Sappho was supposed to be the third poet in this series. Then I remembered “Tarantella” and moved her. I am finally coming back.
Fragment 31 survives in ancient Greek but breaks off after four nearly complete stanzas. I began with the Greek, a romanization and a deliberately simple translation before reading any of the polished English versions.
The poem
Greek text: Dickinson College Commentaries
Ancient Greek reading: Elizabeth Donnelly on YouTube
φάινεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν ὤνερ, ὄττις ἐναντίος τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούεικαὶ γελαίσας ἰμερόεν τό μ᾽ ἦ μάν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόησεν·
ὠς γὰρ εἰσίδω βροχέως σε, φώνας
οὐδὲν ἔτ᾽ ἴκει·ἀλλὰ κάμ μὲν γλῶσσα ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδὲν ὄρημ᾽, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι.καδ δέ μ᾽ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλίγω ᾽πιδεύης
φαίνομαι […].ἀλλὰ πᾶν τόλματον …
Romanization
Phainetai moi kēnos isos theoisin
emmen ōner, ottis enantios toi
isdanei kai plasion ādu phōnei-
sas upakouei
kai gelaisas imeroen, to m’ ē man
kardian en stēthesin eptoēsen;
ōs gar eisidō brokheōs se, phōnas
ouden et’ ikei;
alla kam men glōssa eage, lepton
d’ autika khrōi pur upadedromēken,
oppatessi d’ ouden orēm’, epirrom-
beisi d’ akouai.
kad de m’ idrōs kakkheetai, tromos de
paisan agrei, khlōrotera de poias
emmi, tethnakēn d’ oligō ’pideuēs
phainomai […].
alla pan tolmaton …
The romanization maps the Greek letters into the Latin alphabet; it is not a confident reconstruction of exactly how Sappho sounded.
A simple, naive translation
He seems to me equal to the gods,
that man who sits facing you
and, close beside you, listens as you
speak sweetlyand laugh charmingly. That truly
makes my heart flutter in my chest;
for whenever I look at you even briefly,
I can no longer speak.Instead my tongue breaks; at once
a thin fire runs beneath my skin;
my eyes see nothing,
and my ears ring.Cold sweat pours over me; trembling
seizes all of me; I am greener than grass,
and I seem to myself only a little short
of being dead.[But everything must be endured …]
The final bracketed line is only a provisional gloss of a broken sentence. Whatever followed it has been lost.
Before I read a polished translation
My first picture was of a girl talking to her beau, trying to impress him with stories and laughter while feeling nervous to the point of fear. I recognize the situation: meeting someone you admire and love, wanting to charm them, then finding yourself stuttering and stumbling as you speak.
There seemed to be a conflict between “speaking sweetly” and “I can no longer speak.” I read them as part of the same struggle: the performance she wants to give and the panic that interrupts it. The more she wants to impress him, the less control she seems to have over her voice.
Listening to the Greek
I found myself relying heavily on the tone of the delivery and being influenced by it. This time, listening did not add anything to the poem for me. It felt less like a way of hearing something new and more like another interpretation laid over it.
Two translations
Henry Thornton Wharton’s 1885 prose version stays fairly close to the Greek:
That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead.
John Addington Symonds’s 1883 version is much more obviously a poem in English:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee
Silverly speaking,Laughing love’s low laughter. Oh this, this only
Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble!
For should I but see thee a little moment,
Straight is my voice hushed;Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me
‘Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling;
Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring
Waves in my ear sounds;Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes
All my limbs, and paler than grass in autumn,
Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter,
Lost in the love-trance.
Symonds adds things that are not in the Greek, including “silverly,” “autumn” and the “love-trance.” Wharton’s printed version continues with a conjectural ending, which I have left out because it is not securely present in the surviving Greek.
After reading the translations
The translations changed the arrangement of the scene for me. The poem now reads almost as if Sappho is reading out the mind of the woman speaking to the man. Looking in on such an intimate moment feels intrusive, especially given the intensity of the woman’s feelings and the seeming obliviousness of the man she is speaking to.
Strictly speaking, the Greek gives those physical reactions to Sappho’s speaker rather than the woman she is watching. That is still how the scene forms in my mind. Either way, the poem captures a moment of sweet infatuation.
What I learned
Sappho lived on Lesbos around the end of the seventh and beginning of the sixth centuries BCE. Her poetry was composed as song in Aeolic Greek, not as silent words on a page. The poem is in what is now called the Sapphic stanza: three longer lines followed by a short one. Its sentences spill across those boundaries. The language itself seems to falter when the speaker says that her tongue has broken.
The poem survives largely because an ancient critic, conventionally called Longinus, quoted it in On the Sublime. He was interested in the way Sappho gathers the heart, tongue, skin, eyes and ears into one overwhelming experience. Four stanzas survive almost completely, but the next sentence breaks off. We do not know what came after it.
We also do not know the relationship among the three people. The scene has been read as a wedding, as jealousy, and as desire so overpowering that the man seems godlike simply because he can sit beside the woman without falling apart. The poem does not settle the question. Its first-person voice should not automatically be treated as a page from Sappho’s private life either. It is a lyric performance, however personal it feels.
The Roman poet Catullus later remade the poem in Latin as Poem 51. He kept the lost speech, the fire beneath the skin and the ringing ears, then added a stanza about the dangers of idleness. Many other poets have made their own versions since.
The line or image I kept thinking about
I can’t think of another pair of lines that capture infatuation as well as the opening of John Addington Symonds’s translation:
Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful
Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
He seems godlike simply because he can sit calmly beside the person whose presence overwhelms the speaker. The rest of the poem describes what infatuation does to the body, but those first two lines say it all for me.