From: ciaran@county.lmt.mn.org (Ciaran Benson)
Subject: Sappho (spin-off thread)
Reply-To: ciaran@county.lmt.mn.org (Ciaran Benson)
Organization: LaserMaster Technologies, Minneapolis, MN
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 92 20:28:40 GMT

  Dear Janis,

  Please forgive me for not writing you for so long.  Things
have been, well, busy.

In article <2AA3DD0F.16250@orion.oac.uci.edu>, cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis 
Maria Cortese) writes:
> 
> >  "...And here, Queen Aphrodite, pour heavenly nectar into gold
> >   cups, and fill them gracefully with sudden joy."  -- Sappho >>
> 
> Where did you get this?  I thought Sappho's stuff was gone.
> 
> Blessings,
> Janis

  Well, yes, it mostly is.

  After becoming discontent with several sources, most of
them proportedly "Pagan" writers (but apparently with their
own agendas), I've finally settled with the translations of
Willis Barnstone as set forth in "Sappho and the Greek Lyric
Poets", by Schocken Books, New York (ISBN 0-8052-0831-3).

  The book contains various accounts of Sappho's life, and
the tragic loss of the great bulk of her writings.

  Barnstone says; "Of the more than five hundred poems by
Sappho, we have today about seven hundred intelligible lines,
and these come from no single collected copy but are pieced
together from many sources: from the scholia of ancient
gammarians to the mummy wrappings in Egyptian tombs.  Plato's
entire work has survived virtually intact, having been both
popular with and approved by Pagan and Christian alike.
Sappho's works did not lack popularity, but as one who,
in Ovid's words, "taught how to love girls" (/Lesbia quid
docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?/), her popularity did
not always win approval.

  "To the Church mind Sappho represented the culmination of
moral laxity, and her work was treated with zealous
disapproval.  About A.D. 380 Saint Gregory of Nazianzos,
Bishop of Constantinople, ordered the burning of Sappho's
writings wherever found.  She had already been violently
attacked as early as A.D. 180 by the Assyrian ascetic Tatian:
"Sappho was a whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her
own licentiousness" (/[passage in Greek not reproducible without
resorting to MacDemigodStatus, and I've already done that
once today]/  -- Orat. ad Graec., 53.).

  "Then in 391 a mob of Christian zealots partially destroyed
Ptolemy Soter's Classical library in Alexandria.  The often
repeated story of the final destruction of this famous
library by the Arab general Amr and Caliph Omar is now
rejected by historians.  Again we hear that in 1073 Sappho's
writings were publicly burned in Rome and Constantinople by
order of Pope Gregory VII.  Until late in the eleventh century,
however, quotations from Sappho still appeared in the works
of grammarians, suggesting that copies of her poems were
still preserved.  We shall never know how many poems by
Sappho were destroyed in April 1204 during the terrible
pillage of Constantinople by the Venetian Knights of the
Fourth Crusade, or by the Ottoman Turks at the fall of
Byzantium in 1453."

  Barnstone goes on to discuss the discovery of scraps of
Sappho's writings preserved as mummy wrappings in the Egyptian
desert, and particularly through the critical writings of
grammarians like Dionysios in his work, "On Literary
Composition".

  Basically, I guess what remains are the scraps and fragments
which critical writers used to highlight her prose, and
to serve as illustrations of the Sapphic style.

  Unfortunately, even those scraps are often unhelpful in
that the mummy wrappers often tore vertical strips from the
Sapphic papyrus, reducing her work to columns of words.

  Barnstone dives fairly face-first into Sappho's possible
role as priestess of a thiasos, the various arguments for
and against her character, and the apparently on-going
argument of whether or not she was, indeed, a Lesbian in
a sexual, not just geographical, sense.

  Oh, I could go on all day, but let me just give you the
translation Barnstone provides from which I stole my .sig;

  "Leave Krete and come to this holy temple,
   where the graceful grove of apple trees
   circles and altar smokeing with frankinscense.

  "Here roses leave shadow on the ground
   and cold springs babble through apple branches
   where shuddering leaves pour down profound sleep.

  "In our meadow where horses graze
   and while flowers of spring blossom,
   anise shoots fill the air with aroma.

  "And here, Queen Aphrodite, pour
   heavenly nectar into gold cups
   and fill the gracefully with sudden joy."

  There are other translators who report having found fragments
which speak of rituals in the most glorious and graceful
of terms, flowing like the words of the Hymm to Demeter and
the deep-belted Persephone.  I'd have to check the dates to
make sure, but perhaps that was what Sappho was aluding to
when she wrote;

  "Like a sweat apple reddening on the high
   tip of the topmost branch and forgotten
   by the pickers -- no, beyond their reach.

  "Like a hyacinth crushed in the mountains
   by shepherds; lying trampled on the earth
   yet blooming purple."

  Her work is so moving, so immediate, it's something which
I long for in my own writing and hope to glimpse, but it's
a real journey.

  Your writing, Janis, in your "The Silent Eye", sings so
well without laying out an entire script for everyone to
tread through; instead you give just the surface and allow
us to sink as we want; "...the Moon rose with its silvery
eye and ... saw this as well as what we now present to Her..."

  Yes, absolutely.  There is no gift I can give the Mother
but that which She has given me.  No skill I may please
Her with, or song I can sing which She has not crafted
first and placed in my hands.  What is there, then, but
to bask in Her sight, to stand revealed before Her and know
that all these things are Her's for Me.

  Despite the attempts to purge Sappho from our past, she
has survived, and in the few scraps which have been pasted
together of her incredible work, we can glimpse a passion
which, like amber, draws the memories of things past to us
and gives us a vision of our place, our future, our path.

  Despite the zealots and the reconstructionists and the
fundies, as Sappho herself said;

  "Someone, I tell you,
   will remember us."

  Blessed be, Ciaran.

  $uslinit; include oblig.sig <<
  "...And here, Queen Aphrodite, pour heavenly nectar into gold
   cups, and fill them gracefully with sudden joy."  -- Sappho >>