Featured Book Review: If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho Translated by Anne Carson

By Judith Fitzgerald Mar 3, 2008, 12:21 GMT

"Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly comformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire."

Thus opined Joseph Addison in the November 1711 issue of The Spectator. Of those great critics to whom Addison refers, Longinus must surely rank as the greatest: In articulating what he considered "the supreme excellence" of Sappho's poetry, he himself soars: "Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage."

The passage in question, of course, is better known as Sappho's To a Beloved Woman, or The Ode to Anactoria, the oft-translated and imitated fragment (cf. Catullus, Ambrose Philips, W. E. Gladstone, Tennyson, Sir R. F. Burton, et al.). Anne Carson, in If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, renders it with vagarious freshness and colloquial verve:

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
or when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no; 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, 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
who honoured me
by giving their works . . .

Anyone but a person of poverty, the aristocratic poet-musician was born into a wealthy family in the "city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos from about 630 B.C." and "appears to have devoted her life to composing songs," Carson explains by way of introducing If Not, Winter. An accomplished lyrist, Sappho apparently composed nine books of metrically complex verse in which she eschewed the epic high-handedness of gods, muses. and heroes in favour of the exploration of the first-personal voice, the one given over to rapture, passion, and exquisite pain.

Basing her translation on the 1971 Eva-Marie Voigt transcription, Carson includes each fragment in which "at least one word is legible"; and deploys "the plainest language" she could finger, "using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did." While only one poem survives entire, nearly a hundred extant fragments provide a remarkably vivid portrait of one of the more amazing minds in poetry's history.

Curiously, however, of the sexual preferences of the celebrated woman Plato elevated to Tenth Muse status, Carson yields little more than Sappho "knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there?" Do we have a choice? It cannot escape notice, after all, etymological remnants of Sappho's reputation survive in the French sapphisme or the Italian amore saffico, both of which denote queeriosity (from Lesbos, Sappho's home).

Nevertheless, doing justice to Sappho's oeuvre presents unique challenges, many of which Carson admirably surmounts with generosity and gracefulness. Consider H. T. Wharton's literal translation of the above-cited ode undertaken in 1895 (shortly after excavations of ancient Egyptian garbage dumps unearthed strips of papyrus, used to wrap mummies and coffins, which contained scraps of her work):

"That man seems to me peer of gods, who sits in thy presence, and hears close to him thy sweet speech and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart flutter in my bosom. For when I see thee but a little, I have no utterance left, my tongue is broken down, and straightway a subtle fire has run under my skin, with my eyes I have no sight, my ears ring, sweat pours down, and a trembling seizes all my body; I am paler than grass, and seem in my madness little better than one dead. But I must dare all, since one so poor . . ."

The McGill University classicist's bilingual collection certainly expands a sensitive reader's circle of authoritative Sapphic texts in translation. "But the truth of it is," as Addison concluded in the same Spectator essay, "the compositions of the ancients, which have not in them any of those unnatural witticisms that are the delight of ordinary readers, are extremely difficult to render into another tongue, so as the beauties of the original may not appear weak and faded in the translation."

Carson's If Not, Winter, by Addisonian standards, then, is nothing if not beautiful.

Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007).