Among Dim Shapes: Reading Sappho in Quarantine
By: The Nonconformist Magazine
Tags: Poetry, Culture, Sappho, Ancient Greece, Poems On Medium

]

] might accomplish

]

] I want

] to hold

] said

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This fragment comes towards the middle of If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s translations of the writings of a Greek poet, Sappho, which have been collected, piecemeal, from small, nearly disintegrated papyrus fragments. Like the majority of the poems in If Not, Winter, the piece above is conspicuously incomplete, fluttering against a wall of absences. There is no real rhythm to it, though one can infer from the brackets (which Carson uses to gesture to lost words and phrases), that likely there once was. Regardless, there is an urgency to the work; the scattered elements — the missing potential accomplishment, the yearning, the holding, words spoken in the past tense — make for a seductive poetic puzzle. The idea of accomplishment hints at some adherence to structure, a desire for closure, but the preceding “might” keeps the achievement in limbo. It seems a fabulous irony that the piece of papyrus upon which the work was written landed in modern culture similarly robbed of closure: without the rest of Sappho’s words, this poem, like the accomplishment, remains stranded in an unfinished state. The result is a poem devoid of, yet thoroughly haunted by, finality.

Regardless of whether she was controversial or inscrutable, Sappho has just barely survived in her own hand.

Though Sappho, the archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, was deemed the “Tenth Muse” by Plato, precious little of her work has survived the test of time. There are many theories as to why Sappho’s work did not survive in full; some believe that the early church, disapproving of her morals, had her work burned. Some say that by the time her work could be reproduced, printers weren’t making scrolls anymore — they had switched over to codices, bound papers, a form which did not suit her work. Another theory posits that Sappho’s poetry was linguistically inaccessible; Sappho spoke an Aeolic (also called Lesbian) dialect that contained obscure phrases and arrangements no longer used in the Attic dialect that had become the norm for literary work.

Regardless of whether she was controversial or inscrutable, Sappho has just barely survived in her own hand. Carson’s brackets serve to acknowledge this loss within the fragments, and aid in emulating their fragility. Carson writes:

“Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp — brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.”

One cannot read these fragments without conjuring the world and circumstances within which they existed.

It seems a poetic choice to incorporate loss into the presentation of the work; little can be confirmed about Sappho’s life, but it is known for certain that she spent much of her time in exile in Sicily — a punishment for her controversial political activity in Lesbos. Though I imagined her as living a Dionysian romp of song and lovemaking, many of her poems are written from exile, at which point she was excluded from the rituals, gatherings, and customs that had come to define her life in Lesbos.

The sparest works in If Not, Winter, are most among the most affecting: some of the fragments read almost like eccentric shopping lists, comprised of single terms like “soda”, “celery,” “gold ankle-bone cups,” or “mythweaver.” I find them touching at this moment — like small islands in a large sea of uncertainty or souvenirs from a lost world. The words work like synecdoche; one cannot read these fragments without conjuring the world and circumstances within which they existed. In equal parts earthly and ephemeral, these fragments convey both a complexity and a wistful nostalgia for the ordinary.