Worst Professor Ever

Forget Homer (not entirely, just for now). Read Sappho first.

In the first place, her poems are readably short. When learning about a new culture, there’s nothing wrong with starting small.  Also, Sappho writes about sex, which is a far more pleasant universal experience than war.

And apropos to the post that got this whole thing started, Sappho is punk. Or maybe a little bit country. Consider this opening salvo (poem 94): ‘Honestly, I want to die.  She left me crying.’ Hank Williams couldn’t have said it better, and Miranda Lambert has a song called ‘I Wanna Die’.  Enough said.

Unfortunately, the idea of translating classical poetry invites a lofty approach that isn’t the least bit correct for poor Sappho; her lyrics are short and sharp, pretty and populist. It’s beautiful poetry, but it’s not fancy. Reading her makes me wish I had some musical skill, so I could do her justice, preferably in the style of Johnny Cash.

Take her most famous poem, the one about watching a crush-object. You can find eight million translations of it, (as, for instance, here) but we almost always start with some variation on “he seems like a god who sits opposite you.” Literal, but doesn’t quite get the sense of “I really envy that guy sitting across from you.” (I should confess here that I have a vested interest in translation, to the extent that a co-worker and I somehow translated an entire Aristophanes play for fun.)

And the climax of the poem: wanting to say something, but not being able to speak, heart pounding in the ears, sweating and shaking and wanting to die … a quintessentially human experience, making for a beautiful but fraught teaching moment.  It was good pedagogy (and true) to say, “we’ve all experienced this,” but by saying it I was breaking an unwritten (and reasonable) professional rule — do you really want your students to imagine you as someone with romantic interests? Not exactly.

And yeah, Sappho may have written about women, but she actually couldn’t have been “gay” in our sense because there was no word to correspond to our “gay.”  Sappho writes about women, and about men. She includes epic war imagery (often deemed “masculine”) and erotic fruit-tree imagery (“feminine”, of course). And, conveniently,  she often just uses “you” to address her beloved  (much like Melissa Etheridge, before she came out), so you can use her poetry to seduce anyone. Not that I’ve ever tried it or anything.

Sadly, there aren’t any translations that make me swoon with delight. If you Google Sherod Santos, you’ll find some really lovely, though slightly fancy, translations. Stanley Lombardo is a good, forthright translator. In my classes I always used his Hackett edition, which is small, affordable, and cheap. (Note that this isn’t paid advertising, just my opinion) — and now, trying to find a sample, I find an anonymously-authored promo page praising the fact that Lombardo preserves the “ancient, remote qualities” of Sappho’s poetry.

Sigh. To those reading her, Sappho was neither ancient nor remote; a good translation should reproduce the familiarity, not the alienation. That’s why, whenever I hear Liz Phair sing “your eyelashes sparkle like gilded grass,”  I think of Sappho “turning paler than green grass” while she watches her crush.

Man, I really wish someone would do Sappho’s stuff as songs. Seriously, I’ll help with the translation.

Tags: ancient, anne carson, country, erotic, gay, Greek, johnny cash, Lesbos, literature, liz phair, miranda lambert, poetry, Sappho, sexy, sherod santos, translation