Annual Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference, University of Leeds
Audio available
https://symbolsandmetaphors2015.wordpress.com/programme/panel-2-2-animals-and-food-as-symbols/
Abstract
Sappho is perhaps most well-known for being a symbol of lesbian erotic love. She is the reason that lesbian dropped the capital L and ceased to be merely a demonym. Semiotically, lesbian sex is the signifier for the word Sapphic, not Greek poetry. This is understandable: Sappho writes about her jealousy of girls taken away from her (fr. 51) and the shaking which grips her when she sees a beautiful woman (fr. 31). Therefore, what she has become a symbol for is unsurprising. Everyone knows that Sappho wrote about her desire for women. What this paper explores is – what if she didn’t?
I propose that in fr. 1 Sappho writes about sparrows and Aphrodite rather than her erotic desire for women. She writes about her love for nature more than she writes about the nature of her love. This is exaggerated by the early English translations of her poetry such as Ambrose Philips’s much-admired Ode to Venus from 1711, and John Addison’s and Francis Fawkes’s translations (1735, 1760). My paper highlights the significant discrepancy between the perception of Sappho as a symbol for erotic lesbian love elegy, and what those who first rendered her Aeolic Greek verse into English thought was the focus of her writing.
Through textual analysis and close-reading of these early translations properly contextualised, I propose that nearly all trace of the ‘beloved’ has been lost, in favour of depicting Aphrodite travelling down from her father Zeus’ house on her chariot drawn by sparrows. Examining these earliest English translations of Sappho’s work, I will shed light on the ways in which Sappho’s poetry and persona was received in this fundamentally formative period of her textual transmission.
Harriet Lander 