Two Poems by Sappho
I used to start letters with images. Due to the prevalence of Spam catchers, I do so no longer. There is a wonderful image of Sappho in Raphael’s great fresco, “Parnassus.” Imagined, yes: Raphael painted it over 2000 years after Sappho had died, with no image for a model, as far as I can tell, of the great Greek poet. But his image, as you might guess, is stunning. To see it, type ‘Raphael Sappho Wikipedia’ in your search engine…..
I spoke with some friends about this letter yesterday, saying I had reservations about sending it. “I try to write about poems in ‘ordinary’ language,” I said, referring to my intent of making poems accessible — not, of course, just trite, easy-to-understand messages — so that I can allow readers to enter into poems. For poems matter, they speak to us of important things that we need to know. But this letter, about Sappho, though it begins comprehensibly enough, eventually goes down what I would call a worm-hole. It descends into ‘depths’ that literary scholars so often insist are the domain of ‘LITERATURE,’ inaccessible to all but literary scholars who speak in an abstruse, specialized language that makes most of us feel small and insufficient and not capable of actually understanding what writers try to speak about.
So a ‘worm-hole’ will appear later in this letter, and I will give ample notice of it. Maybe in writing about Sappho and Paul Celan and the problems of language I am just succumbing to the need to appear literary. Skip over the worm-hole if you wish: It really may be too literary, too abstruse, to over-intellectualized. I included it because it addresses a specific problem, that of language and the sayable. It says that language is, finally, insufficient at rendering the richness of our experience. Kafka puts the issue simply when he says, “All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.”
So be prepared to skip over the second half of this essay if you want to avoid my tedious (but I think worthwhile!) descent into the abstruse….
THE BEAT GOES ON [“fragment 58”]
You, children, be zealous for the beautiful gifts of the violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.
But my skin once soft is now taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.
And my heart is weighed down and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.
I groan for this. But what can I do?
A human being without old age is not a possibility.
There is the story of Tithonos, loved by Dawn with her arms of roses
and she carried him off to the ends of the earth
when he was beautiful and young. Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his deathless wife.Translated by Anne Carson
It seems to me one of the wonders of our age. In 2004, examining the papier-mâché (known as cartonnage) which wrapped an Egyptian mummy, scholars found a sheet of papyrus that contained a ‘complete’ poem of Sappho. (How do I know this? I did a web search for ‘complete poem of Sappho, believing there to be only one, and learned of the poem translated above.) It is the earliest manuscript of a poem of Sappho: It provides a rather complete poem for which there had, previously, only been a fragment with many, many omissions.
I begin this letter with this poem because I love it, and because I had already drafted a letter on Sappho’s most famous poem (a fragment), a letter which I thought had veered too far into the recondite. I write these letters to make poems accessible – believing as I do that poems are “needful to man as air,” a phrase which occurs in Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass,” which I have written about. In writing about Sappho’s great lyric of passion I feared I made it more distant, more literary, harder to read. So I figured if I led off with this poem, wonderful and accessible, “The Beat Goes On” might serve as an introduction to the thornier discussion which follows.
The poem begins with a direct address to younger readers – younger than the speaker, a speaker whom we will shortly learn is old. It asks them to be “zealous” in their pursuit of art, and its inspiration, love:
You, children, be zealous for the beautiful gifts of the violetlapped Muses
and for the clear songloving lyre.
At this point I feel a need to cite two lines from William Butler Yeats. The first phrase is the single line of verse I say to myself most often; I, alas, mostly ignore the second line, the conclusion of the poem:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
As I explained to a colleague over lunch a while ago, this is Yeats’s great theme: The power of art to buttress him in the face of aging, of the decay we all confront as our bodies slow down and our sexual passions wane. His greatest poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” written when he was not old, begins,
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
“That is no country for old men.” I suppose he means Ireland (but in the larger view, it is the whole world) – pardon my language, here – is fucking, but he is not; he no longer feels himself to be part of the world of procreation, which even the fish and birds partake of, to say nothing of “the young/In one another’s arms.”
Yeats’s predicament, that “bodily decrepitude is wisdom,” is his life-long theme. It is also, at least in this poem by Sappho, her theme. She beat him to it by 2400 years.
But my skin once soft is now taken by old age,
my hair turns white from black.
And my heart is weighed down and my knees do not lift,
that once were light to dance as fawns.
I am not sure if more apt lines have ever been written about age. Skin, once baby-soft, grows thin and wrinkled; hair which was once full of color now is white with the snow of age. And joints, here the knees, are weak and perhaps arthritic. The knees, which once danced, ‘Light…as fawns” (young deer!) no longer “lift,” nor does the heart which is now weighed down with the heavy freight of life. (“Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,/ And custom lie upon thee with a weight/ Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!” Wordsworth wrote most wonderfully in his “Intimations Ode.”)
So, as Sappho writes it, age changes the skin, the hair’s color, the spring in one’s steps, the lightness of heart with which one began life. No longer fawn-like and sprightly and young, the poet “groans:”
I groan for this. But what can I do?
A human being without old age is not a possibility.
Astonishing. Sapho understands yoking specificity to generality. She provides the reader with images of age and what it does to the human body, followed by an abstraction, “A human being without old age is not a possibility.” We live in time, and time goes forward, relentlessly and inescapably. We age, and age some more, and then one day we are old.
Sappho then turns to an example, that of Tithonus. According to our translator, Anne Carson [whose poem, “Essay on What I Think About Most” I wrote about in a previous letter], here is what Sappho is referring to: “the myth of Tithonos, a young man so desirable that the goddess of Dawn (Aous or Eos) fell in love with him and rapt [sic] him away to the ends of the earth. She then asked Zeus to grant him immortal life, but forgot to request immortal youth, so Tithonos aged forever.” This is the conclusion of Sappho’s poem:
There is the story of Tithonos, loved by Dawn with her arms of roses
and she carried him off to the ends of the earth
when he was beautiful and young. Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his deathless wife.
A gorgeous Dawn, “with her arms of roses,” falls in love with Tithonos and carries him to that far-off place in the East where she rises each morning to welcome the world to a new day. But her lover, who is granted to her eternally, still is gripped by the world of time, by the inexorable aging of human beings. “A human being without old age is not a possibility.” Dawn endures, “deathless,” but Tithonus, and all human beings, are caught in inexorable aging.
I read a book on physics as we understand it today, and what I took away is that there is one constant – even more of a constant than the speed of light – and it is that time’s arrow moves in only one direction. It is never reversed in the physical universe. We are all in what Allen Ginsberg, in an inspired phrase in “Howl,” called “the total animal soup of time.”
We grow old. Alert readers may hear in that phrase the echo of T. S. Eliot’s ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:” “I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” But what Sappho understood, and the young Eliot who wrote these famous lines did not, is that growing old is not an affected posture (as with Prufrock) but the inevitable decline of the body as it feels the weight of accumulated time: “my knees do not lift,/ that once were light to dance as fawns.” Fawns no longer, dancers no more, our hair grows white . . .
Sappho’s poem is a lament for humans, who do live “in the total animal soup of time.” While it begins with a plea to the young, it is a recognition of aging, and what it feels like. That – the capacity to convey what things feel like – is the hallmark or Sappho’s poetry, and what she brought, wondrous gift, to Western consciousness.
Thus, we move on to Sappho’s most famous poem, a fragment. It is, I shall tell you at the outset, a poem of passion, of what passion feels like. It is about love and physicality. About sex. As Margaret Reynolds wrote, “Certainly Sappho seems to have been an original inventor of the language of sexual desire.”
Sappho
Translated by William Carlos Williams
That man is peer of the gods, who
face to face sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little
of dying.I am another person
There is, I dare say, no more famous short poem than this fragment of Sappho’s. Indeed, apart from the Iliad and the Odyssey, Fragment 31 of Sappho (also called, after its opening line, phainetai moi: But don’t ask me to pronounce it!) is the most celebrated of all Greek poems. Unlike Homer’s epics, it is short: A lyric, written not in regular dactylic hexameters like Homer but in Sappho’s special verse form, three longer lines followed by a shorter fourth line. The verse is metrically , what scholars generally call Aeolic. Written in the sixth century B.C. (Sappho died in about 550 B.C.), it comes down to us solely because it was cited as an example by Longinus in his “On the Sublime,” an essay which was itself a fragment. That essay that was originally published in Latin in about 100 A.D.
Why is Sappho’s poem so famous?
Well, even in Greek times, Sappho was known as the “Tenth Muse,” an appellation which Plato gave her. (The first book of poems published by an American, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America [1650], refers back to Sappho!) So Sappho was regarded as accomplished even in her own day, ever so long ago.
Sappho wrote poems about persons for persons, unlike Homer, who wrote about heroes in the oral epics which preceded her works. She sang her poems, supposedly to the accompaniment of a lyre, so we can regard her as the progenitor of lyric poetry. The person, not the nation or tribe, is her subject. In this sense, almost all of modern poetry traces its roots back to Sappho. (Or to the Song of Songs, the Biblical text in which love of God is expressed as love for a woman.)
The poem before us is remarkably rich, even though it has only seventeen lines, the last of which is often omitted in both translation and commentary. So: Sixteen lines, four stanzas of four lines each.
It is, as befits its importance, one of the most translated passages in all of literature. Catullus translated it into Latin. Ronsard and Racine translated it into French. In English, well, the Renaissance poet Sir Phillip Sidney, the eighteenth century poet/journalist John Addison and his contemporary Tobias Smollett. Alfred Tennyson and John Symonds translated what is known as ‘Sappho 31’ in the nineteenth century. Horace Gregory and Robert Lowell and Richmond Lattimore and Guy Davenport, among others, translated it in the twentieth.
I will provide two translations, the one by William Carlos Williams already cited above and which will serve as our guide as we read the poem, the other by Anne Carson that will alert us to a ‘strangeness’ that too often translators glide around.
I first encountered Sappho’s poem in the translation by William Carlos Williams. I am still enthralled by his version, which he claimed ameliorated the falsities of diction and rhythm of all previous versions, as he put Sappho into the rhythms of American vernacular speech. He published the translation in 1957 and then included it at the start of Paterson V (ii), which is where I encountered it.
Anne Carson also provides us with a translation of the poem. Her version also includes the final line, which just hangs out there as a harbinger of what comes next; of course, we do not know what comes next, since the rest of the poem is lost to us.
Sappho’s truncated poem is available to us because, as I wrote, it is cited in Longinus’s treaty On the Sublime, where it lacks that final hanging line, and consists of only the four quatrains. Longinus was the first to comment on the poem; it is worth reminding you of what he said, since it is so apt, even today.
Is it not wonderful how at the same moment soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour, all fail her, and are lost to her as completely as if they were not her own? Observe too how her sensations contradict one another—she freezes, she burns, she raves, she reasons, and all at the same instant. And this description is designed to show that she is assailed, not by any particular emotion, but by a tumult of different emotions. All these tokens belong to the passion of love; but it is in the choice, as I said, of the most striking features, and in the combination of them into one picture, that the perfection of this Ode of Sappho’s lies.
What Sappho wrote was a love poem; even more precisely, it was a poem of passion. The poem concentrates on the poet’s response to seeing a woman before her, who is talking to a man.
We will see how she portrays passion, and in so doing we can recognize what so fascinated poets and readers for almost three millennia. But we will also see that in writing about passion, Sappho also tells us a lot about poetry: About what it can do, about what it cannot do, and about the border which divides the two, the border between telling and silence. So as this consideration goes along, it will get more abstruse. If that is too overwhelming, skip along, surfing over difficult paragraphs, for we should not lose sight of the major truth, that this is a poem of passion and of love.
The byways through which we come to our reading can be byzantine, so forgive me if I recount the circuitous journey which has led me to this letter. A while back, perusing an electronic posting which had a short piece on Paul Celan, the famed German language poet of the mid-twentieth century, I found a reference to a book by Anne Carson on Celan and a Greek poet named Simonides of Keos. I got the book, Economy of the Unlost, in an electronic version through the University of Vermont Library. (It turned out later I had a paper edition of the book, which a decade ago I had bought and never read.) Carson is very, very good on the difficult if not impossible Celan; she also piqued my interest not only on Simonides but on ancient Greek poetry. Thus, I’ve been reading a good bit of Greek poetry lately in a famed anthology, Willis Barnstone’s Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets.
It is impossible to read classical Greek poetry without coming to grips with Sappho, the greatest poet of that hundreds-of-years-long era. I’d read Sappho before. She is tough, largely because almost all of her work comes to us as fragments, sometimes of only one word and a lot of blanks. Carson, a classicist by training as well as a major contemporary poet, is a brilliant translator of Sappho, largely because she is dedicated to being literal – so much so that in many poems she indicates the numerous blanks by rendering them as such, using lines like
[………
to give an indication of what has been lost to the ravages of time.
Longinus, as I have said, included this Sappho fragment in his Latin treatise On the Sublime. It is not complete, since he quotes only four stanzas. One final line was somehow discovered in later years – that one line indicating that there is more to come. But, of course, more never comes. All we have is the extended excerpt.
Here is Anne Carson’s translation. With one very important exception, which I have put in bold print below, I will depend on the translation by William Carlos Williams for our ‘text.’ His translation is at the head of his essay.
Fragment 31
He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speakingand lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in meno: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills earsand cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty
Let’s start in. The poem has four stanzas, plus that odd and seemingly extraneous last line. Here is how William Carlos Williams renders the first stanza.
That man is peer of the gods, who
face to face sits listening
to your sweet speech and lovely
laughter.
The poem is sometimes entitled “Jealousy” by translators, and the first stanza tells us why. The object of Sappho’s love is sitting beside a man who gazes at her and listens to her “sweet speech and lovely/ laughter.” Meanwhile, the speaker of the poem is at a remove, observing this close connection. She is, in a sense, across the room, not looking into the lovely woman’s eyes; she hears her laughter at a distance. “It is this that rouses a tumult/ in my breast.” As we encounter the scene, it is the man, not the poet, who listens from right in front of her.
It is time for us to slow down. The “tumult,” which Carson translates as “oh it/puts the heart in my chest on wings,” is clearly the speaker’s inner turmoil as she recognizes that the beautiful woman is (in physical proximity) close to the man who sits with her, and rather more distant from the poet. Indeed, the man is blessed by this closeness: He is “peer of the gods” since he has the good fortune to be her companion. For surely, to sit beside a ‘goddess’ is to be the equivalent of a god…
It is this that rouses a tumult
in my breast. At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.
Jealousy, perhaps, and yet there is more here than jealousy. Read slowly now, for this is important, and we will return to it later: The speaker of the poem is rendered mute. “At mere sight of you/ my voice falters, my tongue/is broken.” In Carson’s version the same muteness is recognized: ‘For when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking/ is left in me// no: tongue breaks”.
This is truly odd. We are reading a poet, and this is her poem, yet here is what she writes of: Having no words, complete muteness, a total insufficiency of language. She cannot speak, and yet she speaks – or, at least writes. This is language pushed to its uttermost: Language says it is insufficient to what is experienced, and yet it goes onward. One is reminded of Samuel Becket, who famously pronounced in one of his stories, “ … you must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” a formula repeated in some sense in another of his stories, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Long before Beckett and Celan, Sappho wrestles with the incapacity of language to express what one feels, and the concurrent need to use language as the sensitive tool that human beings have to express what we feel. So Sappho, the poet-observer in the poem, uses language to express the failure of language. “At mere sight of you/ my voice falters, my tongue/is broken.”
Ah, but the poem does not end here.
Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.
One can be pardoned for thinking this might still be a description of jealousy. Rage at the other person who has what one wants – jealousy – makes her blind and she hears “thunder” in her ears. And yet, and yet: The fire that runs through her does not seem like the fire of jealousy. This is a “delicate fire,” in Williams’ version; in Carson’s, it could still be a conflagration: “fire is racing under skin/ and in eyes no sight and drumming/ fills ears.” But that is not her entire translation, for in her words, separated by a line break, the fire is a “thin/fire.” So it is not, not, a conflagration. Delicate fire, blindness, thunder: It would seem that the speaker of the poem is overcome with passion. An all-over tingling, sight fails, the blood thunders in the ears: Sexual passion takes over.
Is that what is happening here? Let us look at the following lines, which comprise the final stanza.
Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little
of dying.
Something remarkable, at least to my eyes, has happened here. The poem has moved from its opening, with at least a partial focus on (and jealousy towards) a man, to a description of what it feels like to be jealous, and then quickly runs onward to: To sexual abandon. I suppose we could be very literary/philosophical and say the love object has been triangulated, that through the ‘medium’ of a third party (that man!) who seems intimately close to the woman, the poet has recognized her own sexual thrall to the woman (whom she observes from a distance) sitting beside that man.
And yet this is more than triangulation. The poet is in a state of aroused sexuality. We might have seen this almost from the start. Williams has it, “My voice falters, my tongue/ is broken.” Carson, more literal I assume, has it better: “oh it/ puts the heart in my chest on wings.” Something is happening in this woman, the poet. She is aroused: She herself is in bondage to something larger than herself. What else can this be but sexual arousal and surrender:
Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow
paler than grass and lack little
of dying.
Here is how Carson renders these lines:
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills earsand cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me.
“No speaking is left in me,” Carson translates, and then the new stanza begins with that full stop, “no:” as the poem shifts to a sexual surrender which cannot be withstood. “tongue breaks and thin/fire is racing under skin/and in eyes no sight and drumming/fills ears//and cold sweat holds me and shaking/grips me all.”
This is a poem of passion, of what passion feels like. Sexual passion? Yes. Unlike the Homeric heroes who marshal their ranks and throw spears and make speeches, Sappho the poet lets us know what love feels like.
Can it be doubted that these lines refer to sexual intercourse, and the death which follows is what poets in the Renaissance called ‘the little death,’ that of orgasmic climax (as opposed to that other death, which is mortality manifesting itself)? ‘La petite morte,’ the French called it; the British adopted the phrase ‘little death’ in the sixteenth century. But millennia before then Sappho recognized, in this poem, the similarity between death and sexual climax, which both result in a foreshortening of all the senses. “I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,/ Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,” writes Whitman in Song of Myself, two sections before he also writes of sexual climax (although, it should be noted, his climax is solitary, masturbatory:)
Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.
Sappho understands how the senses are ‘bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me.’ Speech fails in her poem; then fire takes over her limbs, then she cannot see and only hears the pounding (of blood) in her ears. She sweats and trembles, shaking, gripped in a physical passion that has overcome her, and to which she has surrendered all her will. And she “lack[s] little/ of dying.”
Now here comes a strange, strange locution. Williams did not know Greek, and depended on classics scholars to render the Greek into English so that he could translate the poem. (He did know the American language, though, which is what makes his version so compelling to us Americans.) But Anne Carson is a classicist herself, a professor of Greek, and so her willingness to render in translation something that is there in the Greek original should compel our attention. What follows is abstruse, and speculative, and you may want to skip it and go to the last four paragraphs of this letter. This is the worm-hole I cautioned you about in my headnote. Be warned. What I am entering upon has to do with the intricacies of translation, and in exploring this terrain I acknowledge that Anne Carson has been influenced by the poet Paul Celan (about whom, as I mentioned, she wrote a book) to deal with a strange (Greek) locution in the poem.
Because I do not read Greek, I asked a friend, an accomplished classicist, what the Greek lines actually translate into. Here is what he wrote me regarding the Greek original and the Anne Carson translation. [Beware: We are going into the recondite here.]
“That passage is actually pretty straightforward in the Greek, but she has made the English a little stranger than it needs to be so that she can capture something in the word order. Let me first translate it word by word, literally (except note that δέ or δ᾽, “and”, is postpositive in Greek, i.e. follows first word in clause).
χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
and greener (than) grass
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾿ ὀλίγω ᾿πιδεύης
I am, and to-be-dead little needingφαίνομ᾿ ἔμ᾿ αὔτ[ᾳ.
I seem to my self.
More idiomatically: greener than grass I am, and I seem to myself almost to be dead. But note how in the Greek ἔμμι (I am) is adjacent to the infinitive τεθνάκην (to be dead); the δ᾿ means ‘and’, but goes after the word it joins. Thus the reader / listener hears ‘to be dead’ before this gets soft-pedaled by ‘I seem to myself almost’. She tries to replicate this effect by not putting a comma after ‘I am’ (note how the editor of the Greek HAS put a comma there to mark the end of the clause), and by replacing the infinitive with a participle, which lets it double as a second predicate to ‘I am.’ “
Carson’s translation is very, very strange. Very. So strange that I had to look it up again to make sure it was not a typo. I found it in her book of translations from Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho.
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me
“I am and dead.” Grammatically, it does not make sense: “and” should link two similarities, yet here it is the verb ‘am’ (intransitive, ‘to be’) and the adjective (for a participle is the adjectival form of a verb) ‘dead.’ We could read the sentence without the ‘and,’ as most translators do: ‘I am dead.’ Or we could read it as a foreshortening, a collapsing of elements: “I am and I am dead,’ expressing thereby a contradiction, that of being and non-being co-existing. [That is how I think my friend John Franklin reads it.] I suppose I read it that way, too, a collapsing of what would otherwise be contradictory elements, the strange situation of the ‘little death’ which is both a death and yet a vibrant part of life.
Still, the phrase is there in the Carson translation and not, I am afraid, to be explained away too easily. So we have to reconsider, having come upon a strangeness we are quite quick to put aside: “I am and dead.’ We encounter, here, the limitations of language. I mentioned earlier I recently came to Sappho by means of a book by Anne Carson on Paul Celan and Simonides. (As I said, I think the shadow of Celan hangs over this line of her translation.) So let me divert our way from Sappho into Celan, possibly the most difficult, and certainly one of the most revelatory, of modern poets.
Celan’s parents, both Jewish as was he, died in forced labor camps; he also was sent to a forced labor camp until 1944, when he was liberated. A poet, his problem was that German was his original language, the language shared with his beloved (and lost) mother; yet German was also the language of the savage oppressors whose destructively anti-semitic campaigns led to the destruction of both his parents and six million other Jews.
Theodore Adorno famously asserted, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” The problem for Celan was even greater: How could he write a poem in German, the language of the culture that destroyed his mother and sought to destroy him?
Celan wrote in a language that skirted that edge between what can be said and what cannot be said. A language that denied itself and yet asserted. Allow me to quote from two prose works (and there are very few of those) of Celan. The first is from his brief remarks when he won a prize, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” [1958] and the second from when he won another prize, the Georg Buchner Prize, a speech he called “The Meridian” [1960]:
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.
In this language I tried, during those years and years after, to write poems: in order to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going, to chart my reality.
The second passage is bleaker, tougher:
It is true, the poem, the poem today, shows – and this has only indirectly to do with the difficulties of vocabulary, the faster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis, none of which we should underrate – the poem clearly shows a strong tendency towards silence. [My italics]
The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an ‘already-no-more’ into a ‘still-here.’
The ‘still-here’ can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and – not just verbally – ‘corresponding’ to something. …..
The ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature….
The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.
Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?
I know these are hard passages. I have read them many times. What Celan is telling us, I think, is that it is extremely difficult to use language to say things, but that words are what we have. And that words allow us to encounter others, even as that encounter is always a mystery, as the other is always unknown to us – as we ourselves are, all too often, unknown to ourselves.
I think Carson knows that Sappho, millennia ago, understood what Celan is telling us. That strange phrase, “ I am and dead,” is an example, a powerful one, that tells us “that the poem holds its ground on its own margin.” It pushes language to its limits, it exceeds rationality, and in that pushing and in that excess, that ‘surplus,’ it reveals to us – the poem too is en route – that the poet and the experience are both beyond words, and yet must be transmitted to us through words. It is only after a sort of death, the poem appears to claim, that one can encounter the self. No wonder Carson strained language to its uttermost to convey this extreme of illogic: That the death of the self precedes the seeming discovery of the self.
“But all is to be dared,” Sappho tells us in the last line. “I am another person,” she insists in Williams’s translation. Either way, the poem is en route to us by means of words, even if it exceeds words.
As for those last lines of the fourth stanza? She is “paler than grass” [Williams] and yet “greener than grass” [Carson], depending on the translation. Yet we should not be surprised: Sexual death is a kind of rebirth. The act of sexual congress between a man and a woman leads to inception, pregnancy, birth. Nor should the new life that comes forth be restricted to male-female relations; same-sex relations can also bring forth a new being, now charged with the power of intimacy that sexual climax brings.
I am pretty certain that all this has been hard to follow. Perhaps what Sappho is telling us is that sexual climax, orgasm, feels like death, and that when it comes over us we seem to ourselves to be dying. The death, grammatically according to my friend John Franklin, comes before the awareness of self, and maybe undermines it.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.” “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof s/he must be silent.” But Sappho does not choose silence. She attempts to express, in words, that strange experience of the “little death” as it is happening, before one knows for certain (or “almost,” in Carson’s translation) that it, in Whitman’s terms, “led forward life.”
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
“But all is to be dared” follows this fourth stanza of Sappho’s poem. We do not know what came next from this “person of poverty,” but we do know that Sappho dared much in this brief fragment. She began with what is perhaps jealousy, turned to her own love and desire, wrote of sexual passion, and then turned to what cannot be known – even in language – through that slippery medium we call language. In this, perhaps she is reminiscent of another great women poet, Emily Dickinson, who wrote a poem, “After Great Pain,” that concludes with lines that refer to an ellipsis, a blank, an omission: Her acknowledgement of the inability of language to say what consciousness cannot know.
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Words do not suffice for what cannot be said, for what happens after “the letting go” of consciousness. Yet, as Celan said, words are all we have. Thus, when Sappho seeks to tell us of sexual climax, her grammar runs away from what is expected, and she borders upon language that does not quite do what we expect it to: Language declares, simultaneously, its inadequacy and its attempt to tell us what must be told.
The endurance of fragment 31, “That man is peer of the gods,” has remained strong for almost three millennia. A poem of passion, it also goes as far as language can go.
Years ago, I went to the great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There I was struck, with what was in actuality a physical force, by the realization that there were astonishing artists who lived three thousand years ago. Their jewelry went beyond anything we can imagine in our times; their small sculptural recreations of daily life were more ‘real’ than anything we produce in our day. I recognized the passage of time has not necessarily meant progress. (This historical passage of time is very different, I think, from the ‘personal’ passage of time that Sappho bemoaned in the poem with which this letter opened, the poem that was formerly fragment 58.)
Those who lived long before us knew as much as we do: Of beauty, of truth.
In summary, there is much in Fragment 31. It is the first poem from our classical Greek heritage that speaks to us of how the world feels, and not surprisingly it is not only an evocation of the overpowering nature of love but of sexual passion. But it is also, even though it was composed so long ago, about what language can and cannot do.
Sappho, living in the seventh century BC, still teaches us about love, about passion, about being alive, about language. Still!