Reading Sappho

By Andrea Scarpino

 

someone will remember us

I say

even in another time

 

Of Sappho’s writing: one complete poem and hundreds of fragments: torn pieces of papyrus—some found wrapped around Egyptian mummies—quotes included in ancient texts. 

 

The ephemeral nature of art, time’s fickleness, a culture’s changing attitudes. Sappho translator Willis Barnstone writes, “But the best indication, perhaps, of the general availability of her works in the classical age lies in the number of quotations from her poems by grammarians, even late into Roman times, which suggests that both commentator and reader had ready access to the corpus of the work being quoted.” And, “About 380 C.E., Saint Gregory of Nazianzos, bishop of Constantinople, ordered the burning of Sappho’s writings wherever found.” 

 

We can read Plato “virtually intact” and of Sappho, only pieces. A moment. A line. A breath. 

 

I read and reread Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. And I love the fragments, their expansiveness, how much can be said, deduced, understood with only a moment on the lips. 

 

if not, winter

] no pain

 

I know what this means, exactly; I don’t need more narrative. How much a line of poetry can hold. How much of a story can be told without even one complete sentence. Or only one complete sentence: 

 

Eros shook my

mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees

 

Doesn’t that say all that needs to be said? 

 

Which is not to dismiss the sadness I feel for all those lost poems, the sadness that sexism and religious fervor nearly obliterated such a lovely voice. A voice deemed threatening. 

 

At the end of his translation of Sappho’s work, Barnstone quotes from Stobaios’ fifth century Anthology: 

 

“One evening, while drinking wine, the nephew of Solon the Athenian sang one of Sappho’s songs, and Solon liked it so much that he ordered the boy to teach it to him. When one of the company asked why he was learning it, he answered, ‘I want to learn it and die.’”

 

Can you imagine? A work so beautiful, sublime—lost to ash as libraries were burned to the ground, destroyed. 

 

Again, Carson translates: 

 

You got there first: beautiful [

and the clothes[

 

And I think, yes. To write with such richness that even a fragment, a torn piece of text, can say all that needs to be said. This should be each of our goals, shouldn’t it? To make every word count. To make every moment shine.