February 8 - 15, 1 9 9 6
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Poetic license

Although most of her works have been lost, and the poems that survive are mere fragments, Sappho has exerted a maternal influence on poets throughout history. Her love poems are the touchstone of modern erotic poetry. Transcribed on papyrus and potsherds, her lyrics captivated the ancient world; they've been translated by everyone from Ovid and Catullus, during Rome's heyday, to Baudelaire and Swinburne, to Beat patriarch Ed Sanders. Here, an eclectic group of poets pay their respects:

Olga Broumas

An expatriate Greek poet, she includes among her many books the Yale Younger Poets Series winner Beginning with O and her 1994 collaboration with T. Begley, Sappho's Gymnasium. That book, she says, was part of a homage to Sappho's practice of working with a whole school of poets, drawing from an "indivisible ego."

"I work exclusively in that mode now . . . Sappho wrote in a time when the primary deity was female, when women were not `other.' She saw herself in God's image. She's at home in her emotions and makes no apologies . . . We don't have many voices, especially lyric ones -- almost everything has been passed down by male writers. But Sappho's voice is truly native. I aspire to that nativity of voice -- my paradigm in all of my writing life.

"Her guiding principle was how to pass through difficult subjects without giving in to lament. There's a legend that her last words, from her deathbed, to her daughter Cleis, were: `Must I remind you, Cleis, that tears are unbecoming to a house of poets, and they are not suitable in ours.' "

Sam Hamill

The author of more than 30 books of poetry, essays, and translations, Hamill is publisher and editor-in-chief at Copper Canyon Press.

Sappho's importance, he stresses, is at once erotic, sacred, and musical: "Sappho stands alone at the headwaters of a great literary tradition. Besides her intense eroticism, she is the inventor of the mixolydian mode, a diatonic scale corresponding to our G minor, which eventually became the foundation of the `heavenly music' of the Christian liturgy."

Rosanna Warren

Professor of comparative literature at Boston University, author of two acclaimed books of poetry, Warren had her translation of Euripides's The Suppliants released last year by Oxford University Press. She contributes these thoughts from her essay "Sappho: Translation As Elegy."

"Sappho has imposed herself as the exemplary sublime poet, with a halo of primacy for the lyric akin to that of Homer for the epic. She was known in the Palatine Anthology as the Tenth Muse, and comes down to us as a kind of mother goddess of poetry . . . [The] survival of her texts in quoted snippets and in the papyri of grave wrappings" evokes "the power of these mutilated poems stripped from mummies but still casting erotic spells."

Tuli Kupferberg

Beat generation elder, Fugs founding member, poet, radical scholar, cartoonist and the wildest anarchist who ever put on a pair of shoes, Kupferberg comments, "It's all in the translation!" (He prefers Willis Barnstone's versions of Sappho.) In homage to the great mother bard, this maestro of the limerick offers the following inimitable Kupferberg original:

Oh Sappho loved the ladies,
although her husband said,
"you'll go straight to Hades!"
She said, "Soak your head."

& Sappho loved her daughter
She loved her boyfriend too,
"& if you ever make me choose:
watch out or I'll fuck you!"

Ed Sanders

Poet, classics scholar, and Beat patriarch, Sanders was also a founder of the legendary '60s New York dada band the Fugs. His books include Tales of Beatnik Glory, Hymn to the Rebel Cafe, the American Book Award-winning Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, and last year's Chekhov, a biography in verse of the Russian literary giant. His interest in Sappho, at this point, is "mostly political." Musing on what might have happened to Sappho's lost works, he remarks, "I've always thought the pope had all that, in the Vatican library."

To close with an approximation of Sappho's own words, here is Sanders's translation of one of her most famous fragments, the one beginning "Phainetai Moi":

Equal to the gods
is the man who sits
in front of you leaning closely
and hears you sweetly speaking
and the lust-licking laughter
of your mouth, oh it makes my
heart beat in flutters!

When I look at you
Brochea, not a part of my
voice comes out,
but my tongue breaks,
and right away
a delicate fire runs just beneath
my skin.

I see a dizzy nothing,
my ears ring with noise,
the sweat runs down
upon me, and a trembling
that I can not stop
seizes me limb and loin,
oh I am greener than grass, and
death seems so near . . .

-- Catherine A. Salmons

Sam Hamill reads from his works this Tuesday, February 13, at 5 p.m. at Brandeis University; call 736-2000. March 1 marks the opening, at Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, of a group exhibit featuring Tuli Kupferberg's cartoons and artwork.