Fragments, shadows and projections: Greer on Sappho

Sappho is a character of whom we know little, but speculate much. 

There is enough archeological rubble and dust to suggest she lived in the Greek island of Lesbos and sang songs with a lyre. She is ambiguously believed to have been born sometime between 610 and 630 BC. 

Scholar of 16-17th century literature Professor Greer says in a recent lecture that there have been so few fragments of Sappho’s work unearthed that there is little to be known definitively about her life.

“Sappho is a real headache to anybody who wants to find her,” Professor Greer says.

And many people do want to find her.

Of all the fragments of Sappho’s poems that have been uncovered, there are only 26 that have full lines.

This means that transcribing and translating Sappho’s poetry is a highly speculative art form. It means projecting something into nothing. Adding words where there are holes. And translating words that may not have contemporary equivalents.

“All translation is mistranslation,” Professor Greer says artfully of this process.

The translator is put in a position of mis-remembering history and the reader can have no access to the actual substance of Sappho. 

The reader cannot truly see Sappho’s poetry because history obscures the view.

However, despite this, or perhaps because of this fragmentation, the elusive figure of Sappho has captivated generations of historians, poets and readers, who have often interpreted her narrative and pieces according to the prevailing attitudes of their era.

The Romantic poet Mary Robinson was fascinated by the story of Sappho stepping off a cliff due to unrequited love. In this retelling, Sappho is a tragic woman, cut against a stormy sky, with a stanza named, “She endeavours to fascinate him”.

There have been historical debates waged about whether Sappho was a prostitute. Now, the contemporary mythology of Sappho is that of lesbianism. Her status as a citizen of Lesbos has served to name lesbianism and she has become an ideological and literary poster girl in absentia. 

There is little to definitively say she was in fact what is currently seen as a ‘lesbian’. Rather her poems were at times erotic and romantic, with ambiguity about the gender of the voice of the poem and the object of the speaker’s desire.

“Sappho is no longer an author,” says Greer. “She’s a celebrity.”

History has made her an unreliable character, because society keeps narrating her differently.

“The difficulty is to avoid deciding who she is,” explains Professor Greer. “You need to keep all the options in your head at once.”

As a literary figure, Sappho is defined more by what we don’t know than what we do know. The fragments to which we do have access expose the holes and gaps and show us what we can’t see.

www.arts.unimelb.edu.au