The Lesbian Lyre
SAPPHO
The stars about the radiant moon
consider their brilliant orbs unsightly
when in her fullness she burns brightly
upon the earth. . .
*
As the sweet apple reddens atop of the bough
by the tip, at the furthest height,
the pickers forgot it, no, they didn’t, not quite
but just couldn’t reach it somehow.
*
As the hyacinth
on the mountain top,
trampling shepherds didn’t see
the purple flower drop.
*
“Maidenhood, maidenhood,
where go you leaving me”?
“I leave you for good,
you’ve outgrown my company.”
*
Hesperus, restoring all that shining dawn
has scattered far and wide,
you bring the sheep, bring the goat, bring every fawn
back to its mother’s side.
[not so the bride –
who leaving home is forever gone.]
*
The moon departs the sky
the Pleiads pass from sight
midnight’s hour slips by
and I lie alone tonight.
*
ALCMAN
Like a smith –
again love strikes the hammer’s blow,
plunging me
in Winter’s torrent as I glow.
*
Again do I love, again love not,
this moment sane, the next distraught.
*
Again tossing his purple ball my way
blond Eros strikes calling me out to play
with a gaily sandaled girl.
but she’s of Lesbian pedigree
and won’t have any part of me
because my hair is grey,
and gapes that some other girl agree.
*
Thracian filly, why cast sidelong glances,
why flee as if I’d lost my senses?
I could easily bridle your head in place,
rein you in; run you round the race.
Now grazing in meadows you lightly skip
with no nimble horseman to hug your hip.
*
ANACREON
Like a smith –
again love strikes the hammer’s blow,
plunging me
in Winter’s torrent as I glow.
*
Again do I love, again love not,
this moment sane, the next distraught.
*
Again tossing his purple ball my way
blond Eros strikes calling me out to play
with a gaily sandaled girl.
but she’s of Lesbian pedigree
and won’t have any part of me
because my hair is grey,
and gapes that some other girl agree.
*
Thracian filly, why cast sidelong glances,
why flee as if I’d lost my senses?
I could easily bridle your head in place,
rein you in; run you round the race.
Now grazing in meadows you lightly skip
with no nimble horseman to hug your hip.
*
ARCHILOCHUS
A fig tree on its rock, feeding many crows,
accessible, loved by all, to all exposed.
*
Like a mating crow,
pleasured, perching low,
poised on a jutting peak,
slack-pinioned, sleek.
*
We have a sturdy ox at home,
knows how to plough, need not be shown.
*
Gain gathered by long time and labor
often flows down the gut of a whore.
*
And on that skin, insatiable, alight,
hurling belly on belly, thigh on thigh.
*
IBYCUS
In spring the river streams bedew
the quinces in Cydonia,
where sacred stands the Maidens’ grove
and shading bough vine-blossomed grows;
this love of mine no season knows
but races – northern Thracian blast
from Aphrodite’s shrine outcast
ablaze with flash of lightning, black
with shameless fits of parching rage,
pain unrelenting, unassuaged.
Chapter Excerpts
PREFACE (THE GREEKLESS “POET-TRANSLATOR”)
The Lesbian Lyre focuses on the results and implications of the poet-translator phenomenon, one that I have found to perplex non-classicists. Yet within the self-approving classics field of the past fifty years and more, this phenomenon has become commonplace. Reviewing such works for academic journals and other media, classicists rarely so much as note a poet-translator’s lack of classical language training. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, such a situation would have been unthinkable. There have of course been rare and outstanding exceptions: witness Alexander Pope (1688–1744) who, with minimal Greek and an unfailing poetic sensibility, completed one of the most successful and enduring translations of Homer (xxvii).
CHAPTER 2 (THE TASK AT HAND)
The present work takes Sappho at face value, restoring her to common sense based on the meaning of her words in context (24).
CHAPTER 11 (MEMORIZING POETRY)
The difference between reading and memorizing poetry is the difference between viewing a Rembrandt at the museum and having it hang from your own wall (106).
CHAPTER 25 (T. S. ELIOT, "PRUFROCK")
The poem comes laden with Cubist compression: "When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" equalizes high and low, flattens the depth of sky "upon a table," draining the very empyrean of perspective (and turning it upside down). The sky’s life-sustaining aether becomes sense-numbing ether. The circumambient is localized, creating a sense of spatial and sensory suffocation (343-344).
CHAPTER 25 (IMPERVIOUS EZRA POUND)
As Pound took all the wrong lessons from Dante—those of his politics, artistic purpose, and style—he proved impervious to the best in Homer and had no use for Virgil. There would have been no Pound, and no self-willed alienation, otherwise (368).
CHAPTER 25 (POUND AND EMILY DICKINSON)
Dickinson worked in a sparse and highly formal style, with the artist's rather than the barn painter’s brush. Requiring discipline, education, and time, her poetry reflected the life of the mind rather than life’s adrenalized gusto. Even had she been better known in her lifetime—let alone as shamelessly self-promoting as Whitman—Dickinson would not have won the palm. More congenial to the times the wide outdoors and the up-winded scent of one’s armpit. Dickinson was fine wine to Whitman’s beer. Why sip and savor when you can guzzle? (369)
CHAPTER 27 (SAPPHO "PROBLEMATIZED")
McEvilley's work is a reproach to the radical reclamation and "problematization" of Sappho; it is a credit to what is instinctive or primal in Sappho’s outlook and, thus, to what is eminently simple and straightforward. We know and have always intuitively known Sappho's predicament: "Love and sorrow are re-born with every human being. Time and civilization make little difference. But those touches are only weakened by . . . recondite conceits and ambitious psychology" (392).
CHAPTER 34 (THUNDERBOLT FOR HYBRIS)
To treat the Odyssey "as though it had been written not in the 720s BC by Homer, but in the 1950s AD by Robert Fitzgerald," and to proceed in largely unfootnoted fashion as though Homer had never previously met with comment, is a presumption for which Zeus keeps a special thunderbolt (513).