Thirteen Ways of Reading Sappho

Come, divine shell, / find your voice and sing.

–          Sappho

1.

So many translations.

Guy Davenport renders this: “Lead off, my lyre, / And we shall sing together”

Jim Powell: “Come now, my holy lyre, / Find your voice and speak to me”

Willis Barnstone : “Come, holy tortoise shell, my lyre, / speak to me and find your voice”

Anne Carson, electrifying as ever: “yes! radiant lyre speak to me / become a voice”

Willis Barnstone (again): “Come holy lyre speak to me / and become a voice”

Which of these is the ‘best’ translation? The most faithful? The most accomplished? Knowing no Greek, I cannot judge.

Does it matter? Isn’t this what the struggle of poetry is all about? The alchemy of thought into language, the conversion of what is clear and singing in one’s head into words on the page? And every attempt / is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure. An embarrassment of attempts then. And, if we are lucky, a glimpse of something underneath, the outline that emerges from the shards of a cubist painting, a shape we experience, but cannot entirely comprehend.

So:  “Come, divine shell, / find your voice and sing.”

The poem as approximation.

2.

I came to Sappho late. Oh, I read her early enough (what Salinger-obsessed teenager didn’t?), but to my fifteen-year-old self these fragments, this miscellany of phrases, made little sense. What was all the fuss about?

“Become a voice.”

What brought me back to Sappho was the idea of voice as something unique, a quality beyond style and above content. The notion of poetry as something that survives, /a way of happening, a mouth. Wasn’t this what I had always dreamt of? Not fame or reputation, but the immortality of a line so perfect, so necessary, that it becomes a part of who we are. Reading Sappho again, I felt not like some watcher of the skies, but like a scientist peering through his microscope at the building blocks of lyric, the pieces of that first jigsaw, poetry’s DNA.

Lyric adj. (of poetry): expressing direct usually intense personal emotion especially in a manner suggestive of song. From the Greek lyra, or lyre.

What brought me back to Sappho was that the more I read, the more I saw her influence everywhere. There were the usual suspects, of course – Horace and Ovid, Baudelaire and Rilke, Eliot and the Imagists – but echoes of her voice found me in Ashbery and Armantrout, in the hi-jinx of found poetry and flarf.

What brought me back to Sappho was the realization that there are some poems one has to re-read, because one does not read the same poem twice.

The poem as journey.

3.

Not a lyre but the lyre. The very first. Fashioned by a god from a tortoise shell. And not just any god, but Hermes: messenger, dream-speaker, spy. God of speed and cunning, master of invention and theft. Soarer through heaven, guide to the underworld, lord of all that speaks and soars. But also, per Auden[i], god of chaos and whimsy. Mercurial, acute, untameable. The most uncivil of our civil gods.

In short, the god of poetry.

But what if you didn’t know about Hermes and his lyre? What if, like me, reading the poem for the first time, you imagined not a tortoise shell but a seashell, pressed to the poet’s ear, whispering of distant seas? Would the poem be less powerful for your ignorance? Would it disappoint you when you learned the truth?

And must you abandon your first reading, for this more informed, more accurate version? Or can they both coexist?

The poem as palimpsest.

4.

A dramatic moment.

A voice speaks, “Come”, demanding our attention. And we are transported into another world. A scene is conjured, an image constructed. A woman stands alone, head bent, lyre cradled in her arms, one hand preparing to play.

All this with eight simple words.

And not the scene only, but what follows. Any moment now the woman will begin her song. Sitting here, waiting, we can almost imagine it. Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard… We hold our breaths.

A gesture, captured in all its immediacy, breathtakingly alive.

The poem as is.

5.

Sound. The voice raised in address, the sequence of short and long stresses following in exact glyconic order[ii].

That strain again! Even as the speaker calls for music, it is in her words. The rhythm of human speech is brought to its perfect pitch.

“Find your voice and sing.” The poet does not ask for speech or song, but for both together. Because that is what poetry is, a resonance, the marriage of sound and sense to create a music so subtle, so instinctive, that we hear it subconsciously, through ‘mental ears’[iii].

But you don’t need to be told that. All you have to do is listen, and you know.

The poem as performance.

6.

And yet.

The sound of the lyre, its song, is inherently artificial. An object is made out of carefully selected material, shaped and polished until it sounds just right. Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress / of every chord, and see what may be gain’d / by ear industrious and attention meet. It is through such painstaking ingenuity that the craftsman arrives at an effect that seems entirely natural, entirely unforced.

The poem as artifice.

7.

Try an exercise. Read the fragment aloud as:

1. A command
2. A humble plea
3. A flirtation
4. A casual request
5. Banter
6. Encouragement

Which of these sounds right to you?

Someone is being addressed here. The lyre, you say. But the lyre is just an object, it cannot hear, cannot understand. Perhaps the narrator is speaking to herself then, with the lyre as decoy, as shell? Perhaps there is someone else, a listener, an audience, if only an imagined one, to whom these words are addressed?

And what of the lyre’s song? That too, after all, comes from the singer. Your voice most tender / to the strings without soul had then given / its own.

And yet, without the lyre there would be no song.

So who is the actor here and who is being acted upon? Perhaps both. Or neither – perhaps it is the song that acts.

We speak the poem and the poem speaks to us.

The poem as ventriloquism.

8.

Every shell is an absence made perfect. This is what gives the lyre its resonance, turns hollowness into depth. Sounds walking over the silence.

In the making of the lyre, then, as in poetry, what you take out matters as much as what you put in. The skilled artisan pares what may be said down to what must be said. The result is a sound clearer and more powerful, for being less adorned. This is Sappho’s shell: compact, echoing.

The poem as essence.

9.

“Emptiness is the female form of perdition…to be left, for her, means to be left empty.”

–          Erik Erikson, ‘Womanhood and the Inner Space’[iv]

Inner Space. Anatomy as destiny. The womb as shell.

All nonsense, of course.

“Find your voice.” Not a song but a slogan, a call to arms. A cry of sisterhood ringing down through the centuries.

“Find your voice.” This is a woman who, by the sheer force of her talent, would win the respect and admiration of the masculine world. A woman who would be honored, despite her gender, by Plato and Plutarch and Aristotle, because “Everybody honors the wise.”[v] A woman whose work, with its depiction of women free and passionate, would threaten and undermine the patriarchy for two and a half millennia.

“Find your voice.” How many people, trapped in traditional gender roles, stifled by the assumptions and stereotypes of a heterosexual society, have found in these poems a voice they can call their own? How many people have felt, in that moment of recognition, a sense of something singing, deep, deep inside?

“And we shall sing together.” Come out of your shell. Speak up. Be heard.

The poem as a political act.

10.

The womb as seashell. A thing of whispers. Whorls of delicate pink folding towards a moist and secret center. And the lyre intricate with touching, strings of pure sensation fingered into a music that fills and empties, trembles and thrills.

I sing the body electric.

The singer alone with her lyre. This is not a public performance, it is a private act. A tender moment between artist and object, lover and beloved.

Reading a poem requires intimacy, lack of inhibition, a willingness to possess the poem, and be possessed by it. The lyre must be tuned, the ear sharpened, the mind teased into a state of arousal. Only then can the song begin.

The poem as seduction.

11.

The singer alone with her lyre.

Or not alone, perhaps. Perhaps surrounded by presence, a host of phantom listeners, an invisible audience of spirits whispering in the air.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

They believed in words, our forefathers.

Gods surrounded them. Every tree, every river, every storm had its own deity. Scratch a rock / and a legend springs. But these were gods to be bartered with, and language was the currency of exchange. Through chants and incantations, charms and spells, curses and prayers, they sought to harness the natural world, tame it to their own purpose. Just as the singer, granting her lyre divine status, conjures its powers for herself.

“Come, divine shell.”

Or is there another, higher spirit being called upon? One for whom the lyre is only a receptacle, a shell? Poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion. This is inspiration, the god entering the sibyl, the trance like state from which the poet wakes (or is woken – remember the person from Porlock?) to find that she has produced something she did not know she had in her.

The poem as magic.

12.

The shell is immortal, its purpose to preserve. It protects the living, keeps the form of the dead. To hold a shell in your hand is to hold a fossil, a record of what once was, a mould, a cast, a death mask.

Albert Goldbarth describes what remains to us of Sappho’s work as “that snatch of tantalizing tatters”[vi]. Snatch. Something we seize upon. The poet raiding the jewelry store of language, the image captured in all its thrilling clarity. But also, an act of desperation, of need. These pieces clutched in our hand a testament to our struggle against time, our attempt to hold on to the past by turning it into something else. An image, an anecdote, a lyre. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

“Divine shell.” The singer proves ephemeral, the song endures, vibrates in the memory. And the lyre, passed down to other hands, yields itself to their playing, and so survives.

The poem as artifact.

13.

Did Sappho really intend all this? Probably not.

But that doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that when you press a shell to your ear the roar you hear is the sound of your own blood. What we take from the poem is what we bring to it. The words of a dead man / are modified in the guts of the living.

To read a poem is to enter a dialog, just as to play the lyre is to engage in a kind of give and take. We cannot inhabit the mind of the poet, but we can converse with it, and if the poet is a good poet, and if we listen conscientiously, what we learn, about the poet and about ourselves, may surprise us.

The gift of poetry is an ambiguous gift. Which is to say that, the poem, read properly, may lend itself to multiple interpretations, just as the lyre, in skillful hands, may play a thousand different tunes. A truly great line is like a laughing string / whereon mad fingers play / amid a place of stone. The history of poetry is threaded with such lines. That is why we continue to read and treasure these fragments, because so much depends on that perfect line, there is so much it can accomplish, so much it can bear.

To bear: to withstand, to carry, to give birth.

The poem as discovery.

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[i] For Auden’s take on Hermes vs. Apollo, see ‘Under Which Lyre’

[ii] A glyconic is a metrical phrase of eight syllables: two either short or long, one long, two short, one long, one short, one long.

[iii] On ‘mental ears’ see Prynne, J.H. ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’ Chicago Review 55:1 (Winter 2010) pp. 126-157

[iv] Quoted in Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics (University of Illinois Press 1969)

[v] “Everybody honors the wise…the Mytilinians honored Sappho although she was a woman.” – Aristotle Rhetoric.

[vi] Goldbarth, Albert, ‘Danielle Suite’, from To Be Read in 500 Years (Graywolf 2009)

References

Books cited

Barnstone, Willis. Sappho: Poems. Green Integer Kobenhavn: Los Angeles 1999
Barnstone, Willis. Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho. Shambhala: Boston & London. 2006
Carson, Anne. If Not, Winter. Vintage: New York. 2002
Davenport, Guy. Sappho: Poems and Fragments. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor. 1965
Powell, Jim. Sappho: A Garland. FSG: New York. 1993

Lines in italics in the article are quotes from the following works (in order of appearance):

T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’ (from Four Quartets)
W.H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’
John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’
John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. Act I Scene 1
John Keats, ‘Sonnet: If by dull rhymes our English must be chained’
P.B. Shelley, ‘To Jane’
Octavio Paz, ‘Reading John Cage’ (translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger)
Walt Whitman, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’
Walter de la Mare, ‘The Listeners’
G.M. Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’
Arun Kolatkar, ‘A Scratch’
Czeslaw Milosz, ‘Ars Poetica?’ (translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’
P.B. Shelley, ‘Music, When Soft Voices Die’
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’
W.B. Yeats, ‘To a Friend, Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’
W.C. Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’