Читать книгу Sappho and her influence - David M. Robinson - Страница 6

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It is my purpose in the limited space at my disposal to show in a general way, since it will not be possible to go into details, the truth of Sappho’s prophecy that men would think of her25 in after-times: to show her importance as a woman and poetess and our debt to her, and also to give my readers some acquaintance with the real and the unreal Sappho so that they can judge how much is fact and how much is fancy in what they hear and read about Sappho, thus proving again that the warp and woof of literature cannot be understood without a knowledge of the original Greek threads. This chapter will consider Sappho’s Life.

Unfortunately we know little of Sappho herself, and about that little there is doubt. Even the ancient lives of Sappho are lost. If we had Chamaeleon’s work on Sappho,26 or the exegesis of Sappho and Alcaeus27 by Callias of Mytilene, or the book on Sappho’s metres by Dracon of Stratonicea, we should not be left so in the dark; but all these have perished or, what comes to the same thing, are undiscovered. Like Homer, Sappho gives us almost no definite information about herself, and we must depend on late lexicographers, commentators, and imitators. Villainous stories arose about her and gathered added vileness till they reached a climax in the licentious Latin of Ovid, especially as seen in Pope’s translation of the epistle of Sappho to Phaon.

Sappho came of a noble family belonging to an Aeolian colony in the Troad. Though Suidas gives eight possibilities for the name of Sappho’s father, the most probable is Scamandronymus, a good Asia Minor name vouched for by Herodotus, Aelian and other ancient writers and now confirmed by a recently discovered papyrus.28 He was rich and noble and probably a wine-merchant. He died, according to Ovid,29 when Sappho’s eldest child was six years of age.

Her mother’s name, says Suidas, was Cleïs.30 Commentators assume that she was living when Sappho began to write poetry because of the reference to “mother” in the “Spinner in Love”; but this may be an impersonal poem. According to the Greek custom of naming the child after a grandparent the poetess called her only daughter Cleïs.

The poetess had three brothers, Charaxus, Larichus, who held the aristocratic office of cup-bearer in the Prytaneum to the highest officials of Mytilene, and, according to Suidas, a third brother, Eurygyius,31 of whom nothing is known.

Athenaeus tells us that the beautiful Sappho often sang the praises of her brother Larichus; and the name was handed down in families of Mytilene, for it occurs in a Priene inscription32 as the name of the father of a friend of Alexander who was named Eurygyius. This shows the family tradition and how descendants of Sappho’s family attained high ranks in Alexander’s army.

Charaxus, the eldest brother as we now know, “sailed to Egypt and as an associate with a certain Doricha spent very much money on her,” according to the recently found late papyrus biography. Charaxus had strayed from home about 572 and sailed as a merchant to Naucratis, the great Greek port colony established in the delta of the Nile under conditions similar to those of China’s treaty-ports. There he was bartering Lesbian wine, Horace’s innocentis pocula Lesbii, for loveliness and pleasures, when he fell in love with and ransomed the beautiful Thracian courtesan, the world-renowned demi-mondaine. She was called Doricha by Sappho according to the Augustan geographer, Strabo, but Herodotus names her Rhodopis, rosy-cheeked,33 and evidently thought she had contributed to Delphi34 the collection of obeliskoi or iron spits, the small change of ancient days before coin money was used to any great extent. Herodotus, the only writer preserved before 400 B.C. who gives us any details about Sappho tells the story and how the sister roundly rebuked her brother in a poem. Some four hundred years later Strabo, adding a legend which recalls that of Cinderella, repeats the story and it is retold by Athenaeus after another two hundred years. In our own day it has slightly influenced William Morris in the Earthly Paradise. Except for archaeology, however, we should never have heard Sappho’s own words. About 1898 the sands of Egypt gave up five mutilated stanzas of this poem which scholars had for many a year longed to hear, but the beginnings of the lines are gone and only a few letters of the last stanza remain. My own interest in Sappho dates from that very year when I wrote for Professor Edward Capps, then of the University of Chicago, a detailed seminary paper on The Nereid Ode, and for the twenty-five years since I have been gathering material about Sappho. We must be careful not to accept as certainly Sappho’s, especially the un-Sapphic idea of the last stanza, the restorations of Wilamowitz, Edmonds, and a host of other scholars, who have changed their own conjectures several times. Wilamowitz goes so far as to think that the words apply to Larichus, but most critics have restored them with reference to Charaxus. I give a version which I have based on Edmonds’ latest and revised text,35 taking a model from the stanza used by Tennyson in his Palace of Art.

In offering a new translation of such songs as these it should be fully realized that no translation of a really beautiful poem can possibly represent the original in any fair or complete fashion. Unfortunately languages differ; and in translating a single word of Sappho into a word of English which fairly represents its meaning, one may easily have lost the musical charm of the original, and still further he may have broken up the general charm or spirit which the word has because of its associations with the spirit of the whole song. It ought to be clear that in preserving the literal meanings of the words in a song the translator may be compelled to part in large measure with the musical note that comes from assonance, alliteration, and association; or again that in rendering the music as Swinburne could do, he may have diluted or even lost the real meaning and spirit of the poem; and finally that, though the spirit of the poem may be seized ever so effectively, the working out of the details of music and meaning may fail to respond to those of the original. Of course a slight measure of successful representation may be attained. But whatever poetical value anyone senses in these translations must be almost indefinitely heightened by imagination, if the beauty, grace, and power of the original are to be realized. Why then translate at all? Well, just because of a desire to make an English reader share even in a small measure the pleasure the translator feels in the original and to furnish him with paths along which his imagination may lawfully climb toward the height reached by this strangely gifted woman’s pen.

TO THE NEREIDS

O all ye Nereids crowned with golden hair

My brother bring, back home, I pray.

His heart’s true wish both good and fair

Accomplished, every way.

May he for former errors make amend—

If once to sin his feet did go—

Become a joy, again, to every friend,

A grief to every foe.

O may our house through no man come to shame,

O may he now be glad to bring

Some share of honor to his sister’s name.

Her heart with joy will sing.

Some bitter words there were that passed his lip,—

For me the wrath of love made fierce

And him resentful,—just as he took ship,

When to the quick did pierce

My song-shaft sharp. He sought to crush my heart,—

Not distant be the feasting day

When civic welcome on his fellows’ part,

Shall laugh all wrath away!

And may a wife, if he desires, be found

In wedlock due, with worthy rite—

But as for thee, thou black-skinned female hound,

Baleful and evil sprite,

Set to the ground thy low malodorous snout

And let my brother go his way

Whilst thou, along thy low-lived paths, track out

The trail of meaner prey.

(D. M. R.)

In this letter, handed perhaps to Charaxus on his return from Egypt, the tone is that of reconciliation rather than that of rebuke, and the rebuke itself may be found in a fragment of another letter, if Edmonds’ restoration is anywhere near the truth.35