The Sappho Companion
Margaret Reynolds Chatto & Windus, 422pp, £25
ISBN 0701165863
Sappho intrigues us, and has done for the past two and a half thousand years. She intrigues us with her ambiguous sexuality. She intrigues us with her illusive life. Most of all, she intrigues us with the tantalising scraps of her poetry that have survived. As Margaret Reynolds says at the outset of The Sappho Companion, "we know very little about her poetry, hardly anything about her life, not much more about her society, nothing to speak of about her character, and nothing whatsoever about her personal appearance". What fills the pages of this substantial volume, then, is what successive generations of writers, poets and scholars have done with the idea of Sappho and the few clues that have survived her.
Born on the Greek island of Lesbos in about 630BC, Sappho wrote, loved, married, bore a child and died. That is about all that can be said with confidence about the historical woman, yet she has scarcely been out of the public eye since and, at various times, has achieved something near to cult status. Although none of Sappho's work was written down during her lifetime, she was con-sidered one of the great lyric poets by the third century BC. Plato acclaimed her as the tenth muse. He is said to have died with a copy of her verse under his pillow. In the ancient library at Alexandria, Sappho's poetry filled nine books and ran to thousands of lines; a few hundred years later, all that survived of these nine books were some shreds of verse, numbered as crudely as bits of forensic evidence in some macabre courtroom drama: Fragment 1 through to Fragment 213.
Sappho, as Reynolds makes clear, is both a rich mine and a black hole, "a space for filling the gaps, joining up the dots, making something out of nothing". Seldom has so large and enduring a reputation been built upon so little. Reynolds stresses the subjective quality of any "knowledge" about this most elusive and, to some extent, illusory of poets. She raises important questions about the translatability of Sappho, and shows how all translations - whether literal transcriptions by Greek scholars or literary approximations by other poets - turn her into a product of that writer's own time. John Donne's Sappho is an artful seducer, playing with the conceits of love. Christine de Pisan's Sappho is a prim intellectual. Byron's is a sensual libertine. When Reynolds broadens her scope to include artists, historians, theologians and literary cliques, she convincingly shows the extent to which Sappho, or rather the idea of her, has served as a cipher for prevailing attitudes about women - revered, vilified, demonised and politicised over the centuries.
"Your songs are with us still, your immortal daughters," wrote Dioscorides of Sappho's poetry in the third century BC, and so it has proved. No shortage of writers have feasted on Sappho's poetic crumbs, from Ovid to Pope to Sylvia Plath. Reynolds includes many of them in this Companion, some beautiful in their own right, such as Mary Bar-nard's extraordinary translation of Fragment 37: "Pain penetrates/Me drop/by drop."
Reynolds has gathered together an enormous wealth of information about Sappho, and her book is a fascinating guide to a slippery subject. But the book has a serious and central flaw: it cannot make up its mind whether to be a scholarly tome for classicists or an introduction for the intelligent lay person. Frostily proper in some places, lazily chatty in others, it tries to be all things to all readers, and ends up frustrating at least as much as it pleases. I am not at all convinced by (and cannot see the point of) Reynolds's claim that Sappho inspired Diana Ross's "Where Did Our Love Go?", still less Madonna's "Like a Virgin". This smacks of gratuitous dumbing down.
More seriously problematic is the organisation of the book into slabs of commentary, followed by slabs of quotations, rather than integrating the two. The effect is a weird hybrid of anthology and monograph, which is unnecessarily awkward and frustrating to read. As for the illustrations, someone at Chatto &Windus should be shot at dawn for not stretching the budget to include colour plates - the text shrieks out for them.
At the end of the 19th century, Sappho-philes got an unexpected bonus. Egyptian farmers ploughing their fields in Oxy-rhynchus started turning up bits of papyrus. They had stumbled upon a 2,000-year-old rubbish dump, and buried amid the detritus were tiny pieces of poetry by the tenth muse herself. It was Tony Harrison, in his 1990 verse play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, who gave the discovery the requisite comic twist: "Bits of Sappho, Sophocles and Plato/used as compost for the carrot and potato!"
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