and 168 in particular. Apart from these, and Michael […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,141,142],"tags":[139,140],"class_list":["post-2206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greek-lyric-poetry","category-sappho","category-stanley-lombardo","tag-sappho","tag-stanley-lombardo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2206"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2214,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2206\/revisions\/2214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}