Saturday, June 25, 2005
Fourth work of Sappho is revealed to the world
A 2,600-year-old poem was published for the first time yesterday, giving the world only the fourth known work by Sappho, a woman who has given her name not just to a form of writing, but an entire lifestyle.
Heroine of feminists and homosexuals, Sappho was a sixth century BC poet from the island of Lesbos reckoned by no less a critic than Plato to be ranked as a Muse rather than a mortal writer.
Almost nothing is known of her and until yesterday the 200 or so scraps of her work that had been put together had managed to contribute only three complete poems.
The fourth work is apparently addressed to young Lesbian women and bemoans the advance of years in her own mind and body compared to their youth and beauty.
The poem was recovered from the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy, where it appears to have been soaked and used as part of the bandaging. It was identified because it matched an existing, much smaller scrap known to be by Sappho found in 1922 during excavations of a rubbish dump in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus. Combining the two fragments produced the rarest of gifts, a Sapphic original.
Thought to date from the first part of the third century BC, the new scrap discovered by scholars in the archives of the University of Cologne is the oldest of all remnants of her poetry.
The poem, in which Sappho addresses some of the many young girls who seem to have attended her house as a kind of artistic finishing school, has now been translated and published by Martin West, emeritus fellow of All Souls, Oxford.
He said: "She obviously had emotional relationships with women of her circle, quite possibly sexual. They seem to have had some sort of society in which they could be in each other's company quite a lot, rather cut off from men, but they were clearly able to have plenty of fun."
In his article accompanying the poem and published in the Times Literary Supplement, Dr West wrote: "The ancients, who had nine books of her poems at their disposal, were unstinting in their admiration. Some called her a tenth Muse.
"The poem is a small masterpiece: simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of human feeling, dignified in its restraint. It moves both by what it says and by what it leaves unspoken."
***
You for the fragrant-blossomed Muses' lovely gifts
be zealous, girls, and the clear melodious lyre:
but my once tender body old age now
has seized; my hair's turned white instead of dark;
my heart's grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.
This state I oft bemoan; but what's to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there's no way.
Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world's end,
handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o'ertook him, husband of immortal wife.
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