What We Know of Sappho

Re:What We Know of Sappho by Jun8 on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @10:10AM (#25359238)

Analyzing her "Midnight Poem" is a favorite pastime, there has been attempts by astronomers to pinpoint the date of this night, the latest I know is a paper from 2016 (https://dhayton.haverford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Sap...). From this paper, here's the poem in Ancient Greek and three translations:

    ἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
    καὶ πληΐαδες μέσαι δε 
    νύκτες, πα ὰ δ‘ ἔ χετ‘ ὤ α, 
    ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω

    The Moon hath left the sky; 
    Lost is the Pleiads‘ light;
    It is midnight
    And time slips by;
    But on my couch alone I lie. 
    (Symonds, 1873–1876).

    The moon has set, and the Pleiades;
    it is midnight,
    the time is going by, 
    and I sleep alone. 
    (Wharton, 1887: 68).

    The silver moon is set;
    The Pleiades are gone;
    Half the long night is spent, and yet 
    I lie alone.
    (Merivale, 1838: 226).

There has been criticism on the methodology used, e.g. (https://rogueclassicism.com/2016/05/16/problems-with-the-sci...). A good collection of her poems with modern translations is (https://www.amazon.com/If-Not-Winter-Fragments-Sappho/dp/037...)

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by Rebelgecko on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @05:47PM (#25366423)

It's amusing to me to see the parallels between the analyses of Sappho's poems and the analyses of Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day"[1]

Both start out with the assumption that the events actually happened literally and exactly as they were narrated, and that the narrator isn't taking any poetic license with the chronology.

Then the authors bend or ignore certain facts to build their narrative (whether it's "we're gonna skip the details about the moon" or "we're gonna ignore the details about what was on TV because maybe Mr. Cube was watching reruns or an old VHS tape")

Then you have the counter-analysis where people vehemently decry the flaws of the initial analysis and assume that the original work was done by idiots who are overanalyzing the artistry, then a classic internet flame war develops and nothing is accomplished.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Was_a_Good_Day#Date_of_th...

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by adrian_b on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @05:46PM (#25366402)

The criticism from (https://dhayton.haverford.edu/blog/2016/05/20/astronomers-do...) is mostly correct, so that paper is mostly bogus. Only the season of the year can be deduced from the poem and that was established by a much older paper.

There is only one point in this criticism that is not valid, there is no doubt that the Pleiades referred to the same group of stars as now.

Nevertheless, when dealing with Ancient Greek or Latin texts it is necessary to be aware that a very large number of names used for animals, plants, minerals, places and so on, were used with a very different meaning than today, so Darin Hayton had good reasons to be cautious in his criticism.

Unless one is careful to make extensive searches through the literature, it is very easy to reach wrong conclusions based on misunderstood names.

For example the poems of Hesiod have several references to "adamant", i.e. "diamond" in English, which are hard to understand by those who think that he referred to what is now called diamond.

In fact, Hesiod used the name "adamant" for nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy (collected from alluvial deposits of gold), so he appropriately mentioned it as grey material suitable for making a hard blade for a sickle that will cut anything.

Later Greek authors, like Plato used it with the same meaning as Hesiod. Pliny the Elder was the first author that mentioned the modern diamond, under the name "Indian adamant", together with the previously known osmium-iridium "adamant".

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by YeGoblynQueenne on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @02:40PM (#25363467)

>> πα ὰ δ‘ ἔ χετ‘ ὤ α,

I can't make head or tails of this. Anyone have any idea what words are those?

Edit: I mean, it looks to me like we're missing some ρ's, say "παρά δ' ἔρχετ‘ ὤρα", as in "ώρα παρέρχεται" or something like that.

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by Zickzack on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @03:02PM (#25363874)

The first line misses a delta as well: δἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα

The poem is beautiful and the translations do its sophisticated simplicity no justice.

Thanks to the OP, by the way, for the astronomical article. I have tried to date the poem as well. And the imagery of the Nebra sky disk made me try even harder.

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by YeGoblynQueenne on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @03:13PM (#25364083)

Oh, I missed that- good catch.

I was reading the blogpost linked by OP criticising the coverage of the paper (https://rogueclassicism.com/2016/05/16/problems-with-the-sci...) and it has an image of the poem as it's cited in the paper. Indeed, it says "δέδυκε" and "παρά δ' ἔρχετ‘ ὤρα".

I suspect someone tried to copy the poem from the original paper and left behind a few characters, because LaTex. Or in any case some kind of transcription error occurred and nobody noticed because, well, ancient Greek.

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Re:What We Know of Sappho by Jun8 on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @05:31PM (#25366223)

Good catch and thanks for posting the correct text. While copying from the article in haste I didn't notice that some letters didn't come through.

The language is tricky since Attic is only covered in introductory courses and this has sone non-Attic forms. For those of you who want to have a go in trying you hand at your own translation here are some short but useful notes (http://aoidoi.org/poets/sappho/sap-2.html). I had an earlier version of these notes that were longer, i.e. he pointed out the tmesis in Line 3.

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