For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.
First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:
In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.
Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.
She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.
Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”
The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.
Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:
yes! radiant lyre speak to me
become a voice
Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.
Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:
To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…
Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:
Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.
In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.
We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:
When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…
Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:
It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.
Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!
