Posted on 06/25/2005 6:38:31 PM PDT by blam
The Greek wouldn't mean anything to you.
And the translation is copyrighted.
All this and no poem.
What a gyp.
Very good, I'm stealing it.
The last bit of it reads as follows:
Here is the poem in my own restoration and translation. The words in square brackets are supplied by conjecture.
"[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."
We know of several poems in which Sappho spoke of herself as getting on in years. Here she addresses a group of younger women or girls, whom she calls (to translate literally) “children”, contrasting their blithe singing and dancing with her own heaviness of heart and limb. It is clear from other evidence that she composed her poetry, or most of it, within an intimate circle of women whom she calls her “companions”. Her house is a house of moisopoloi, “servants of the Muses”. Later writers saw her as a chorus-leader or teacher, to whom people of class in several cities sent their daughters for a musical education. We cannot tell how accurate a construction this is, but it must have been based on the impression given by the poems, and it is consistent with what we know.
In the new poem, however, the focus is on Sappho herself. She recites the symptoms of her ageing, as in another famous poem she recites the physical symptoms of jealous love. Then comes philosophical reflection. In the love poem she tells herself that everything is endurable, because fortunes can be transformed at God’s pleasure. In the new poem she tells herself that growing old is part of the human condition and there is nothing to be done about it. This truth is illustrated, as typically in Greek lyric, by a mythical example. It is a tale that was popular at the time, the story of Tithonus, whom the Dawn-goddess took as her husband. At her request, Zeus granted him immortality, but she neglected to ask that he should also have eternal youth, so he just grew ever older and feebler. Finally she shut him up in his room, where he chatters away endlessly but barely has the strength to move.
Sappho is very economical with the myth, giving it just four lines and ending the poem with it. At first sight it might seem a lame ending. But the final phrase gives a poignant edge to the whole. Tithonus lived on, growing ever more grey and frail, while his consort remained young and beautiful – just as Sappho grows old before a cohort of protégées who, like undergraduates, are always young. 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. It gives us no ground for thinking that Sappho’s poetic reputation was undeserved.
I saw a bit on the history channel (I think) a while back where the government has stored all kinds of stuff in old underground salt mines. I did a google search and came up with a company that does it.
http://www.uvsinc.com/
Freakin Cool.
I knew I saw it before but didn't know where.
Thanks for aiding and abetting.
It was Julius Caesar, not Octavius, whose fire burned the library at Alexandria. It was not an intentional burning of the library, but a fire that got out of control. I hear that Cleopatra was furious with him for this.
"If it was such a great poem why was it found there, and why was another piece found in a garbage dump?"
It was printed on the equivalent of a MacDonald's happy meal paper placemat. Buy your King Tut camel burgers here, and by the way, here's a poem by Sappho to amuse the kids.
--If she was so damn great, somebody should have taken the time to write all of her crap down someplace other than a mummy.--
Sophocles only had seven surviving plays. Every year when he entered the drama competions in Athens, he had to have 3 tragedies and a satyr play to enter. He wrote at least 118 plays, and all we have left are 7.
We are lucky to have much of any of this left. With periods where large numbers of people were illiterate, and the tendency to recycle (paper gets reused to do things with...wrap stuff, make papermache, start fires, and other things, even today), and the destruction of libraries, the near loss of literacy in western Europe and a distaste for classical literature that a lot of Europe developed after 500, and centuries of civl upheaval, it's a wonder any of it survived.
Not even the Iliad. They didn't start writing these epics down until somewhat later, but even then the versions we have now came later yet.
*snort*
LOL
oh fans of sappho....
score!
nice. my previous comments are not, btw, meant to be dismissals of her poetry.
She certainly wrote romantic/erotic poetry like the vast majority of classical lyricists. I'm not sure how much, however, it would apply to modern ideas of eroticism, let alone Lesbianism. And modern literature professors/critics tend to apply the word "erotic" to all sorts of things--anything they consider sensuous, romantic, idealized, or aesthetic seems to fall into that category, from what I've seen. The "queer theory" types also love to search for "homoerotic" echoes in everything anyone's ever written; it's like a game to them.
You've sort of caught me off guard here. I stopped thinking about this subject five and half months ago.
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