Sappho Translated by Dan Beachy-Quick Review by Maxima Kahn

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Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho

Translated by Dan Beachy-Quick

Review by Maxima Kahn

Tupelo Press, June 2023

238 pages / $21.95

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Ordering the Cosmos: Review of Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho

“These are the songs she sang.”

With this line, Dan Beachy-Quick begins the introduction to his new translation of the surviving poems and fragments of Sappho. He goes on to illuminate the way that “Sappho teaches us that an ankle glimpsed beneath the hem of a dress is a cosmological fact as central to the work of the world as are the dangling lights of stars, those earrings in the vast dark.” Hasn’t that always been a special gift of women artists, to point to the small wonders and wrenching losses, the daily beauties and cruelties, the personal glories and frustrations, and exclaim that these bear as much weight as the lofty philosophizing of men? Hasn’t this been the province of poets of every gender? But it was feminism that reminded us that the personal is political; personal experience is inextricably informed by the political situations in which a woman finds herself. Sappho might have argued that what happens at home and in our hearts is as important and vital as what happens in our nations and institutions. In Beachy-Quick’s introduction, we learn that in ancient Greek, the word cosmos means world-order, universe, stars, but also adornment and praise. Sappho is fundamentally a poet of praise and a profoundly intimate writer, as we discover in Beachy-Quick’s Wind—Mountain—Oak: The Poems of Sappho.

Originally, Sappho’s poems were songs, played to the accompaniment of a lyre. Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker compares Sappho’s popularity in her day to Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. She was a singer-songwriter, though her melodies are lost to us as are most of what she wrote, yet these fragments still sing on the page. Sappho is credited as being the progenitor of lyric poetry—a deeply personal and musical art in contrast to the epic poetry also popular in her day. Plato called her “The Tenth Muse.” Her face was printed on coins, such was her power and renown throughout antiquity. Sadly, the fires of Alexandria claimed Sappho’s poems. Of the nine books she wrote, Beachy-Quick tells us, “We now have only a few complete poems; torn fragments of others; and of others, a few words, or one word, is all that remains.” But what he makes of these is a kind of beautiful epic. Beachy-Quick writes:

“If a voice can be thought of as a ritual, a life can be considered an epic—and I wanted to offer an ordering of these poems that give some sense of that epic journey any given life is, one that leaves us as it leaves most heroes, limping on a wounded foot. There is a motion [to] how the poems move from first to last, from wondrous recognition of the world, through erotic entanglement, to the sanctity of human bonding, to religion, to morals, to age that threatens to tear apart the sanctities we have clung to, and then to death itself, which might teach us—as Sappho hints—to see ourselves as no more than we are.”

Beachy-Quick has woven the fragments artfully into what reads like a single poem that is tender, lyrical, and winds like a labyrinth, drawing the reader ever inward—in circuitous loops—to the living core. This arrangement could be compared to a flip book, where readers can pause on any image as well as enjoy the succession of frames blurring into one moving picture. Though so little remains of Sappho’s writings, poetry lovers cannot seem to get enough of the few extant drops of her strangely compelling, bittersweet wine. Is it the pleasure of a secret whispered but not wholly heard, a treasure map whose lines are smudged but the promise of treasure still beckons? In his arrangement, Beachy-Quick draws out the compelling magic in a single line remaining in a poem otherwise lost to time: “a door of carved wood” or “…and longingly I long and searchingly I search….”

Some of her fragments read like erasure poems, a form that has become a recognized art in our current age of fragmentation. In the erasure poem, most of the original source text is erased, leaving only a few visible words, which form the new poem. Often these erasures feel like the revelation of essential truths and offer such ironic pleasures as this fragment of Sappho’s:

         we live

         opposite

         reckless

         men

We have no idea which words originally stood between these that remain, but we do know that Sappho wrote in long lines. So, much is missing in this fragment above, yet what lingers here on the page reads like a complete thought.

Sappho wrote intensely personal poetry; many friends, lovers, rivals, and family members are mentioned, as well as gods and goddesses of ancient Greece. At the start of the collection, Beachy-Quick gives us a helpful guide to the personae and a captivating note on the translation. “There are depths within the denotative life of Greek words that English seldom allows readers in translation to access,” he tells us. “At some basic level, I wanted to offer a translation that traced out some of those complexities into an apprehendable substance in the poems themselves….” He explains that he has departed from the usual orderings of the poems and instead “clustered them into groups that seem to loosely trace the entirety of life, from childhood to older age, from the birth of desire to the fear of no longer being desirable.”

Beachy-Quick’s translation is both contemporary and timeless. He captures the pulses of Sappho’s anguish and desire in the neologisms he creates by combining words and in stuttering, comma-laden phrases. Here is the beginning of Sappho’s famous hymn to Aphrodite:

Deepthroned darkcarved wood deathless Aphrodite,

wileweaving child of Zeus, I beg, I pray to you

don’t hurt me, my thought, let grief never seduce,

         Queen, my shardscared heart

At the end of this poem comes the beautiful plea:

…Come to me now again, save my mind

scathing in thought, win the warloud din of my heart’s

endless desire, end it. Now greaves, not grief. You

         be my battlemate.

Sappho’s  relatability across millennia is due to the immediacy and skillfulness with which she describes so many aspects of the human predicament; “I don’t know where I go// my mind is two minds.” In her pithy wisdom and acute perception, Sappho reminds me a bit of Emily Dickinson, as in this fragment: “When in the fertile breast anger is sown,/ guard the tongue’s idle barking.” Sappho captures moods from innocence such as, “a tender girl plucking tender flowers,” to “reckless prayer” to bitter jealousy. She does so with great vulnerability and also great authority; “I say beauty/ is whatever you// love.” Consider this rendering of a poem in which she captures the undoing that love and attraction can bring:

Glimpsing you but for a second unvoices me,

         speech impossible,

my tongue a boat-broken wave, some fire’s thin husk

burns its fine edge beneath my skin, as if blind,

my open eyes see nothing, some hum, some buzz,

         is all I can hear

Sappho beautifully details the agony of love as the great poet loses her voice in the presence of the beloved, her skin burns with desire, and her head spins.

Beachy-Quick has brought his knowledge of ancient Greek, his love of the Classics, his adventurous spirit, and his lyrical ear to the rendering of these timeless poems. In doing so, he has given us an extraordinary vision of Sappho’s art, a gift in which Sappho springs lyrically from the page.

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Dan Beachy-Quick is an American poet, writer, and critic. He is the author of eight collections of poems, most recently, Variations on Dawn and Dusk, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry. His other collections include North True South Bright (2003); Spell (2004); Mulberry (2006), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for poetry; This Nest, Swift Passerine (2009); Circle’s Apprentice (2011); Of Silence and Song (2017); and Variations on Dawn and Dusk (2019). He is also the author of A Whaler’s Dictionary (2008), a collection of linked essays responding to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Maxima Kahn is a writer, teacher, and firekeeper. Her first full-length collection, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals, including The Louisville Review, Los Angeles Review, Wisconsin Review, Sweet, and many others, and on popular blogs such as The Creative Penn and Tiny Buddha. She has twice been nominated for Best of the Net. She is the founder of Brilliant Playground, where she teaches and blogs about artful, soulful living. She taught formerly at the University of California, Davis Extension and is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center. She is also an improvisational violinist, an award-winning composer, and a dancer. Find out more at MaximaKahn.com

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16 August 2023