THE TENTH MUSE

(This entry is placed right after The Nine Plus Three, mostly to observe the continuity of the “Muses” theme.)

I confess that I have always thought, and I think so today, that the great poetess Sappho has been greatly overrated. It is impossible for one who is not intimately familiar with the delicacies of the Greek language to judge the much acclaimed linguistic magic of the Sapphic verse. But, on the other hand, the greatness of every great poet known to us, even more ancient than she is, is never based merely on that elusive criterion alone. There are certain other elements that constitute great poetry, and we are quite capable of appreciating such poetry even in translation, where the original linguistic uniqueness is missing. The great poet Mayakovsky is perhaps the most difficult to translate into foreign languages, yet his genius can still be appreciated outside his native Russian waters…

Having said that, Sappho leaves me speechless. I am not even ashamed of confessing that her poetry has no appeal to me whatsoever, to say the least. Why should I trust an apocryphal authority, on second hand, when the first hand is suspect? Why should I trust any authority, for that matter, rather than my own philological sense? Here are just a couple of examples, allegedly, from the horse’s mouth:

“That man seems to me on a par with the gods, who sits in your company and listens to you so close to him, speaking sweetly and laughing sexily, such a thing makes my heart flutter in my breast, for when I see you even for a moment, then power to speak another word fails me, instead my tongue freezes into silence and at once a gentle fire has caught throughout my flesh, and I see nothing with my eyes, and there is a drum drumming in my ears, and sweat pours down me, and trembling seizes all of me, and I become paler than grass, and I seem to fail almost to the point of death in my very self.” (Sappho, in Lyrica Selecta Graeca.)

“...Just as the sweet-apple reddens on the high branch, high on the highest, and the apple-pickers missed it, or rather, did not miss it, but dared not reach it… [is a girl before marriage.]” (Sappho in Fragment 105-A.)

…That was nice and lyrical, but was it great, all that great?

“Sappho: floruit circa 600 BC. Little is known of her life history. Of her nine books of lyric poems, all have been lost, except one ode to Aphrodite and a few fragments. Among the ancients, she was ranked together with Homer and Archilochus. Plato in Phaedrus refers to her as The Tenth Muse.” (Quoted from Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, the 1963 edition.)

This entry should become a far-reaching essay on Sappho and on the reasons why this particular “whore” (sic!--- in Alexander Pope’s description of her) of Lesbos has become such a refined and intense symbol for Western culture, which must hardly have been on account of her Sapphic verse alone. There has to be another good reason why Sappho has become known to us, courtesy of Plato, and despite Herodotus’s unkindness to her, as “the Tenth Muse,” and is treated with such particular veneration. I could probably go so far as to support my wife’s suggestion that the cult of Sappho may boil down to the chauvinist male’s mocking denigration of women, which, of course, has been going on for millennia…

Still, I ought to examine this matter further someday…