“Fragment Thirty-six” by H.D. & Sappho

Lives of the poets

Poetry’s most ancient claim—that it is an eternal art—is easy enough to scoff at now. But a wiser, humbler approach to poems might stifle our laughter. The beautiful girl wearing a flower-garland of her own hand’s weaving can stun us now as much as she astonished Sappho—Sappho, whose lines let us see her still. 

Throughout the centuries, certain poets have sought out those same, beautiful eternities, H.D. primary among them. Through translation and through invocation, H.D. fuses her voice to a timeless psyche—the breath or soul of the ancient world. Though the centuries deny it, I consider it a fact that H.D. was—somehow still is—a young woman studying in Sappho’s school. (The school where I hope to become a student, too.) As H.D. writes in Notes on Thought and Vision, “the world of the great creative artists is never dead.”

Sappho

Place forms voice. The Greek poet Sappho lived on Lesbos, an island among many smaller islands, possessed of one large city, Mitylene, and governed in her life by the tyrant, Pittacus. The island had two ports, and Sappho’s brother made a small fortune trading wine—money he wasted away on a beautiful courtesan, Doricha. He ended up roaming “the dark blue seas with agile oar,” stealing from others the wealth he’d lost himself. Both parents died early in Sappho’s life; she named her only daughter, Cleis, after her mother. Sappho left home in exile—no one knows why—but returned to Lesbos some years later, either opening a school for girls or forming a group that worshiped the cult of Aphrodite. Maybe these aren’t mutually exclusive.

All the facts about Sappho are ancient rumors. That she surrounded herself with young women and wrote of her love for them—sometimes rapturous, sometimes burning with jealousy—the poems bear the proof in themselves. She wrote nine books of poetry, though none survive, all lost in the fires that destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria. Mostly fragments remain with just a few poems still whole. 

The ancient world revered her. Called a tenth Muse, Strabo claims no other woman poet neared Sappho's accomplishment, and Plato called her beautiful and wise. Sappho wrote the first lyric poems of the Western world on the island Lesbos while Thales, first philosopher of the Greek world, pondered the stars on the mainland of what is now Turkey—poet and philosopher in eye-shot of one another, lyric poetry and philosophy born together, with only a thin sliver of ocean holding them apart.

H.D.

Place forms voice. Poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in 1886 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and raised in the Moravian traditions of her mother: a strict but mystical Protestantism devoted to peace and the possibilities of rebirth. H.D. fell in love with a woman while a student at Bryn Mawr and discovered in her sexuality a spectrum that would move between women and men throughout her life. 

William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound courted her and would come walk the countryside outside Philadelphia, where H.D. lived. Williams’s words give a portrait of the young woman’s spirit:

Storms, those welcome and those not, entered often into H.D.’s life. While engaged to Pound, she followed him to England, but the marriage never occurred. She wedded Richard Aldington in 1913, a pregnancy ended in a still-birth, and Aldington returned from the war shattered by its trauma. She had a daughter with the Scottish composer Cecil Gray, but the most lasting erotic love of her life twined her to the novelist Bryher. She received psychoanalysis from Freud himself. She lived in London during the Blitz of World War II. But throughout her life, H.D. invited other storms: gales of influence, prophecy’s breeze, wind’s myth—most essentially tied to ancient Greece. Perhaps the religious mysticism in which she grew up opened within her the ability to channel ancient potencies, such as those of Sappho, into modernist song.

Lives of the poems

Place forms voice—but voice is also a place of its own. Robert Duncan, poet and profound thinker on H.D.’s poetry, tutors us in just such possibilities in his poem “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”:

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought

A made place in the mind, so near the heart, that it is “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” captures much of how we might imagine H.D.’s connection to Sappho. 

The word “poet” derives from the ancient Greek ποιητής (poietes) which translates simply enough as “a maker.” The word φρήν (phren) can be translated as either “heart” or “mind.” The ancient Greeks thought the heart might be filled with the phantasms of all that we love, a kind of breath or pneuma, in Greek, that moves through the senses and embeds the image in the heart—a kind of pasture where we learn to think, learn to feel. We can imagine the poem as a fold in that eternal, internal pasture—a place that voice forms. 

Love is the wonder-field and H.D. knows it, as she writes in Notes on Thought and Vision: “We must be ‘in love’ before we can understand the mysteries.” For H.D., as for Sappho, the “mysteries” aren’t ambiguities, but rituals of initiation.

Fragment Thirty-six

In Heliodora, published 100 years ago, H.D. translates poems of Sappho, though that word hardly seems to capture the full extent of her approach. Take Fragment Thirty-six for a prime example. In Wind-Mountain-Oak (Tupelo Press, 2023), I translate 36 as:

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

“Fragment Thirty-Six” in H.D.’s first stanza reads:

I know not what to do,
my mind is reft:
is song’s gift best?
is love’s gift loveliest?
I know what to do,
now sleep has pressed
weight on your eyelids.

Here, translation is something more than, stranger than, a direct treatment of the original text. It’s a version of Robert Duncan’s sense of “permission,” as if H.D. finds in Sappho’s fragment a field to return to, and each return builds into a next poem, a vision unfolding differently, though the point of inspiration is the same. Each version asks its inherent, pressing questions. Here, it feels that “song” and “love” can’t exist simultaneously. Loving requires the lover’s undivided attention; song requires the distance from which one can finally sing about love. “I don’t know what to do;” it tears the mind in two. The last image gives us the intimate space of the questions: watching her lover sleep. H.D.’s “translation” returns to its own beginning, grows as restless as desire:

I know what to do:
to turn and slake
the rage that burns,
with my breath burn
and trouble your cool breath?

Perhaps we’re still, in this next return to Sappho’s line “I know not what to do,” watching the sleeping lover. H.D. feels the pangs love courses through the body, a rage that burns at such heat it sears in the breath, a breath that could wake the sleeper from the cool reserve of her dreams:

My mind is quite divided,
my minds hesitate,
so perfect matched,
I know what to do:
each strives with each
as two white wrestlers
standing for a match,
ready to turn and clutch
yet never shake muscle nor nerve nor tendon;
so my mind waits
to grapple with my mind,
yet I lie quiet,
I would seem at rest.

Love for Sappho, and so love for H.D. (and love, perhaps, for us all), divides us in two. We suffer, as here, a division and a doubling. It’s agony. That word, ἀγών (agon) in ancient Greek, defines any ground of contest, including the wrestling ring. We feel in H.D.’s image of these wrestlers a physicality of thought we seldom attribute to mind: “muscle,” “nerve,” “tendon.” The speaker lies quiet and still, not to wake her lover. But within her, though she seems at rest, thought grapples with thought.

And yet again:
I know what to do:
strain upon strain,
sound surging upon sound
makes my brain blind

“Strain” is a key word with a double meaning: the melody of a song, and physical exertion. H.D. returns us to her primary problem: “to sing” or “to love,” which is the better gift? There is no answer to the question. To hear the struggle, to feel it, “makes my brain blind.”

The many lives of translation

For H.D., translation isn’t merely a devoted transfer of a dead tongue into a living language: it is a locus, a place of return, “an eternal pasture folded in all thought.” As we can see from her iterative translation of Fragment 36, her approach to translation isn’t a deed to accomplish, but an ongoing ritual of initiation, where the test isn’t to find the perfect equivalent, but to seek permission to enter the meadow, and there in that pasture’s fold, to graze, to think, to feel, to say all that can be said.

The poem might be thought of as a form—nearly Platonic in potency—into which one enters, a novice to the mysteries one wants to practice, the very ground on which one learns to sing not as one alone can sing, but as anyone can sing, if you can find the place from which song itself emerges. I’m reminded of T.S. Eliot, her contemporary (though a poet whose relation to ancient texts feels far different), who writes in “Little Gidding”:

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

To think that H.D.’s approach to translating Sappho might be best understood as the “sound of the voice praying” goes some way to explain the nature of her translations in Heliodora. She returns, over and over again, to a place where once—millennia ago—a prayer had “been valid.” In such a place, the poem isn’t expression so much as it is ritual. Ritual’s nature is to repeat, to recite, to return—somehow finding that the effort to begin again is to begin for the first time, as if origin hides itself in some field not behind us, but ahead of us: the poem, the translation, is the very act that asks permission to enter. And the prayer isn’t sanctimonious. It isn’t dogmatic. It doesn’t say Thou shall not. It suffers the desire it sings—a desire that can divide the mind in two.

But perhaps another poem of Sappho’s (fragment 105a) can make the point more poignant. As I translated it:

As the sweet-apple reddens on the high branch,
high on the highest branch, that the apple-pickers forgot—
no, they didn’t forget; that apple they could not reach.

There is, even now, an apple ripening on the highest branch of the apple-tree, so high the pickers can’t reach it—though they see it, though they can imagine its sweetness, sweeter than any apple they’d ever eaten. It’s an image that describes the translator’s dilemma and the translator’s delight: for the translator, as for the initiate and the lover, puzzlement and bliss merge into the same condition. And a good translation—H.D. knew this in her mind-heart, in her φρήν—only requires of us another attempt, like a ladder requires another rung. Or so it does, if you want to taste the sweet sweet-apple.