CLASSICS REViSITED-XVIII

SapphoPoet and Legend

By KENNETH REXROTH gold," "far whiter than an egg," "neither honey nor the bee"? The two Edwardian poetesses who wrote under the name of Michael Field expanded many of Sappho's fragments into poems of great poignancy. The best was taken from a scholiast's commentary on a line of Pindar's, where the reference to Sappho is in indirect discourse, "Yea, gold is son of Zeus, no rust/ Its timeless light can stain;/ The worm that brings man's flesh to dust/ Assaults its strength in vain./ More gold than gold the love I sing,/ A hard, inviolable thing." Does the original justify this enraptured response? It has been difficult to come at Sappho with the Greek. Nineteenth-century England swarmed with mediocre academicians and country clergymen, all in a conspiracy to prove to those without the tongues that Western civilization was founded by tenth-rate minds who wrote atrocious doggerel. Translations of Sappho, until recent years, have been fantastically inappropriate. Catullus, with Baudelaire and Tu Fu, in all the world's literature most nearly approach Sappho's special virtues. Catullus's translation of her lessens her intensity. Today a sufficient number of literal translations by modern poets may enable the reader of English to measure Sappho as we do distant stars by triangulation from more mundane objects. It then becomes apparent that we are not deluding ourselves. There has been no other poet like this. Wherever enough words remain to form a coherent context they give each other a unique luster, an efi^ulgence found nowhere else. Presentational immediacy of the image, urgency of personal involvementin no other poet are these raised to so great a power. Both the ancient legend of a romantic, tempestuous life and the Victorian one that portrayed her as a schoolmistress of an academy for brides were constructed from her poems. We know nothing surely except the poetry, which, on the face of it, is the passionate utterance of a woman whose life was spent as lover and guide to a small circle of younger girls. There is no evidence that this was an institutional relationship, like the thiasos, the dancing school, of her friend Alkaios. He is obviously a doting professional teacher of chorus girls: Sappho's relationships are as obviously openly erotic. Passionate love is the very substance of Sappho. In ancient Greece as in China, the love between men and women was of a totally different character where it

INCE THEY BEGAN in the early days of the popular education movement in nineteenth-century Britain, five-foot shelves, world classics, hundred best books have hardly ever included poetry as such, and drama and epic have been distinguished for the trashiness of their translations, because these collections are all programmatic "the great ideas that have influenced the progress of mankind." I doubt if works of art as such do any such thing, yet no one would dare give his selections so vulgar and unimproving a label as "One Hundred Books That Have Thrilled the Ages." So we have a large collection of Aristotle's lecture notes on politics and ethics, and we have only fragments of Sappho's poems. The greatest Greek writers, read in Greek, seem hypersensitive to us and possessed of a higher irritability in the medical sense; among us this is considered a morbid condition, because it has been cultivated excessively or pretended to by modern decadents. There is no reason why it should not be thought of as quite the oppositea symptom of superabundant health. Sappho is as exquisitely sensitive to objective reality as to her own subjectivity and she organizes the poignancies of these interlocked realities with consummate taste. Since we have only fragments of Sappho the size of Japanese poems, one short complete poem, and single words or phrases quoted by grammarians to illustrate the Aeolic dialect, is it possible that we delude ourselves with the Sapphic legend? If attention is focused sharply on anything whatever from which we expect esthetic satisfaction, a process takes place similar to the raptures of nature mysticism. Our own hyperesthesia is exacerbated; we become hypnotized; the object of contemplation, like a crystal ball, acquires a significance with unlimited ramifications. Is this what we do with the shards and ruins we call Sappho? . . . about the cool water the wind sounds through sprays of apple, and from the quivering leaves slumber pours down . . . . is, just as it is, a most impressive poeiri. Whatever its original context, it is as moving as any similar poem in classic Japanese. How about "more gold than SR/November 27, 1965

existed at all, and seldom passionate. In most Greek poetry, however noble or erotic, relations between the sexes are institutionalized, whether Alkestis or the prostitutes of Paulos Silentiarios. Romantic love with its destructive potential is found only between members of the same sex. Sappho's poetry is not only intimate, it is secular. Myth hardly exists and is never the cohesive cement of institutions as it is in Pindar's lyric odes, which are hieratic, hierarchic, and impersonal. The idylls of Theokritos are court poetry, like the eighteenth-century French rococo poets who imitated him. Behind the flirtations of his deodorized shepherds and shepherdesses we always hear time's winged chariot hurrying near, loaded with marriage contracts arranged by treaty between warring dynasties. So Kallimachos was an Alexandrian Voltaire, one of a committee to construct the synthetic religion of Serapis for an atheist court. His one intimate poem is to a man. Erotic love returns in the Greek Anthology with lateborn Levantines like Meleager and Isaurians with Hittite blood from the Anatolian highlands. Except for them, and a few passages in the choruses of Euripides, what we consider the proper subject for lyric poetry does not exist in Greek verse outside the fragments of Sappho and one tiny bit by the similar Erinna. Central to the understanding of Sappho, as of Plato, is her sexuality. Critics down the ages have exerted themselves to deny this, most especially when they shared it. To judge by primitive song, legend, and epic, romantic love has commonly existed between members of the same sex, and seldom in the institutionalized relations between men and women until those institutions pass through formalization to etherialization, as in the court circle of The Tale of Genii. Although women in Lesbos were more free than in Athens or Sparta, they were far from free in our sense. Sappho's poetry reveals the intensity of the hidden fife of ancient Greek women. The curtain is raised for a moment and we see into purdah. For the rest, history and literature are silent. 27

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In the Human Interest

HE PRESIDENT of the United States and all the other heads of government have one thing in common: all have taken an oath of office to defend the national interest. This is their cupreme responsibility. If all of themor even a small number of them should succeed in carrying out that responsibility, the result would be a world nuclear war. When President Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear explosives, and when he further authorized the manufacture and stockpiling of hydrogen bombs, he did so for what he conceived to be the best interests of the United States. When Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union proceeded with the development and stockpiling of their own nuclear weapons, they did so as a matter of stark national interest. When Mao Tse-tung decided to commit vast sums and resources to atomic weapons, he did so in behalf of the interests of Communist China. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia, President Castelo Branco of Brazil, President Arturo lllia of Argentina, and Chancellor Ludwig Erhard of Germanyall these are among the chiefs of state who would like to have nuclear weapons in order to uphold the vital interests of their nations. It is likely that they and others will attain that objective within a few years. When they do, the sum total of their achievement will represent the most fiendishly precarious situation ever experienced by the human race as a whole.
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For the existence of nuclear stockpiles and the means of instant delivery in a dozen or more nations will convert this planet into an arena of total dread. What has happened is that the national interest and the human interest have come into clear conflict. The nations cannot do what they were created to do without jeopardizing human life as a whole. When President Johnson a few weeks ago directed the United States Air Force to proceed with the development of a manned orbital laboratory, and then the Soviet Union followed with an equivalent announcement, there was no difference in principle between this decision and decisions of a century ago to fortify coastal cities by building forts with long-range cannons. What is different is that contemporary instruments of warfare, if used, would become engines of national and world suicide. The same is true of national disputes and ambitions. If the government of Rhodesia acts in what it conceives to be its own best interests, the result is prejudicial to the interests of most Africans. Communist China conceives the political complexion of Southeast Asia to be a matter of its highest national interest. So does the United States. All the major nations have marked out their own spheres of vital interest. The significant thing about these spheres is that no one has devised a way of getting the major nations to agree to avoid overlapping. The attempt to hold spheres of interest, or to maintain a balance of power, however essential and justifiable to the na-

tions involved, does not necessarily contribute to the peace of the whole. Meanwhile, nothing is more characteristic of the states or the nature of the human predicament today than the fact that not a single nation has put forward a plan for world peace. The nations, like the human race, will not be able to survive without such a plan, but this is not what has been preoccupying the nations. The nations are preoccupied with their historical concerns: national defense, national aspirations, national pride, national interest. It is not surprising that this should be so. This is the nature of absolute sovereignty. What is surprising and deplorable is that the people whom the nations are supposed to protect do not adequately realize that absolute sovereignty, far from being a source of protection, is a threat today both to their safety and to their freedoms. Freedom cannot exist without law. Law cannot exist without a form of its own, without enforcement mechanisms, without direct access to violators. Nowhere is law more necessary than among nations. Nowhere is it less in evidence. The ideological conflicts in the world could be resolved today but that by itself would not create peace. Armaments could be reduced but that by itself would not create peace. Agreements to advance the cause of international cooperation could be concluded but that by itself would not create peace. If there is to be genuine peace, the nations will have to come within a structure sturdv enough to replace the present anarchv with enforceable law. The wonder is not that the world since 194.5 has been pockmarked by wars in Indonesia, Korea, Suez, the Congo, Southeast Asia, and a dozen other places. The wonder is that, considering the general condition of anarch' among nations, the main centers of ci\ilization are still standing. To the extent that the United Nations has been permitted to function it has represented the vital difference. Of all the collective instruments fashioned by man for his security, the U.N. comes closest to possessing genuine relevance. But it has been impoverished by the nations it was created to serve; it has been subordinated to the individual foreign policies it was set up to transcend. The U.N. is the proper place for the defense and pursuit of the human interest. It is the logical center for the development of a philosophy of survival. With such a philosophy, it will be natural and right to require that the chiefs of state be given the specific responsibility for upholding the human interest as well as their national interests. World peace will not be achieved by drift or default. The goal must be defined, the approaches must be accepted, the responsibilities must be fixed. N.C. SR/November 27, 1965

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