Sappho

Therefore, we remember that her lines are often dramatic rather than being internal monologues. Her lines were collected in books, but we have only a fraction of what she actually wrote, collected on fragments of papyri. Many of the fragments are very short, sometimes as short as one line on a page, as, for example, Fragment 38, “you burn me,” three short words take up the entire page, white space pervades. Sitting with the fragment brings up questions immediately: Who is the you? Who is the me? What is the context? Questions like this come up over and over in the fragments, and Anne Carson’s translation emphasizes the rupture of the lost pieces by using the ] and [ symbols: as she describes in her introduction, “When translating texts read from papyri, I have used a single square bracket to give an impression of missing matter, so that ] or [ indicates destroyed papyrus or the presence of letters not quite legible somewhere in the line. It is not the case that every gap or illegibility is specifically indicated: this would render the page a blizzard of marks and inhibit reading. Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event rather than an accurate record of it” (xi).  The brackets, then, act as a reminder that what we are reading, even in the fragments that contain multiple lines and somewhat coherent narrative, is not whole, that there are gaps and ruptures we have no way of recovering. We find reading Sappho deep expressions of desire and longing, but we cannot find coherent characterization, definitive speakers or certain consistency in narrative. The question is what to do with such uncertainty.  

A class might discuss, for example, the first line of Fragment 94: “I simply want to be dead.” There are two women in this poem. Which one is the I of the first line? And what changes in the relationship between the two women when we assign the first line to each one. Then who is the we that appears in line 8? How does this we turn the poem from one between two people into something more communal? Does that make a difference in the reception of the poem? As Ellen Greene argues, “The picture in stanzas five through ten is one of idyllic beauty and blissful satisfaction. As against the clearly delineated voices and personalities at the beginning, here, the ‘I,’ ‘you,’ and ‘we’ of the poem are all linked in the aura of sensations and erotic stimulation. Boundaries of person, object, and place seem to break down as everything in the environment dissolves into a totality of sensation.” [1] 

Xavier Buxton reads a similar slippage in lyric subject in Fragment 31 [2], wherein the speaker, taken with desire, claims, “no speaking/is left in me,” and yet continues to speak. In Carson’s translation of this fragment, after “tongue brakes,” she uses the passive voice to articulate the described sensations of the body: “and thin/fire is racing under skin/and in eyes no sight and drumming/fills ears.” With this split in subjectivity, the speaker becomes paradoxically not a speaker but an observer just like the audience.