# Sappho

Sappho (Attic Greek: Σαπφώ; Aeolic Greek: Ψάπφα, Ψάπφω) (born c. 630/612 BC; died c. 570 BC - 581 BC) Greek poet; A prolific and much acclaimed writer, she is credited with either eight or nine long books of poetry. Her extant works are preserved in fragments, in citations in the works of classical authors, and on strips of papyrus found in Egypt. Many translators have attempted to fill in the gaps with their own interpretation of Sappho's style, thus a definitive collection is not possible.

## The Willis Barnstone translations
### Dream

* O dream on your black wings
    you come when I am sleeping.
    Sweet is the god but still I am
    in agony and far from my strength.
    for I had hope (none now) to share
    something of the blessed gods,
    nor was I so foolish
    as to scorn pleasant toys.
    Now may I have
    all these things.
   * Fragment 63 Voigt

### Exhortation to Learning

* A handsome man guards his image a while;
    a good man will one day take on beauty.
   * Fragment 50 Voigt

### Loss

* Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go?
    I am gone and never come back to you.
    I never return.
   * Fragment 114 Voigt

### Old Age

* Of course I am downcast and tremble
    with pity for my state
    when old age and wrinkles cover me,
    when Eros flies about
    and I pursue the glorious young.
    Pick up your lyre
    and sing to us of her who wears
    violets on her breasts. Sing especially
    of her who is wandering.
   * Fragment 58 Voigt

### Supreme Sight on the Black Earth

* Some say cavalry and others claim
    infantry or a fleet of long oars
    is the supreme sight on the black earth.
    I say it is
    the one you love. And easily proved.
    Didn't Helen, who far surpassed all
    mortals in beauty, desert the best
    of men, her king,
    and sail off to Troy and forget
    her daughter and her dear parents? Merely
    Aphrodite's gaze made her readily bend
    and led her far
    from her path. These tales remind me now
    of Anaktoria who isn't here,
    yet I
    for one
    would rather see her warm supple step
    and the sparkle in her face than watch all
    the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored
    in glittering bronze.
   * Fragment 16 Voigt

### To a Handsome Man

* If you are my friend, stand up before me
    and scatter the grace that's in your eyes.
   * Fragment 138 Voigt

## Suzy Q. Groden translations

    From The Poems of Sappho (1966)

### Beauty

* To have beauty is to have only that,
    but to have goodness
    is to be beautiful
    too.

### Controlling Wrath

* When wrath runs rampage
    in your heart
    you must hold still
    that rambunctious tongue!

## Stanley Lombardo translations

    Sappho, Poems and Fragments, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Hackett Publishing, 2002), ISBN 978-0872205918

### Frag. 1

* Shimmering, iridescent, deathless Aphrodite, child of Zeus, weaver of wiles, I beg you, do not crush my spirit with anguish, Lady, but come to me now...
Fr.1 Voigt

### Frag. 11

* Truly, I wish I were dead. She was weeping when she left me, and said many things to me, and said this: "How much we have suffered, Sappho. Truly, I don't want to leave you."
Fr.94 Voigt

### Frag. 20

* Look at him, just like a god, that man sitting across from you, whoever he is, listening to your close, sweet voice, your irresistible laughter And O yes, it sets my heart racing— one glance at you and I can't get any words out, my voice cracks, a thin flame runs under my skin, my eyes go blind, my ears ring, a cold sweat pours down my body, I tremble all over, turn paler than grass.
Fr.31 Voigt

### Frag. 26

* Eros has shaken my mind, wind sweeping down the mountain on oaks
Fr.47 Voigt

### Frag. 69

* Like the sweet apple reddening on the topmost branch, the topmost apple on the tip of the branch, and the pickers forgot it, well, no, they didn't forget, they just couldn't reach it.
Fr.105a Voigt

### Frag. 72

* The moon has set, And the Pleiades. Midnight. The hour has gone by. I sleep alone.
Fr.168B Voigt

## Quotes about Sappho

* Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modem lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but flame. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.
** Joseph Addison, in The Spectator, No. 223 (November 15, 1711)
* Sappho thou coverest, Æolian land! The Muse who died, Who with the deathless Muses, hand in hand, Sang, side by side! Sappho, at once of Cypris and of Love The child and care; Sappho, that those immortal garlands wove For the Muses’ hair! Sappho, the joy of Hellas, and thy crown,— Ye Sisters dread, Who spin for mortals from the distaff down The threefold thread, Why span ye not for her unending days, Unsetting sun, For her who wrought the imperishable lays Of Helicon?
** Antipater of Sidon, Anth. Pal. VII, 14
** Andrew Lang, Grass of Parnassus (2nd ed., 1892), p. 173
* When everybody says "lesbian," a word connected with Sappho and the island of Lesbos, that automatically means that your forefathers and foremothers are European, that George Washington is the father of our country and Columbus discovered America-all false assumptions.
** Gloria E. Anzaldúa interview in Backtalk: women writers speak out by Donna Marie Perry (1993)
* When Judy Grahn wrote of the Greek poet Sappho she suggested that she was not the first woman poet in Western civilization, not a solitary female voice rising out of an otherwise barren plain. On the contrary, Grahn said, hers was the surviving voice, the last voice in a long line of women poets and artists-Sappho's works so badly fragmented because they were systematically destroyed. Grahn wrote: “And what was the nature of Sappho's wealth? She praised it often enough: love, beauty, grace, flowers, appropriate behavior to the gods, lovely clothing, intelligence, tenderness. Her poems are filled with the color purple, the color gold, the sun, flowers, especially the violet and the rose, and altars, deer, groves of trees, and the stories of the gods. Love, she said, is a tale-weaver. Wealthy? We own no kind of money that would buy us Sappho's wealth. In her world, women were central to themselves; they had to have been to write as she did. She lived on an island of women, in a company of women, from which she addressed all creation. And oh, how they listened.”
** Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)
* (What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?) Sappho, what else did you write?
** Louise Erdrich interview (2016)
* We knew...that Sappho had written love poems to women in 600 B.C.
** Judy Grahn Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1985)
* Mascula Sappho.
** Masculine Sappho.
** Horace, Epistle I, xix, 28
* and of the flowers of Sappho few, but roses ...
** Meleager's Garland, in Lyra Graeca (tr. J. M. Edmonds), p. 165
* of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses;
** Meleager, Anth. Pal. IV, 1, in Greek Anthology (tr. W. R. Paton), p. 111
* Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.
** Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1990), p. 672
* Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited.
** Marge Piercy "Why Speculate on the Future?" in My Life, My Body (2015)
* Sappho speaks words mingled truly with fire; through her song she communicates the heat of her heart.
** Plutarch, Moralia, Vol. IX, Dialogue on Love (Loeb translation)
* One of the earliest- and perhaps the first-rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho...Much of Sappho's poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer. Though Attic poets and playwrights tried to destroy her by attacking her as a courtesan or "Lesbian" pervert, the German classical scholar, Welcker, in his Kleine Schriften, declares that such attacks were sheer calumny. Nor did they succeed in their aim. More than twenty centuries have honored the "sweet singer" of Aeolia.
** Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as force in history (1946)
* Living unloved, to die unknown, Unwept, untended and alone.
** Christina Rossetti, Sappho (1846)

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Sappho on Wikipedia
* Works related to Author:Sappho on Wikisource
* Media related to Sappho on Wikimedia Commons
* Fragment one
* The Poems of Sappho, translated by Edwin Marion Cox (1925)
* Sappho in Unicode-encoded Greek and English translation
* Sappho the Tenth Muse