Richard’s Literary Byways: Fragment 31, by Sappho

Something a bit different this time: a voice speaking from the shadows of two-and-a-half millennia and more ago, in words so timeless and universal they might have been written yesterday.

It was a couple of years ago that I stumbled across this piece on the Internet, and I don’t remember what led me to it. But I do have a vivid memory of my reaction to it, of the awed surprise and delight, that sense of a bullseye having been scored which is one of the hallmarks of a good poem.

I knew little or nothing about Sappho beyond what nearly everybody who has heard of her knows: that she was an Ancient Greek poet (though I didn’t realise quite how ancient) who gave her own name, and that of the island on which she lived, Lesbos, to female homosexuality. Likewise, my acquaintance with Ancient Greek poetry was slight to non-existent, not much more than a passing familiarity with some of the better-known episodes from the Iliad and the Odyssey: legendary tales of high adventure and heroism. This was nothing like that at all. I had no idea that there was anything in the poetry of the Ancient Greeks so intensely personal and immediate, so thrumming with emotion. Anything that delivered such a visceral punch.

Nor was I aware of what good company I was in. I didn’t know that these qualities are exactly what she is celebrated for, nor that the piece I had found, known as Fragment 31, has been her most admired work from ancient times right up to the present day.

Sappho, who is thought to have lived around 630 to 570BC, is a tantalisingly shadowy figure. Even to those better informed than I, very little is known about her life, and at this distance in time it is impossible to disentangle legend from fact, so I don’t see much point in going into the details, such as they are. And very little of her writing survives: we have just one complete poem, the Ode to Aphrodite, plus an assortment of fragments of varying lengths, to a total of only about 650 lines. According to one theory the Christian church ordered her works to be destroyed for their immorality and sinfulness.

What is certain is the very high reputation her writings had throughout ancient times. She was commonly referred to as ‘The Tenth Muse’ (in addition to the nine of legend) or ‘The Poetess,’ as Homer was ‘The Poet.’ Indeed, the reason this piece survives when so much else has been lost is that the unidentified author of a book of aesthetics and criticism called On the Sublime, writing six or seven hundred years after Sappho’s death, quoted it as an example of her brilliance and intensity.

So what’s all the fuss about? What is this gem of poetry from the distant past?

It is not much, only about a hundred words long, and the situation it depicts is simple. A man and a girl are sitting chatting – where is not stated – and the poem’s narrator, who is head-over-heels with the girl, is watching them. As is the way with the best poetry, Sappho manages to say much more than you might think this slight framework could carry.

None of this will mean very much unless I quote the poem. And here, of course, we run up against a problem. There can be no definitive version in a language Sappho didn’t write in. There have been many translations over the years, varying quite widely in emphasis and freedom of interpretation, and since I have no knowledge of Ancient Greek, let alone the dialect form of it in which Sappho wrote, I am unable to say which of them is truest to the original. Rather than impose my own taste and judgement by picking on just one, I shall give a few examples, so you can see how they differ, catch the various nuances they bring to the poem, and come to your own verdict.

I think the best place to start is the version quoted in the Wikipedia article about the poem. Its sober style, devoid of the flights of fancy that adorn some other efforts, plus the fact that it is set beside the original Greek and follows its layout, suggests to me that it is probably a fairly literal translation. It is unattributed: it may be the work of whoever wrote the article.

That man seems to me to be equal to the gods
who is sitting opposite you
and hears you nearby
speaking sweetly

and laughing delightfully, which indeed
makes my heart flutter in my breast;
for when I look at you even for a short time,
it is no longer possible for me to speak

but it is as if my tongue is broken
and immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin,
I cannot see anything with my eyes,
and my ears are buzzing

a cold sweat comes over me, trembling
seizes me all over, I am paler
than grass, and I seem nearly
to have died.

Of course the danger in translating poetry literally is that the spark, that quality that lifts words from stodge into poetry, can get lost in the translation. Let’s see how some other translators have got on. The Wikipedia article on Sappho herself contains a different version, this one by Edward Storer:

He seems like a god to me the man who is near you,
Listening to your sweet voice and exquisite laughter
That makes my heart so wildly beat in my breast.
If I but see you for a moment, then all my words
Leave me, my tongue is broken and a sudden fire
Creeps through my blood. No longer can I see.
My ears are full of noise. In all my body I
Shudder and sweat. I am pale as the sun-scorched
Grass. In my fury I seem like a dead woman,

The following ones are a little more adventurous. First, by Willis Barnstone:

To me he seems like a god
as he sits facing you and
hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh

in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. For now
as I look at you my voice is empty and

can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire is quick
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light. My ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass,
and feel my mind slip as I
go close to death.

Or this one, by Chris Childers:

He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, who
ever he is, who takes his seat so close
across from you, and listens raptly to
your lilting voice

and lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,
sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering;
as soon as I glance at you a moment, I
can’t say a thing,

and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin
flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,
a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then
my eyes go dark,

and sweat pours coldly over me, and all
my body shakes, suddenly sallower
than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,
is very near.

And finally (Phew!) this one, by Daniel Mendelsohn:

He seems to me an equal of the gods—
whoever gets to sit across from you
and listen to the sound of your sweet speech
so close to him,

to your beguiling laughter: O it makes my
panicked heart go fluttering in my chest,
for the moment I catch sight of you there’s no
speech left in me,

but tongue gags—: all at once a faint
fever courses down beneath the skin,
eyes no longer capable of sight, a thrum-
ming in the ears,

and sweat drips down my body, and the shakes
lay siege to me all over, and I’m greener
than grass, I’m just a little short of dying,
I seem to me.

‘Are you not amazed,’ the author of On the Sublime wrote nearly two thousand years ago, ‘at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns, is irrational and sane, is terrified and nearly dead, so that we observe in her not a single emotion but a whole concourse of emotions? Such things do, of course, commonly happen to people in love. Sappho’s supreme excellence lies in the skill with which she selects the most striking and vehement circumstances of the passions and forges them into a coherent whole.’

And me? Well, I suppose your response to the poem rather depends on how familiar you are with the sufferings of unrequited love. I’ll put my hand up to that (though not from recent experience, I should maybe add), and so I got the full force of it. Even more than that astonishingly, and famously, vivid portrayal of the physical symptoms of being in love, it was the poignancy of the situation that struck home. Straight away I got a mental picture of a pretty girl and a man of about the same age sitting in animated conversation at a table, maybe after a banquet or similar function, blithely unaware of the older woman sitting on her own some way off looking on with steadfast sadness and yearning. She is wondering if he has god-like powers, this lucky bastard, for she can’t understand how else he can possibly sit at his ease so close to this girl and hold a normal conversation with her, when even a glimpse of her reduces the woman to a tongue-tied, quivering wreck. The odds are that the girl is straight, and that the woman knows it, in which case she also knows that her passion is almost certainly utterly hopeless. All she can do is keep her distance and stare, nursing her pain.

That’s just my take on it. Scholars have been arguing for centuries over points of interpretation (What is the situation? What is the relationship between the man and the girl? Between the girl and the narrator? What exactly are the narrator’s feelings – beyond the obvious! – as she watches them?), and it is forever impossible to know what was in Sappho’s mind when she wrote the poem, whether it is autobiographical or conjured from her imagination. But we’re talking about lyric poetry, not history, and so there are no facts to be right or wrong about. We are all free to take what we want from Sappho’s poem, and that’s what I took. Such heart-wrenching sadness, such a potent charge of emotion, and all in about a hundred words. Pretty good going, I’d say.