Waiting for the Barbarians (18 page)

One way to deal with the problems that arise from the desperately incomplete state in which we find the Sapphic corpus is to forgo entirely any thought of reconstruction, of interpretation: to take the beautiful fragments, in other words, at face value. The idea that fragments of ancient culture—not only poems but vases and statues as well—can be aesthetically pleasing despite their incompleteness is one that has considerable allure and a distinguished Romantic pedigree (“the pleasure in ruins”); during the past century in particular, we have found a great appeal in the notion that fragments are beautiful
because
they are incomplete. You only have to think of Rilke’s famous lyric “Archaic Torso of Apollo” to be reminded of the hold that the notions of incompleteness or fragmentation, and indeed a kind of wholeness-in-fragmentation, had on the twentieth-century artistic imagination, as far back as the beginning of that century. This is, if anything, even more true for our present postmodern imagination, with its obsession with fragmentation, allusiveness, quotation, and reconfiguration of elements of the past. The cultural climate of postmodernism helps to account for the attitudes of Sappho’s most recent generation of translators and interpreters: one contemporary classicist, for instance, prefers to see the tattered corpus of Sappho as a Lacanian “body in pieces,” and hence forgoes traditional attempts at reconstructing Sappho’s work and historical setting in favor of a meditation on “the aesthetics of the fragment”; another has observed that for many critics, the “irony implicit in the fragmentary preservation of poems of yearning and separation serves as a reminder of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge and affection.”

And yet as alluring and provocative to us today as the notion of “the fragmentary” may be, it must be said that it has no meaningful relation to the presumed object of serious scholarship and translation, which, you would think, ought to be some kind of responsible representation of Sappho herself to the wider world—even if that
representation must remain partial and unsatisfying to the world (which, as we know, is often eager to see in her its own reflection). We may not know a great deal about Sappho, but we do know that she wrote whole poems, not fragments. The resemblance between the shattered state of the Sapphic texts and the shattered state of the broken hearts that are sometimes described in those texts is purely coincidental; the use of such resemblance as an element in the criticism of Sappho’s work is, ultimately, as sentimental as any of the theories advanced by the Victorian critics of yore.

The contemporary critical penchant for fragmentation invariably colors new translations of the poems themselves. The admirable Stanley Lombardo, a classicist and translator who produced a remarkably fresh and distinctive new version of the
Iliad
in 1997, writes in the preface to his
Sappho: Poems and Fragments
(2002) of the “gaps in the text that often leave us with only these beautiful, isolated limbs.” “Beautiful, isolated limbs” brings us back full circle to old Phanocles and that disembodied head of Orpheus, washed up on the shore of Lesbos—a fable that now takes on contemporary overtones, suggesting as it does the way in which poetry can enjoy sentimentalizing and idealizing the fragmentary body (as Rilke would do millennia after Phanocles). And indeed, for Lombardo, the allure of gaps and fragments dictates a philosophy of translation that affects even intact passages: “I sometimes deliberately treat a more or less intact passage as if composed of fragments that reduce to rhythmic phrases. I have made no attempt to follow, although I do sometimes suggest, Sappho’s various lyric meters.” Here, preference for fragmentation actually erases what is, in fact, recoverable and intact in the original.

The problems inherent in the sentimental “fragmentist” approach to Sappho are even more evident in
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
(2002), the translation of Sappho’s poems, with commentary, by
Anne Carson, who is not only a serious scholar of Greek poetry but also a serious poet whose oeuvre thus far represents, to my mind, the most distinguished, original, and successful adaptation and reconfiguration of classical models produced in the past generation. Mimnermos, an elegiac poet of Sappho’s era, is the subject of part of her mosaic-like
Plainwater
(1995);
Autobiography of Red
(1998) is a verse novel that reimagines the myth of Geryon as narrated in the poetry of Stesichorus, a poet of the late seventh and early sixth centuries who was praised by one ancient scholar as being among the most “Homeric” of writers. The Greek lyric genius Simonides of Keos, who wrote the famous epitaph of the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae (“Go tell the Spartans …”) meets Paul Celan in the essay
Economy of the Unlost
(1999); Aristotle and the choral lyricist Alkman appear meaningfully in
Men in the Off Hours
(2000).

So Carson comes to Sappho with the tools of both the rigorous scholar and the freewheeling poet. Both personae are to be found here and, as the following passage suggests, sometimes tango uncomfortably with each other. At one point she writes that the absence, the gaps—the lack of what Sappho actually wrote—have become an “exciting” presence:

To get a sense of what such adventures entail, you might look at Carson’s translation of the poem known as Fragment 22, a partial line of which lends her new book its title. Here are the first few lines:

It should be noted that Carson has taken liberties here—slightly greater ones than she warns in her preface that she would. “Gongyla” and “Abanthis,” for instance, appear in the Greek text as the headless fragments “… gyla” and “… anthis”; there is, presumably, only so much drama to which the lay reader may safely be exposed. And she has also neglected to represent the brackets that, in fact, mar the sixth line of the Greek text. (But then, who would buy a book called “]f not, winter[”?)

I harp on Carson’s selective application of her principles of representation because it seems to me symbolic of the strange waffling that
characterizes her new book itself, which, like so much about Sappho, has ended up stranded between the scholarly and the impressionistic—between an attempt to recover something concrete of Sappho’s meanings and the desire to make Sappho reflect our own preoccupations. (In this case—as Carson’s subtitle, to say nothing of her prefatory remarks, indicates—preoccupations with the beauty and “excitement” of fragments and the fragmentary.) Like Sappho’s songs, indeed, Carson’s translation raises a difficult question of audience: For whom is this book intended? To the lay eye, at least,
If Not, Winter
presents itself as an authoritative new Sappho: it accounts for every one of the nearly two hundred fragments of which at least one legible word survives, and provides the Greek text, brackets and all, on the page facing each translation. There are, too, notes in back that contain many references to and citations of ancient authors. And yet an intelligent reader not familiar with the controversies raging around Sappho and her work, and trusting in the amplitude of Carson’s book, in the scholarly-looking apparatus of notes and Greek citations and, indeed, the Greek on those facing pages, is likely to take away from this new translation, and from what can best be described as the fragments of information to be gleaned from its notes, a picture of the poet and her corpus that is disingenuously taciturn at best and misleading at worst.

There is, to be sure, a great deal to be admired here, not least because as a scholar Carson has special insight into the elaborate rhetorical strategies at play in the few substantial fragments we do have. Perhaps the most famous poem by Sappho—sufficiently influential in antiquity to have been translated by the Roman poet Catullus half a millennium after she composed it—is Fragment 31 in the standard edition, four complete Sapphic stanzas and a single additional line from the fifth, that survive because it was quoted (rightly) in Longinus’ treatise
On the Sublime
:

The poem ends—a bit maddeningly, appropriately enough—with a fragment: the first line of a next stanza whose contents must, for the present, remain unknown.

Longinus admired the way in which the contradictory symptoms of the lover’s passion, as she watches her beloved talk easily to a third party—a man—come together to form a persuasive whole. More contemporary interpreters have admired the way in which it introduces the imagination into lyric utterance for the first time, as the poem
engages in some complex thinking about “seeming”—about perceptions of phenomena both exterior and interior to oneself. The new translation conveys the real drama of this remarkable lyric, which lies in the way that the speaker becomes both increasingly aware of, and yet increasingly detached from, her own body, whose various organs—eyes, tongue, skin—take on lives of their own. Carson allows us to hear how the first four stanzas are framed by words of seeming (the Greek
phainetai
, “he seems,” and
phainomai
, “I seem”): her exact translation places the reader in the slightly echoing inner world of perception that is the special achievement of the poem, and that is not well conveyed, for instance, by Stanley Lombardo’s “Look at him … Look at me,” which has the unfortunate effect, because of the implied apostrophe to the reader, of introducing into this work’s much-commented-on perfect triangle (Sappho, the girl, the man) an extraneous fourth person: the reader.

There are other details in Carson’s rendering of Fragment 31 that show a praiseworthy sensitivity to the original: “puts the heart in my chest on wings” is a stunning solution for the Greek
eptoaisen
, a word that conveys both a fearful shuddering and the airborne intention of beating wings; and “drumming” successfully brings across the almost onomatopoetic force of the Greek verb
epibromeisi
, which Lombardo’s “my ears ring” fails to suggest. But the best and most persuasive aspect of Carson’s rendering is to convey the odd, stilted quality of the Greek when it describes the symptoms that make Sappho not the subject but the object of the phenomena she describes: the Greek literally says “Nothing any longer comes to me to speak,” which is brought across much better here than in Lombardo’s “I can’t get any words out.” It is the poem’s complex play of subject and object, perceiving and suffering, detachment and involvement, that accounts for its privileged place in the Western
lyric tradition, and this elaborate play is what Carson beautifully renders.

And yet as persuasive as much of the translation is, there are odd lapses and strange inconsistencies. A distinctive aspect of Sappho’s verse is that unquantifiable element, voice: in Sappho’s case, forthright and plain, however artful the rhetorical strategies may be. Carson admirably re-creates the directness of Sappho’s voice, explaining her choices thus:

But it isn’t clear that to mimic the word order of a highly inflected language like Greek results, in fact, in an “accurate” representation of the words—any more than to postpone the verb to the end of a sentence in a translation from the German would be an accurate or appropriate translation of the German. One result is a certain stiffness in Carson that you don’t find in Sappho.

Other lapses seem to be arbitrary. It is strange, given Carson’s alertness to the salient gender issues in these poems, that she would choose to translate Fragment 108—at one short line, admittedly not among the most crucial ones—as “O beautiful O graceful one,” when the Greek very explicitly provides a noun for those adjectives:
kora
, “girl.” On the other hand, it’s all too easy to see why Carson has chosen to render the tiny two-word Fragment 38,
optais amme
, as “you burn me.” What the Greek says is “you burn us”; the pronoun is plural. As
we know—and as Carson acknowledges in her note to this fragment—one reason that Sappho uses the plural is that the poetry was choral in origin; but Carson goes on to say that she’s chosen to render this fragment the way she has in order to preserve what she calls its “fragile heat.” In other words, she’s chosen to sacrifice what the words actually say in order to project an image of Sappho as we want her: the private voice of individual erotic yearning. If the fragment is hot enough to translate, it’s hot enough to render accurately—with, of course, the same explanatory note. But then it might not seem so hot, after all.