Tongue-tied, by Sappho

My notes today were meant to be a comment, and ended up an essay. I’m so sorry, read at your own peril.

This is my favourite Greek poem, by my favourite Classical author. It is incomplete (we know it continued beyond four stanzas, the snippets of which I have excluded, and it may have even started before the surviving line 1), but even just the surviving part is incredible. Also incredible is the notion that the poem describes anything but a burning lesbian crush, and yet it is present in serious (and several) analyses. An undergrad once commented to me (on their way out of the room), “you know, I sometimes talk about my friends the way Sappho talks about women”. My friend, if you unironically feel this way about your friends – I hate to break it to you – but you might be in love with them. Change my mind.

This poem starts with a clever foil, because you might think Sappho is writing about a man – but the Greek makes it clear that this man is a placeholder (‘any’ man rather than someone specific). He seems equal to the gods, because Sappho can’t imagine anyone other than a god being able to make intelligent conversation with the real addressee, and she goes on to explain what happens to her when she tries. Again, the Greek is unambiguous that Sappho is talking to a woman (because it is grammatically gendered in ways that English isn’t).

People who say the poem is about the man just haven’t read it properly, and people who deny the obvious and amorous crush Sappho has on this woman are wilfully ignoring the extremely un-cryptic description that dominates the last three stanzas. Time and time again, ancient literature shows us that societies and cultural norms change, but strong and deeply heartfelt emotions are relatable and recognisable across languages and time. Sappho has put the symptoms of a hefty crush into her verse; the only times I have ever felt what she is describing are when I have been enamoured of someone. She doesn’t talk about sex, or lust, because she doesn’t need to – besides, how dare anyone reduce the queer experience of love to such a singlular dimension.

The name I have given this poem doesn’t even start to do it justice – better suggestions are very welcome! As with all of Sappho’s fragments, none are preserved in complete books and so none have names – instead they are referred to by the editor’s numbering system (Eva-Maria Voigt was a pre-eminent scholar of Sappho, hence “Voigt 31”), or by nicknames (“the Tithonus poem” was formerly part of the Voigt 58 fragment, but a later papyrus was published which almost completed the poem).

As the previous paragraph probably demonstrates, referring to fragmented works is a nightmare, and most of Sappho’s works are preserved in papyri – a format not good at surviving beyond a few centuries . This is a problem because the papyri I’m talking about generally date back to the birth of Christ, give or take a few hundred years. Most of Sappho survives in tiny scraps of papyri, or quotes in later authors who copied papyri onto vellum manuscripts, which then survived through the Mediaeval period.

This poem is possibly the best-preserved Sappho to-date, because it survives in a vellum manuscript of Longinus’ On the Sublime from the 10^th Century. The issue is the distance between Sappho (7^th century BCE) and the surviving manuscript (10^th century CE) is about 1,500 years, and the text in the manuscript is riddled with impossible errors. The text I based my translation on is mostly after Denys Page’s edition, with a few adjustments following later scholarship.

“Correcting” ancient texts is a fraught process, but for this poem it is mostly based on metrical errors – given Sappho’s popularity in the ancient world (and the fact that the meter of this poem is literally named Sapphic stanzas), Classicists start from the assumption that the original poem was metrically sound, and try to reverse potential transcription errors to find an ‘original text’ that fits the meter. With better-evidenced texts, their process led to the development of manuscript ‘family trees’ and supposedly inspired Darwin’s concept of genetic inheritance! Sadly, in cases like this with only one surviving manuscript, it is basically down to educated guesses and competing opinions. And again, this is arguably the best preserved fragment of a Sappho poem (we’re fighting over scraps here).

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Featured Image: where have you felt like the speaker in this poem?