以下文章取自紐約時報書評,介紹由女詩人Anna Carson近來新譯的Sappho
提起Sappho, 應該是西方文學史上最早的女同書寫
而這位希臘女詩人所居住的愛琴海小島Lesbos也成了女同志Lesnian的字根
從沒聽過這個典故的朋友們可以在本文第一二段的介紹約略了解她的故事
文章中間是討論Carson英譯版本斷句所引發的新閱讀趣味,
對於這種 散落的佚本,現代的翻寫也是一種全新的詮釋
嗯,有人對這樣的古典文學有興趣嗎
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August 26, 2002
The Mystery of Sappho and Her Erotic Legacy
By DINITIA SMITH
What do we know about Sappho? That she was born sometime around 630 B.C.
on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean. Alcaeus calls her "violet haired,
pure, honey-smiling Sappho"; perhaps she looked like the young Elizabeth
Taylor. She is said to have been married to a wealthy man, Cercylas;
to have had a daughter, Kleis; and may have run a thiasos, a kind of
finishing school for girls, dedicated to Aphrodite, Eros and the Muses.
Of course Sappho also composed poetry: erotic, sensual, desperate poetry,
filled with the anger of desire, wonder at the beauty of the desired one,
the sweet languor of gratification. And now her verse has been elevated
to new heights in a gorgeous translation by the poet Anne Carson, who is
also director of graduate studies, classics, at McGill University in Montreal.
Plato called Sappho "the 10th Muse." She was prolific and composed
nine volumes of work, but only about a thousand lines survive, some
later found on bits of papyri as small as postage stamps.
There were no spaces between the words, no line breaks, and they were
probably intended to be sung to music. (We don't know if Sappho was literate.) Some scholars believe that only one poem remains intact, a hymn to Aphrodite, in which Sappho asks for help in winning a young girl's love:
. . . But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out
and what I want to happen most of all
in my crazy heart. . .
Yes, Sappho composed love poems to women, and sometimes to men.
It seems she loved Anaktoria, who left her, and who in her
thoughtlessness reminds Sappho of Helen of Troy. And there is another girl,
Atthis: "I loved you, Atthis, once long ago,/a little child you seemed to
me and graceless," Sappho says. But, Ms. Carson asks beguilingly in her
introduction, "can we leave the matter there?"
Sappho is a mystery. Her life is a mystery and so is her work because of
its incompleteness. It is partly what is missing in the poems, what we
don't know, to which we bring our own desires and interpretations,
that enhances its erotic spell.
In her translation Ms. Carson denotes the missing words and lines in
the poetry with single bracket marks, as in the title piece:
. . .if not, winter
]no pain. . .
The words seems like a cry of anguish, the missing line, the blank space,
like a freeze, or a death.
"Do I still yearn for my virginity?" Sappho asks in another fragment.
What is the meaning here? Who is talking? Is it Sappho, an old woman
tormented by sex? Or the voice of Sappho's creation? It is the need
to decide that draws us in.
In the fragments of just a single line, the words assume a particular,
devastating power. "You burn me," she says in one piece of verse.
Ms. Carson is one of the most extraordinary poets writing in English.
In book after book ?"The Beauty of the Husband," "Plainwater,"
"Men in the Off Hours"?she has bent and reshaped the poetic form.
Her best-known work, "Autobiography of Red," is based on a fragment
of the seventh century B.C. Greek poet Stesichoros, about a winged
red monster, Geryon, who is slain by Herakles.
Ms. Carson turns it into a verse novel, a contemporary gay love story,
but its mythic counterpart is never far from the surface.
Who can forget the mother sending her frightened red-monster child
off to school after he has been picked on by other children?
"This would be hard/for you if you were weak/but you're not weak,
she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him/out the door."
In "If Not, Winter," Ms. Carson's learned footnotes constitute
their own poetry. In one she refers to Sappho's use of the phrase
"rosey-fingered moon." How "startling is the fecundity of sea,
field and memory which appears to flow from this uncanny moon and
fill the nightworld of the poem," she writes.
By bringing her particular kind of austerity to the translation,
Ms. Carson has deepened Sappho's mystery and yet brought us closer to her.
Compare Ms. Carson's translation to that of Guy Davenport,
until now the best known of Sappho's modern interpreters.
Mr. Davenport brings his own poetic voice to bear on the lines:
Dusk and western star,
You gather
What glittering sunrise
Scattered fa
r,
The ewe to fold,
Kid and nanny home,
But the daughter
You send wandering
From her mother.
Ms. Carson lets the lines stand there naked:
Evening
you gather back
all that dazzling dawn has put asunder:
you gather a lamb
gather a kid
gather a child to its mother.
So, in this new book we have Sappho the mother, in a tender poem about
her daughter: "I have a beautiful child who is like golden flowers/in form,
darling Kleis/in exchange for whom I would not/all Lydia or lovely."
And we have Sappho torn with jealousy, watching her girlfriend with
a handsome man:
. . .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. . .
Sappho's poetry is filled with a golden eroticism. It is redolent of
Attic sunshine, the sweet smells of the Aegean, Grecian meadows.
It is an eroticism from an ancient time when lines between
homosexuality and heterosexuality were blurred, before distinctions
were made and fear and prohibitions came into place.
It is said that Sappho died for love of a younger man, Phaon, a ferry
boat captain, that she threw herself off a cliff because of him.
But that is probably a lie.
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