Seventy years ago – can it be so many years, gone so quickly, insubstantial as a dream? – in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College in Port-of-Spain, our literature teacher departed from the well-beaten path of the set syllabus to tell us about Sappho, the Greek poetess.
He said she was the greatest of all lyric poets of ancient Greece. She lived in the sixth century before Christ. Hardly a single poem of hers has come down to us whole and intact but the fragments that have survived are so beautiful, so perfect in their grace and passion, that her name and work have become immortal.
The crystal, perfect fragments of poetry by Sappho which our eccentric teacher read to us were more memorable than anything in the syllabus. Young imaginations, preparing to receive the glories of the world unfolding, yearn for such teachers out of the ordinary. I remember him – thick spectacles which made him goggle-eyed, a red rash of small boils circling his neck – and thank him and praise him down the years. My love of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins I owe to him and my first hearing of Sappho’s immortal fragments, tears of unrequited love distilled in exquisite, shining vials, I also owe to him. It is by chance that we benefit from such teaching when we are young.
Sappho was born in Lesbos and love like hers has ever afterwards been called lesbian. It is love expressed with extraordinary purity and passion. No poet, male or female, has expressed the agony of love unrequited more simply and fervently than Sappho in the few wonderful fragments of poetry that have survived the centuries.
Perhaps the most famous of all the fragments is a lyric of four lines of aching intensity known in a thousand translations in all the languages of the earth. The teacher read the lines to us in Greek – which we did not understand – and then gave us a dozen different translations in English and we were to say which we liked best and why. Here are two versions:
The moon has set
and the Pleiades; it is the middle
of the night and the hours go by
and I lie here alone
and
The Pleiades disappear,
the pale moon goes down.
After midnight, time blurs:
sleepless, I lie alone.
I recall all that long ago because I subsequently read of the discovery and reconstruction of a “new” poem by Sappho. It was described in an article by the scholar Martin West in the Times Literary Supplement. The new text has emerged through “the identification of a papyrus in the University of Cologne as part of a roll containing poems of Sappho. This text, recovered from Egyptian mummy cartonnage, is the earliest manuscript of her work so far known. It was copied early in the third century BC, not much more than 300 years after she wrote.” The second of the three fragments found “had been partially known since 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus of the third century AD, and by combining the two texts we now attain an almost complete poem.”
Here is this poem by Sappho, translated by the Canadian poet Anne Carson:
THE BEAT GOES ON
[“fragment 58”]
You, children, be zealous for the
beautiful gifts of the
violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.
But my skin once soft is now
taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.
And my heart is weighed down
and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as
fawns.
I sigh for this. But what can I
do?
A human being without old age is
not a possibility.
There is the story of Tithonos,
loved by Dawn with her arms
of roses
and she carried him off to the
ends of the earth
when he was beautiful and young.
Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his
deathless wife.
How wonderful and intellectually satisfying that scholarship and love of poetry can yield such a treasure after so long. I think I see behind those thick spectacles my old teacher’s eyes light up.
