Sappho 31 Introduction

My words may only be of air

But they will always give pleasure

These two short lines, inscribed on an ancient Greek vase alongside a figure identified as the poet Sappho seem neatly to encapsulate her life and work. For today, more than ever, her words are still of air - lost gaps in tattered fragments which in themselves constitute only a fraction of her poetic output. But the fascination remains. Over the ages she has been hailed as the tenth Muse, satirised in plays, branded a whore, and forever associated with (perceived) sexual perversion . Medieval popes burnt her work, Victorian translators bowdlerised it, hip sixties scholars picked over her 'clinically commonplace castration complex'.

Yet the more we try to pin her down, the faster she disappears, slips through the fingers, vanishes into thin air. Scholars can date her life to around 600BC, her home to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, just off the coast of modern Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean. All else is supposition. Perhaps the fragmentary names of political factions in her poetry implicate her in political activities, perhaps not. Perhaps Cleis, the daughter mentioned in two of Sappho's poems is the poet's own, perhaps not. What is clear, however, is that her poetry, however incomplete, however fragmented, still gives pleasure today, nearly two and a half thousand years after her death. And nothing illustrates this pleasure better - as well as some of the adjacent frustrations for those attempting to translate it - than perhaps her best-known and most influential poem, fragment 31:

Read more...The Greek Text