You Burn Me: The Art of Translating Sappho
On Creative Reading and Rewriting
The translation history of Sappho is as fascinating (and contentious) as anything else about this poet. It starts early: Catullus (b. 84 BCE), the famous Ancient Roman lyric poet, lived around 500 years after Sappho’s birth. Known for his liberal use of words like faggot and cocksucker in his polished Latin verse, Catullus cast himself without question in the mold of Sappho.
As poets, whether or not we choose our ancestors is an open question. But whatever we mean by the word “aesthetic” is too narrow sounding of a notion for what usually transpires in my experience. We wish to become them.
Bob Dylan listened to the records of Guthrie so much as a dropout college student stumbling around Minnesota his friends called him “Woody.” Nina Simone felt born again by Billie Holiday, who was herself a credit to Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith, their albums and songs an imaginative permission. Virgil and Ovid may have wanted to write like Homer; for their works to hold the same weight as his. But with Catullus, you sense he wanted to be Sappho. Just a raunchier, X-rated version.
No accident then that “Lesbia” is the pseudonym Catullus confers onto his real-life lover in his poems: a winking homage to the island of Lesbos, where Sappho was from, how we derive the term lesbian. Translation is so much more than the scholar’s magnifying glass, the erection of a thesaurus, though that is not to deny the passionate study of words their proper rigors.
After all, when it comes to the voices of the dead on a wax cylinder of an early Blues song, or the fading papyri of a ghost from Mytilene, these fragment are really all we have to work with. Death is a big gap to bridge, no matter how much of your work is saved from oblivion. So I make no argument akin to: oh poetry and poets are so much more than words. Just the opposite. In reading their books, what Milton called vials of the soul distilled, we translate ourselves more and more into the image we form from them. The future belongs to ghosts.
Take Sappho Fragment 31: