Sappho Fragment 1

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seanjonesbw
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Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

Well my copy of Budelmann’s Greek Lyric: A Selection finally arrived and I’ve been working my way through it in my usual plodding fashion. As a complete newbie, I’m really enjoying these ragged texts with all their gremlins and idiosyncracies. For all their difficulty, it’s extremely gratifying reading through and feeling the huge loss in translation. It makes me much more forgiving of the hard work than being sent to the dictionary by Xenophon, which always elicits an audible groan.

I’ve just finished working through Sappho 1 (the ‘Ode to Aphrodite’) - completely dazzling - and have a few points that I’d appreciate some help with below.

Before I get on to those, I can’t resist sharing a curio, as is my way. I was reading Margaret Reynolds’s The Sappho Companion, which covers the reception of Sappho by later writers (mostly post-medieval, mostly in English), and in a throwaway comment she mentioned that Gerard Manley Hopkins had composed music to accompany the Greek of Sappho 1. I had no idea GMH composed music, let alone trying his hand at music for Greek lyrics, so I had to track it down. I found it in a letter he had written to his friend Robert Bridges (image below) and thought it was so peculiar that I couldn’t help transcribing it for others to hear. It is truly odd. GMH himself described it as “more curious than beautiful, but very flowing in a strange kind. It seems to be in the heptachord scale.”

I’d be interested to learn of any other settings of the Greek for this or other lyric.

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

Text of Sappho Fragment 1
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1 ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα, 2 παῖ Δίος δολόπλοκε, λίσσομαί σε, 3 μή μ’ ἄσαισι μηδ’ ὀνίαισι δάμνα, 4 πότνια, θῦμον, 5 ἀλλὰ τυίδ’ ἔλθ’, αἴ ποτα κἀτέρωτα 6 τὰς ἔμας αὔδας ἀΐοισα πήλοι 7 ἔκλυες, πάτρος δὲ δόμον λίποισα 8 χρύσιον ἦλθες 9 ἄρμ’ ὐπασδεύξαισα· κάλοι δέ σ’ ἆγον 10 ὤκεες στροῦθοι περὶ γᾶς μελαίνας 11 πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ ἀπ’ ὠράνω αἴθε- 12 ρος διὰ μέσσω· 13 αἶψα δ’ ἐξίκοντο· σὺ δ’, ὦ μάκαιρα, 14 μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτωι προσώπωι 15 ἤρε’ ὄττι δηὖτε πέπονθα κὤττι 16 δηὖτε κάλημι 17 κὤττι μοι μάλιστα θέλω γένεσθαι 18 μαινόλαι θύμωι· "τίνα δηὖτε πείθω 19 ] †σαγην ἐς σὰν† φιλότατα; τίς σ’, ὦ 20 Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει; 21 καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει, 22 αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώσει, 23 αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει 24 κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα." 25 ἔλθε μοι καὶ νῦν, χαλέπαν δὲ λῦσον 26 ἐκ μερίμναν, ὄσσα δέ μοι τέλεσσαι 27 θῦμος ἰμέρρει, τέλεσον, σὺ δ’ αὔτα 28 σύμμαχος ἔσσο.
I’d only read Sappho 1 in translation previously. Reading it in Greek with the metre has absolutely blown me away - it felt like my first real taste of sushi. What a beat!

Anway, onto the places where Budelmann didn’t help me out:

5 - ποτα κἀτέρωτα - is the sense here ‘ever and anon’, ‘from time to time’? Or is it simply ‘ever’?

6-7 ἀίοισα πήλοι ἔκλυες - is the distinction between ἀΐω and κλύω here ‘hearing (i.e. noticing) [my voice] from afar you listened (i.e. paid heed)’?

11 - πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ - LSJ and Budelmann have "[with?] fast-beating wings” and “rapidly whirling their wings” respectively. There are no commas around this participial phrase in Budelmann’s text, but I am choosing to take it as independent and to take ἀπ’ ὠράνω αἴθερος διὰ μέσσω· with ἆγον.

13 - ἐξίκοντο - I assume the ἐξ doesn’t add meaning here vs ἴκοντο?

14 - μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτῳ προσώπῳ - instrumental dative or locative?

18-19 - Happy to receive any thoughts on this disputed bit. ἄψ σ’ ἄγην ἐς ϝὰν φιλότατα in Campbell’s text.

20 - Ψάπφ’ - how on earth would she have pronounced her own name? Particularly the πφ cluster.

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Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

This website might be helpful...

https://digitalsappho.org/greektextandcommentary/
N.E. Barry Hofstetter

Cuncta mortalia incerta...

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by cb »

Hi Sean, you may find this version of the poem (by Will Annis) with glosses and notes helpful (it answers several of your questions):

http://www.aoidoi.org/poets/sappho/sappho-1.pdf

On the distinction between the verbs of hearing, perhaps check out my note on ἄκουαι on pg. 22 of my notes on writing Sapphic aeolics:

http://www.aoidoi.org/articles/writingsapphics.pdf

Also I remember from a long time back, there was a unique take on the poem by Will Harris (see from pg. 55 here), worth reading:

http://wayback.archive-it.org/6670/2016 ... Sappho.pdf

Cheers, Chad

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by mwh »

Manley Hopkins. Curious. Is this meant to be sprung rhythm?
Heptachords? He doesn't mean heptatonic? Evidently he's not inferring tetrachords, conjunct or disjunct.
What the blazes is Dorian rhythm? (Well, we can see, but where does he get it from?)
And he seems to defy the accents, whatever they may have been.

The places where Budelmann didn’t help out. Quick tentative answers in bold:

5 - ποτα κἀτέρωτα - is the sense here ‘ever and anon’, ‘from time to time’? Or is it simply ‘ever’?
Simply “ever,” like Homeric “if ever” previously, but κἀτέρωτα indicates on some particular occasion(s?).

6-7 ἀίοισα πήλοι ἔκλυες - is the distinction between ἀΐω and κλύω here ‘hearing (i.e. noticing) [my voice] from afar you listened (i.e. paid heed)’?Yes, κλυω of hearing and taking action accordingly, as “Hear my prayer.”

11 - πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ’ - LSJ and Budelmann have "[with?] fast-beating wings” and “rapidly whirling their wings” respectively. There are no commas around this participial phrase in Budelmann’s text, but I am choosing to take it as independent and to take ἀπ’ ὠράνω αἴθερος διὰ μέσσω· with ἆγον.
I take πυκνα proleptically with διννεντες like Budelmann (whirring their wings in such as way as to make them πυκνα, i.e. with the beats close together, i.e. rapidly). And there'll be quite a number of the birds (how many?, 2, 4, 8, more? Bad question?)
I don’t think commas make any real difference.


13 - ἐξίκοντο - I assume the ἐξ doesn’t add meaning here vs ἴκοντο?
Well they arrived from somewhere (from the sky). It’s unexceptional usage to have prefix as well as preposition, so no it doesn’t add much but I feel plain ικοντο would be odd.

14 - μειδιαίσαισ’ ἀθανάτῳ προσώπῳ - instrumental dative or locative?
Need we distinguish? But not locative I’d say: she could hardly smile anywhere else, and this way we envision her full-frontal face, ?habitually smiling (or laughing), at least on Sappho and/or all women she afflicts?

18-19 - Happy to receive any thoughts on this disputed bit. ἄψ σ’ ἄγην ἐς ϝὰν φιλότατα in Campbell’s text.
I doubt we’ll ever know. What does Budelmann say about this?

20 - Ψάπφ’ - how on earth would she have pronounced her own name? Particularly the πφ cluster.
Ψ (if not fake Lesbian) no problem; απ closes the syllable, φ (aspirated or not) opens the next (if you can tolerate the conventional syllabication rules).

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by jeidsath »

mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am What the blazes is Dorian rhythm? (Well, we can see, but where does he get it from?)
I had exactly the same question when I saw that. A reference in Google Books --that I could only partially see -- claimed that it was related to Schmidt's Griechische Metrik, whom he admired.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

Joel Eidsath -- jeidsath@gmail.com

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

Thanks everyone for the tips, and special thanks to Michael for the point-by-point.
mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am 18-19 - Happy to receive any thoughts on this disputed bit. ἄψ σ’ ἄγην ἐς ϝὰν φιλότατα in Campbell’s text.
I doubt we’ll ever know. What does Budelmann say about this?
Budelmann: "Π [P.Oxy.xxi.2288] probably had ἄψ σ’ ἄγην (~ἄγειν); see Lobel’s editio princeps and Maehler apud Burzacchini 2007a: 85. That text cannot be right: ‘once again whom shall I persuade to bring you back to your love?’ The most promising emendation is ϝὰν for σάν (‘… to bring you back to her love’). Compare perhaps the use of ἄγειν in wedding contexts (Sa. 44.5n.), and cf. 21 for Sappho’s strikingly passive role in this phrase. But the corruption may well be more extensive. For overviews of other proposals see Saake 1971: 54-9, Caciagli 2011: 78-82."

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am Heptachords? He doesn't mean heptatonic? Evidently he's not inferring tetrachords, conjunct or disjunct.
What the blazes is Dorian rhythm? (Well, we can see, but where does he get it from?)
And he seems to defy the accents, whatever they may have been.
GMH describes 'Dorian rhythm' in another letter to Bridges a few pages earlier, p.233 "I added two metrical schemes..." to half way down p.234. Immediately after that (pp.234-235) he describes what he means by heptachords. He concedes at the end of the letter that "The above is not lucid nor perhaps all true." I think he's spot on.

By Dorian rhythm he seems to mean any metrical unit where there are four syllables in the space of three long syllables i.e. two longs two shorts in different orders. Hence his 2 short bar-lines per measure. Joel is right that this seems to have some relationship with his reading of Schmidt, who gets a name check on p.233. I leave any further analysis of the metrical merits and demerits to the experts, although it seems to be characteristically GMH in his reach exceeding his grasp.

Heptachord - he describes this with reference to another piece of music he has written to accompany some lines from the Antigone, apparently in some key of G from his description (Sol = D, La = E), probably major. This whole passage seems a bit confused.

This is my best effort at tracing what GMH is saying here (not in the same order he presents it):
1. The dominant seventh is traditionally built on the fifth scale degree (Sol).
2. GMH feels that he has devised an alternative musical system (!) in which it is built on the sixth scale degree (La). This is the 'heptachord', beginning on La (6th) and ending on Sol (5th) of the next octave (e.g. ABCDEFG)
3. The heptachord is conjunct, consisting of Whole Half Whole steps twice, with a common tone in the middle (so a total of seven notes). In contrast with the major scale starting on Do, which is disjunct Whole Whole Half x2, with no common tone (so eight notes).
4. GMH wants to write music which effectively modulates between the scale based on the tonic at Do (e.g. C major) and the 'heptachord' on a tonic at La, so the listener experiences shifts between major and minor. He suggests that the piece should end on the minor tonic at La, which his music for Sappho 1 does.

I can't really see what the difference is between this and a sort of chaotic modulation (although modulation is not quite the right word here) between a major key and its relative minor (e.g. C major / A minor), which is what seems to be happening in the Ode to Aphrodite I posted above. Perhaps a musicologist would make more hay with this.
mwh wrote: Wed May 19, 2021 2:07 am Is this meant to be sprung rhythm?
Interestingly, in another letter to Bridges from a few years before this one, he said "I wish I could pursue music, for I have invented a new style, something standing to ordinary music as sprung rhythm to common rhythm: it employs quarter tones." This doesn't seem to be the same thing as the 'heptachord'. He seems to have fallen out with anyone who tried to teach him music because they didn't appreciate his revolutionary impulses.

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by mwh »

Sean, Wonderful. Thanks so much for your penetrating analysis. I’d love to think he knew what he was talking about, and apparently Bridges was sympathetic. I adored Hopkins' poems when I encountered them in my young teens, and I still have the Windhover (what else?) in my head sixty years on. Sprung rhythm is at least intelligible (as originally it was not), and perhaps, as you suggest, a musicologist or even a musician would find enlightenment in his musical ideas, but to me they seem irretrievably mired in value-added 19th-century crazinesses.

As to the Sappho text, I don’t really understand why ϝαν was not welcomed with open arms.

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

Hopkins is truly big S Sublime. ὕψι-kins. Amazing to think that he wrote the Windhover around the same time that Tennyson was cranking out poems like Crossing the Bar. It must have seemed like it had come from outer space to anyone who got to read it at the time. It still does now!

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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

I'm leaving here some other Gerard Manley Hopkins trivia I have found on my travels, in case anyone arrives at this thread searching 'Dorian rhythm' or similar.

1. Apparently Hopkins was working on a commentary on Greek lyric before he died, which he thought would be his greatest work, greater even than his poetry. The first part was to deal with 'Dorian metrics' and the second with how he thought Greek lyric had been composed.
Todd Bender, 1966, pp.71 ff.
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Todd Bender, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Classical Background and Critical Reception of His Work, 1966, pp.71 ff.

This book is available for free on Project Muse.
Hopkins believed that his most important literary work was to be a commentary on Greek lyric art, in comparison with which he thought his English verse unimportant. If indeed this work was ever completed, it is now lost; but the general drift of it can be reconstructed from his extant papers. It was to be in two volumes: one treating Dorian metrics, the other dealing with the technique of composition of the Greek choral and lyric odes. Subsequent scholarship tends to show
that his volume on metrics was based on a misconception about Greek verse; but his volume on structural principles has since been at least partially verified and, in fact, shown to be a brilliant insight into the method of composition of certain Greek lyrics. It is unfortunate therefore that what little atten­tion has been given to his analysis of Greek lyric art has been concentrated on the metrical side of his study. An examina­ tion of Hopkins' theory of the structural principle of lyric and choral odes shows: ( 1) that he accurately foresees Gilbert Norwood's hypothesis about Pindar's method of composition, (2) that Norwood's hypothesis, in turn, explains the structure of " The Wreck of the Deutschland," and (3) that Hopkins' theory about the organization of Greek lyrics is consistent with Ford's theory of the unearned increment or Read's theory of the collage effect in modern art.

...

It seems that Hopkins believed that the Greek verse, which he called logaoedic, was composed of dactylic and trochaic feet mixed indiscriminately, but that the feet were equivalent because they were isochronous. Modern classical scholarship, although not absolutely conclu­sive, tends to show that his theory, insofar as it describes Greek practice, is not accurate.3 But even if Hopkins' theory of Dorian meter is inaccurate as a description of the Greek, his misconception may have influenced his English meter (or vice versa) and therefore his study would have been of great interest to the student of his poetry if the manuscript had not been lost.
2. He composed some Greek and Latin verse, most of which has been lost.
Bender, 1966, pp.112-113
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Bassanio's song in The Merchant of Venice, III, ii:
Tell me where is Fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engender'd in the eyes
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring Fancy's knell;
I'll begin it,-Ding, dong, bell.

Hopkins' Latin version reads:

Rogo vos Amor unde sit, Camenae:
Quis illum genuit? quis educavit?
Qua vel parte oritindus ille nostra
Sit frontis mage pectorisne alumnus
Consultae memorabitis, sorores.
Amorem teneri creant ocelli;
Pascunt qui peperere; mox eumdem
Aversi patiuntur interire.
Nam curas abiisse ita in feretrum!
Amorem tamen efferamus omnes,
Quern salvere jubemus et valere
Sic, O vos pueri atque vos puella:
Eheu, heu, Amor, ilicet, valeto.
Eheu, heu, Amor, ilicet, valeto.

And this, in turn, is rendered in Greek:
οτροφή. χορευτής ά] τίς ἔρωτος, τίς ποτ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἁ πατρὶς ᾖν; ρευτὴς τίς δέ νιν τίκτει, τίς ἔθρεψεν, ἀνδρῶν ἢ θεῶν; πότερ᾽ αὐτὸν καρδίας ἢ κεφαλᾶς ἐτήτυμον εἴπω τὸν καὶ πάλαι ὡς ἐπιστρωφῶντα μᾶλλον τόπον ; οὐ γάρ, οὐκ ἔχω πᾶ τάδε θεὶς δὴ τύχοιμ᾽ ἄν. ἀντιοτροφή. χορευτής β'] τὸν ἔρωτ᾽ ἆρ' οὐχ ἑλικοβλεφάροις ἆρ᾽ ῳς ἐν ὀφθαλμοῖσι τραφέντ᾽ ἀκούεις ταῖδα μέν, συνέφαβον δ᾽ ἱμέρου καὶ χάριτος τέως νεοθαλοῦς τηλαυγέσιν ἐν πρόσωπον τοῖς θεάτροις τέλος ἐκπεσόντα φροῦδον, θανάτῳ φροῦδον ἔρρειν; ἐπῳδός. κορυφαῖος] φροῦδος ἔρως, φροῦδος ἡμῖν. ἡμιχόριον α] ἀλλ᾽ αἴλινον αἴλινον εἴπωμεν, ἄνδρες. ἡμιχόριον β] αἴλινον γὰρ αἴλινον εἴπωμεν. χορός] αἰαῖ, φροῦδος ἔρως τὸ λοιπόν, φροῦδος ἡμῖν ἔρως.
3. John Stevens has collected Hopkins's extant music, including notation where available p.466-497 of The Journals And Papers Of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Graham, 1959). The only other surviving Greek setting is Gregorian chant to Pindar's Olympian 2. I tried transcribing this from 'moveable Do' into A major with one beat per punctum as is usual with chant but this struck me as obviously wrong, so I tried again, approximating the clustering in the original, especially in the descending passage (climacus). The result seems more how I would imagine, but I might be way off.
Pindar Olympian 2, Music Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Re: Sappho Fragment 1

Post by seanjonesbw »

I have stumbled across another setting of Sappho 1 - this time in Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece (2018) by T. Phillips and A. D'Angour (eds).

Our old friend the heptachord makes an appearance. In the chapter in which this appears, John C. Franklin argues that the seven-string lyre had 'epicentric tonality' i.e. the middle string (μέση) was tuned first and all the other strings were tuned to it. The tuning was a conjunct heptachord. In this example, A on the staff would be the μέση and is the 'default' tone.

I played this on the piano and it has quite a melancholy effect which is, surprisingly, not a million miles from Hopkins's version, especially the πότνια θῦμον at the end.

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