by Eurydice (c) 1999

About SAPPHANALIA

(SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SAPPHO)

This book is part travelogue:
    It is a record of my travels through the Aegean island of Lesbos (Mytilene), and to a lesser degree through Sicily (where Sappho was exiled in her 30s for a number of years by the tyrant Pittakus, a Napoleonic reformer whose innovations she fought). On Lesbos I visit the places where she lived and worked, talk to the fishermen, villagers, peasants, few (queer) tourists and let their offers of hospitality and folk wisdom and our interactions bring forth memorable and fitting anecdotes along with my observations of local life, light, colour. It is a picturesque, unmodernized, olive-growing isle known for its fun-loving, peaceful, artistic people, and has separate dialect, recipes, superstitions and traditions than the rest of modern Greece, many of them unchanged since Sappho's day. In Sicily I tour the remote area known in antiquity as "the Greater Greece" (once a thriving colony, a place now known as "having been forgotten by God") where the locals still speak a dialect much closer to ancient Greek than Italian and follow customs that have been little affected by the past two millennia. Again I stay in their homes and let impromptu adventures and conversations and feasts steer my narrative, always with an object to link the distant past with the living present and learn from the contrasts and the connections. Finally, I am told a lot of wild tales and fierce opinions about Sappho en locale.
     Part historical research:
Sappho was a 6th century BC lyrist so unparalleled even Plato who didn't like poets called her "the Tenth Muse" centuries after her death, and her contemporary tyrant-lawgiver of Athens Solon refused to die before learning some of her songs; the only woman whose work impressed alike her contemporaries, and later generations of ancient Greeks and Romans, and continues to impress modern readers and critics alike, the most famous woman?famous the longest time and in the most diverse ways?in Western culture (and all this based on two nearly intact poems and two dozen fragments). She was born in sister of a disappointing brother who abandoned his duty for the charms of a famous Egyptian princess/concubine,  She was the wife of a rich merchant, mother of a pretty daughter, Kleis, mistress-companion of the poet Alkaios, a bluestocking, a political conspirator, an academy headmistress. She was reputed to be a great beauty, or short, dark, and ugly. Her life story comes to us second-hand, except for what we can cull from her surviving poems, if we assume the "I" in them to be autobiographical. She was said to be a pervert, a hetaira, a protofeminist, a mystic, a writer of cultish hymns, an avatar of Yellow Book neodiabolism, an endless source of sensational gossip for scandalmongers through the millennia.   
     Part literary exploration:
     Her work partly suffered because it was written in the Aeolian dialect which became obscure when Attic Greek triumphed (around the time ancient texts were transcribed from scrolls to books). The first official collection of her work dates to more than 3 centuries after her death, and it was collected by two great scholars of Alexandria in the end of 3rd-beginning of 2nd century B.C. in nine books arranged according to meter, the first of which books contained 1,320 verses; so apparently her poetic output was substantial. (By comparison, any current translation of her work, including all surviving fragments, however brief, torn, or interrupted, contains around 500 verses.) That collection was destroyed in the fire that ruined the library of Alexandria. And because of her alleged sexual depravity, the poet Plato called the 'Tenth Muse' was the first ancient writer to be demonized by the Church Fathers; they meticulously destroyed her work. There are indications that Byzantine scholars in the 10th and 11th centuries had access to her works, but those secreted texts perished in the flames when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204. Until the 1890s all that survived of her poetry was one complete poem quoted by the critic Dionysus of Halicarnassus. But the sands of Egypt have been generous, and papyruses are still being found (the last substantial chunk was unearthed in the late 30s), and there is always the possibility of a massive new discovery. Her work inspired and influenced the best poets through the ages, and many praised her verse in telling ways. Longinus, in his famous treatise De Sublimitate, pointed to her marshaling of sharp poignant details, rather than to the melody of her verse, as the secret of her eloquence. Some have called it anti-poetry: the discarding of gauds and ornamental tropes for the stripped hard truth. Others have insisted it is the practice of beauty that characterizes Sappho of Lesbos.
     Part social/ethical commentary:
Sappho's story is unique in containing a plethora of themes: the position of women in ancient society, and later in Christianity, which continues to color our life today; the treatment of male and female homosexuality in classical Greece and later greco-influenced cultures; the semantics of Lesbian vs. lesbian which have lasted till now and prove how much we are still informed by ancient Greek (male) thought. I discuss the derision of sapphism which began with the 4th century BC Athenian comedy writers (Aristophanes et al) and continued through two millennia.
     I point out the use of mythology in daily life and in art, the topics of familial love, romantic love, social love, that characterize Sappho's existing poems. I compare the various translations of her work (the intricacies and impasses of translation are of interest because Sappho's work, unlike any other in antiquity, is direct, stripped of stylized ornament, polemical and yet intimate), and I link her poems into my text as a continuous component of the narrative and indirect commentary on it. Throughout, I use fictional techniques (consistency of characters and voice, as well as a sense of exposition-climax-denouement) to construct the vignettes into an organic whole.
     Part autobiography:
     My father is a Lesbian. My mother is a Lesbian. So are my grandparents, uncles and aunts from both sides. I was born, unexpectedly, on the shore where Sappho jumped off the (still existing) cliff to her death, allegedly out of her unrequited love for a fisherman named Phanes, who may have been a mortal incarnation of the first of the Greek Gods (who fathered the Olympians). I have been told, quite straight-facedly, that I look like her. I don't use my last name, in homage to Sappho and in reference to my ancient mythopoeic inheritance which strongly influences my work and my worldview. Like Sappho's, my family has many ancestral lands on Lesbos and though they are rarely visited, they play a major role in my heritage and my sense of who I am in the world at all times, in the most profound level. I have powerful memories from summers spent on those family grounds, which I reaccess during my present-tense travelogue. My first lover, to whom I lost the all-important maidenhead, was named Phanes. My greatest passion was for a woman who died. So Sappho's story, as I unravel it, changes me in unpredictable ways and shutters or foregrounds fears or preconceptions or instincts I nurse. It is an intensely exciting and personally rewarding project, partly because for the first time I'm able to milk both my cultural heritages and bridge my two Ithacas (America and Greece) in my work; and partly because it distinctly pursues the twofold central theme (sexuality and womanhood) that is the continuous focus of all my work, in genres I haven't undertaken before.