Not Sapphic for Germaine

When Germaine Greer bites her host's hand, she does it so elegantly he hardly knows that his fingers have fallen off.

There I am last night, cheerfully giving the TLS prizes for literary translation at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London - and recalling proudly what has been our best 'translator' moment of the past few months, even years, the new  poem by Sappho, reported by Martin West of All Souls, Oxford, in our TLS edition of June 24.

Then up comes Professor Greer on to the stage to give the Sebald Lecture on a theme of literary translation. And she chooses Sappho.

How thoughtful, I think.
I am almost waiting to hear 'and first some praise for our sponsor', or something like that.

But Professor Greer soon makes clear her dim view of male professors in ancient universities who think they know who Sappho was, what she might have written and why she might have written it.

As for the TLS poem, attributed to the 'middle aged Sappho',  it is an implausible mixture of different fragments, assembled according to no logic that she can see, and wholly unworthy in any case. TLS readers have already been able to read two contemporary poet translators who seemed to disagree

The audience is rapt at her bravura. The TLS Editor is rapt at her bravura, though quietly wondering why there is so much blood on his hosting hand.

No more details now. An article based on Professor Greer's speech will appear, I hope, in a future edition of the  TLS and we can take on the argument from there.

Comments

[Richard Janko]

Dear Peter,
This ceremony sounds like a wonderful event! However, I can offer a new interpretation of the poem, which *is* in my view by Sappho, and I will hope eventually to be able to persuade Ms Greer and other sceptics as to its excellence.

As one of your poet-translators brings out, the poem has a careful tripartite structure and placement of imagery. But above all, it uses the myth of Tithonus to evoke the poetic immortality of the speaker even as her body ages. This evocation works because, in the myth that Sappho would already have known, the aged Tithonus, who cannot in his human form have immortality, turns into a cicada which sings beautifully for ever.

Thus the poem is much more subtle than first appears. It is absolutely in Sappho's voice; other fragments of hers also lay claim to her poetic immortality -- which this discovery now gives back to her.

I shall be giving a public lecture on this topic at a Symposium in honour of David Armstrong at the University of Texas in Austin on October 29.

Yours sincerely,
Richard Janko
(Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan)

[Gemma Mahadeo]

I confess this has little to do with Sappho, but Greer biting her host's hand reminded me of an incident I read of in Lindy Woodhead's double biography of Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein 'War Paint' (published by Virago).

Apparently, Arden was a miserable, ill-tempered lady. Hard to work for, and not easy to get along with. Her staff feared her greatly.

However, she was remarkably transformed when spending time around her beloved horses. Loving, affectionate, happy. So much so that when one of her horses actually bit off half of one of her fingers during a feeding, she calmly took the finger, had it sewn back on acted as if nothing had happened. Her horsekeepers were mortified, thinking they would either be fired or the horse would be put down.

It was as if nothing had happened.

But it a brave horse that manages to bite the hand of its feeder.