A Note on the Translation of “Wind-Mountain-Oak: The Poems of Sappho”

The voice is a ritual only epochs can reveal. Centuries let the husks of personality we hold on to so dearly fall away and leave radiant and bare some truer seed called self. The voice performs the rites of that self—a meter, a dance, a song—keeping alive what otherwise would be lost. Because it is a ritual, another may learn the rites, may perform them. It is as just such a novice I have turned to Sappho’s poems, hoping no more than to apprentice myself to the rites of her voice, and in performing them as carefully as I can, return to the page that living voice.

To do so has required choices, line by line and poem by poem, large and small. In the few poems time has given us complete, those written in the hendecasyllabic meter known as sapphics, I have done my best to approximate the potency of that rhythm. Meter in the ancient world can be thought of both as musical and mystical. Some meters sanctified marriage. Others, like the dithyrambic, drove those who listened and those who sang into fits of religious ecstasy, giving them some aspect of the power of the god they worshipped. Sappho’s eponymous meter begins with the fever of heavy stress, then transitions through the middle of the line into a calmer order at the end. It is as if each line begins with the heart startled into a panicked pulse, that then grows accustomed to the startle. The meter lends a physical intimacy, a visceral interiority, felt in the chamber of the body, to Sappho's poems. Your blood flows to her tune, if you let it.

Sappho is a love poet. The war-verse of the epic was written in hexameters, twelve feet per line. Love walks with a wounded foot. Eleven syllables per line, until the adonic, last line of each stanza, wounds the wound, with its five syllable close. We might pause to note how many heroes come to us with wounded feet: Achilles, Oedipus, Philoctetes. We might think of Hermes’s winged feet, who takes a running start and leaps into the air before the last foot falls.

To keep a semblance of that meter meant myriad syntactical choices, and in one case, where I could find no other solution, the addition of a phrase to a rightly famous poem, just four syllables, “Now greaves, not grief,” as Sappho asks Aphrodite to fight with her. I would like to claim that the words arrived as a kind of revelation, something given the novitiate of the rites of a singular voice, but maybe that is simply a self-comforting excuse. What is truer to say is that breaking the metric form felt to me a mistake more egregious than adding in those four words to keep whole the shape entire. But I may be wrong, and apologize for the trespass, to Sappho and Aphrodite both. 

Ancient Greek is a stunningly compound language, and many words arrive thick with alternate and immediate meanings, as if each word isn’t a worker bee, but a hive. Throughout the poems, I’ve tried to be honest to that thick complexity, letting a moment in any given poem accumulate alternate versions—a flower as seen through the bee's compound eye. The verb δονέω means “shake,” and famously describes Eros’s sweet-bitter nature. Love shakes me. But deep in the meaning is agitation of another, related kind—the murmur, the buzz, as of a bee. An image can teach us how to listen more fully. “A bee in a blossom buzzes” reminds us that Love’s agitation is the worry that widens the wild field entire. It is my hope that such willingness to go astray is a truer path, and that something comes to light in a mistake that can be seen in no other way.

One of the words for word in Ancient Greek is έπος. It is from it we get epic. So it might be seen that every word is in and of itself an epic poem, one we could read, if only we could fully enter the word. Any word will do. It is with that principle in mind I worked to order this collection of Sappho. If a voice can be thought of as a ritual, a life can be considered an epic—and I wanted to offer an ordering of these poems that give some sense of that epic journey any given life is, one that leaves us as it leaves most heroes, limping on a wounded foot. There is a motion how the poems move from first to last, from wondrous recognition of the world, through erotic entanglement, to the sanctity of human bonding, to religion, to morals, to age that threatens to tear apart the sanctities we have clung to, and then to death itself, which might teach us—as Sappho hints—to see ourselves as no more than we are.