Discovery of a new Sappho poem is more exciting than a new David Bowie album
The discovery of a gorgeous lost poem by the Greek poet Sappho is thrilling for poetry-lovers
telegraph.co.uk
Sappho was born on the Greek island of Lesbos in the late seventh century BC, after all, and not much her work has survived. Like Bowie, though, she has gained a reputation for playing with voices and manipulating our views of gender – which is one reason why so little of her work survives. Her best-known lines are filled with longing for another woman. Monks didn’t preserve her poetry, and manuscripts of her work that were held in the Vatican burnt in purifying flames.
These gaps are all the more tormenting because what poetry we have from Sappho is so gorgeous. The best-known is addressed to a girl whom the poet sees forlornly through the eyes of the girl’s boyfriend. Its description of the lurch and palpitations lovers feel is so physically acute that some commentators read it as a medical diagnosis.
The last discovery of a Sappho poem was in 2005, when new techniques of analysing marks on discarded papyrus dumped in Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt, revealed another poem, in which Sappho bemoaned her old age (again with attention to symptoms). Lachlan Mackinnon translated it in his collection Small Hours. More could come from that source.
This latest poem emerges from elsewhere – an anonymous collector – and it is the scoop of Dr Dirk Obbink, a Classics fellow at Oxford, who when he saw it declared that it was by Sappho. It’s highly unlikely that he’s wrong. They are written in her distinctive meter, with the long vowels of the Lesbian dialect. Best of all, one poem mentions the Sappho’s brother, Charaxos.
In the poem Sappho chastises an audience for assuming Charaxos will return from a trading journey safely. It’s not clear whether this man ever existed. Herodotus mentioned him, and Ovid picked up on his story, too.
Portrait of Sappho by unknown artist in Campania, Italy First century
Photo: Rex Features |
