[In the following essay, Warren details the influence of translated Sapphic poetry on such writers as Catullus, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, with a principal focus on Sappho's poem known as “Phainetai moi.”]

Our dreams pursue our dead.

Swinburne, Ave atque Vale

ILLE MI PAR …

He's like a god, that man; he seems
(if this can be) to shine beyond
the gods, who nestling near you sees
          you and hears you
laughing low in your throat. It tears me
apart. For when I glimpse you,
Lesbia, look—I'm helpless:
          tongue a frozen
lump, and palest fire
pouring through all my limbs; my ears
deafened in ringing; each eye
          shuttered in night. …
You're wasting your time, Catullus,
laying waste to your life. You love it.
Whole kingdoms and blissful cities
          have wasted away, like you.

I seem to have given a misleading title, for the poem I present is not by Sappho, but by Catullus. And I revise further by pointing out that it is not “by” Catullus either, but “by” me. There may seem to be no little immodesty and downright foolishness in putting forward my own translation of Catullus' famous translation of Sappho's famous poem “Phainetai moi.”

My translation of Catullus' “Ille mi par …” occurs, with another Catullus poem in the Sapphic meter, in a volume of my own poems. But these possessive phrases become obtrusive, as indeed they ought in matters of authorship. The purpose in focusing on a translation of a translation is not to claim that the world needs yet another version of this perennially retranslated poem; nor is it to demonstrate that I have outpaced all my predecessors and found a perfect English equivalent for Catullus. Rather, I should like to offer it, impersonally, as a small instance of lyric lineage, a type or model for poetry's perpetual re-engendering of itself. It is to argue that poetry is, finally, a family matter, involving the strains of birth, love, power, death, and inheritance; and that, given such strains (in every sense), one is never “by oneself” however isolated the act of writing may appear. The so-called original poems in my book are, in their own way, translations of several lyric traditions into personal experience and idiom, and are possible only because of strenuous acts of reading, one form of which we know, conventionally, as translation. I am concerned here with the way in which the individual poet inherits poetry, or, in Eliot's formulation, is catalyzed by it; and I take translation as a specific and especially focused instance of the reception and transformation of literary tradition.

I was drawn to Catullus 51 (“Ille mi par …”) not only because it has haunted me since adolescence, not only because I am more at home in Latin than in Greek, but precisely because I was touched by the pathos of its being a translation and not “the real thing.” In Catullus' forging of a new poetry from his still rather primitive native traditions and Greek models, I recognized the situation of any poet in the strain of self-creation through confrontation with the foreign and the past, the choosing of a parentage. And that situation may be seen as an analogy for the self-creation of a whole literature which develops by exposure to the “other,” as English literature, also fairly barbaric in its early stages, has done in burst after burst, and as American literature, given its colonial inception, could not avoid doing.

The word “inheritance” implies death, grief, contest, and riches. In presenting the literary genre of elegy as a model for translation, I shall be relying on Peter Sacks's The English Elegy (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). This book traces the work of mourning from its anthropological origins on into complex literary codification. In elegy, with its association with the ritual death and rebirth of a fertility god, I see a figure for the work of translation, which involves the death, dismemberment, and (one hopes!) rebirth of a text, with relative consolation for the mourners, or readers.

Sacks's work is essential in restoring our sense of the primitive vigor, I could almost say sacred power, at the source of our inherited rituals of mourning, of elegiac writing, and, I will argue, of all writing. In recalling the rites of sacrifice and cannibalism associated with early cults of Dionysus, and the survival of such rites symbolically in ancient Greek and later funerary practice, Sacks reveals the terror and virtú latent in such an apparently artificial form as English pastoral elegy. He shows how individual loss may be integrated within larger rhythmic structures dramatized by the poem, and he provides a vision of literature as a communion perpetually renewed in the light of death. In considering Sappho and some of her progeny, I am trying to recover that visceral sense of the rite of poetry: that sense in which, as Auden said of Yeats, “the words of the dead / Are modified in the guts of the living,” and in which Pound, also translating a translation, envisioned Odysseus summoning the dead in canto 1 of the Cantos: “… A sheep to Tiresias only, black and a bellsheep. / Dark blood flowed in the fosse, / Souls out of Erebus. …”

The term “elegy” requires more than a little elucidation. The word is a rather mysterious one, with veiled origins, and auspicious dual associations with death and with love. The original Greek elegiac couplets were not necessarily associated with funerals, but were used for a wide variety of exhortation and reflection.¹ But Hellenistic grammarians derived elegos, in an imaginative etymology, from “e e legein” (to cry ‘woe, woe’).² In Euripides it is used as a song of mourning associated with the aulos, a flute whose tone was considered woeful as opposed to the barbitos, the lyre associated with lyric. In Heroides 15, Ovid has Sappho say, in elegiac couplets, “Flendus amor meus est—elegiae flebile carmen; / non facit ad lacrimas barbitos ulla meas” (ll. 7-8: My love is lamentable—a weeping song of elegy; no lyre suits my tears). “Elegy,” in that passage, is doubly anachronistic: in Ovid's time the term was used for witty amatory complaint, and in Sappho's sixth century b.c. the elegiac meter had no necessarily doleful connotation. However, there is a strong possibility that the elegos was at an earlier period specifically associated with ritual grief.³ Sacks describes the evolution of elegy through Latin love poetry into the English pastoral elegy, which reclaims some of the primitive features such as structures of repetition, myth of a vegetation god, bursts of anger and cursing, procession of mourners, detachment from the deceased, and consolation through symbolic substitution.⁴ For my purposes, which are to define a private ritual figure for translation, the perhaps fictive origin of elegy as the art associated with funerals, and thus with the death and resurrection of vegetation gods and the rechanneling of eros into song, serves beautifully. We are considering the death and resurrection of texts in a myth of literary metamorphosis whose deities are those grieving poet-lovers whose nymphs turn into the tools—or emblems—of the trade: Pan's Syrinx into the panpipes, Apollo's Daphne into the laurel. Its other deities are those vegetation figures Dionysus, Adonis, Hyacinth, who survive sacrifice to reemerge as myths of eternal song.⁵ It becomes apparent then that two senses of elegy, love and loss, can only rarely be disentangled.

We shall find our way back to Sappho through Lycidas. The death of Edward King provided Milton with an occasion to negotiate with grief—in this case a rather ceremonial grief—and, more pointedly, with the inherited genre of pastoral elegy and his own ambition and fear of death. His apparent heartlessness, or at least jauntiness, in the twitch of the mantle blue and the turn from pastoral to epic has often been noted. A poet's elegy for another poet is somehow a translation of that poet or at least of a tradition, and involves some kind of transfer of powers, perhaps aggressively asserted by the survivor. In any case, the underlying question is not that of personal survival, but of the survival of poetry. If all real poetry is, as I believe, writing in the light of death, elegy is the genre which performs most consciously in that light.

In Lycidas Milton's grief, anger, and fear crystallize appropriately around the figure of Orpheus, in classical mythology the mystic singer whose death by dismemberment could be read either as the failure of art or as its resurrection and purification.⁶ Orpheus' sparagmos and drowning in the Hebrus not only suit the fate of Edward King, but fit within Milton's cosmic pattern of drownings and ascensions of stars and the sun. Such a pattern is hinted at early in the poem when the shepherds sing undisturbed by the passage of time (“Oft till the star that rose at evening bright / Toward Heaven's descent had sloped his westering wheel”); the pattern is fulfilled at the end, in a Christian design: “So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed / And yet anon repairs his drooping head.” The final couplet astonishingly detaches the surviving poet, the uncouth swain, from the natural cycle to which the dead poet has been assimilated; yet the solar association haunts the conclusion in the ambiguous pronoun “he”: “And now the sun had stretched out all the hills, / And now was dropped into the western bay; / At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue: / Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”⁷

In a crucial turn Lycidas associates Orpheus with Sappho:

What could the Muse herself that Orpheus bore,
The Muse herself, for her inchanting son
Whom universal Nature did lament,
When by the rout that made the hideous roar,
His gory visage down the stream was sent,
Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian Shore?

(ll. 59-63)

The classical Orpheus envisaged in his humiliation emphasizes the death of Lycidas, in this phase, as horror. This Orpheus serves as anti-type to, and will give way before, “the dear might of him that walked the waves”; cut off from Christian revelation, he is an inadequate figure for resurrection. Even at this nadir, however, when the “hideous roar” of the Thracian women seems to overwhelm the “inchanting” powers of music, Milton hints at the resurrection of those powers by imagining the current of the Hebrus flowing south over a hundred miles along the coast of Asia Minor to wash Orpheus' head to the shores of Sappho's island. That “supreme head of song,” as Swinburne called her, and the possibilities of poetry she represents, are immediately challenged in Lycidas by the speaker's questions and the visions of the blind Fury. In Milton's poem Sappho remains a faint allusion. It is significant, however, that she should be glimpsed here in the context of the drowned poet who will be raised, like the “day-star,” into the morning sky, and into a familiar mythology of resurrected divinities. Sappho, too, is said to have drowned, disappointed in love, by leaping from the Leucadian Rock; as Gregory Nagy has shown,⁸ she rises, in her legend if not in Lycidas, into a similar myth of solar resurrection as Sappho/Aphrodite pursuing Phaon/Phaethon.

But why Sappho? I have been considering her as a legend, not as a poet. Indeed, it is partly as legend that she presides over the family matters I want to trace, in translation, through Catullus, Baudelaire, and Swinburne. Nagy's argument linking her to Aphrodite/Istar/Eos and a solar myth of recurrent death and rebirth—an argument so intricate as to deserve Sappho's own epithet for Aphrodite, doloplokos, weaver of wiles—derives to some degree from Sappho's invocations to the goddess, but for the most part from a fragment of Menander's Leukadia preserved by Strabo, from Ovid's Heroides 15, and from a bristling array of mythological sources. Through Menander and Ovid and earlier comic traditions, Sappho entered the Western imagination as a priestess of song and of illicit love who died by flinging herself off the white cliff at Cape Leukas for the love of the handsome ferryman Phaon. Satirically viewed in various plays of Middle Comedy, the story is one of the insufficiency of poetry, and perhaps also of the just come-uppance meted out to a woman who has spurned too long the love of men. Even the burlesque plays and Ovid's arch diagnosis, however, veil a glorious Sappho linked to ancient cults at Cape Leukas. Through “Longinus,” that is, through the treatise “De Sublimitate” to which we owe the preservation of “Phainetai moi,” Sappho has imposed herself as the exemplary sublime poet, with a halo of primacy for the lyric akin to that of Homer for 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, of whom Swinburne said, “Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived.”⁹

But again, why Sappho? Why such a legend? Why should she seem to have engendered the Western lyric, not once, but over and over again, as we see in the twentieth century's rapture over the Oxyrhynchan fragments and their shaping touch on Aldington, Pound, HD, Guy Davenport … ? We must turn to these fragments, to the poems. If the legendary Sappho rising from the sea as the evening star gives us an emblem of the translation and survival of song, the actual survival of her texts in quoted snippets and in the papyri of grave wrappings is all the more eloquent. In the idea of elegy, with its dual allusions to love and death, we can sense something of the power of these mutilated poems stripped from mummies but still casting erotic spells.¹⁰

The enchantment resides, however, not in an idea, but in her “visible song,” as Swinburne so rightly understood; supremely, in the Sapphic stanza, which burned its shape into Catullus' brain five centuries after Sappho's death, and which has shaped our desire ever since. If we consider Sappho as a myth, it must be as a myth not of love, but of form.

Phainetai moi keinos isos theoisin
emmen oner ottis enantios toi
izanei kai plasion adu phonei-
sas upakouei
kai gelaisas imeroen, to m'ei man
kardian en stethesin eptoasen;
os gar es t'ido, broke', os me phonas
ouden et' ikei
all' akan men glossa eage, lepton
d'autika kroi pur upadedromaken,
oppatessi d'oud' en oreimm', epirrom-
beisi d'akouai,
kad de m'idros psukros ekei, tromos de
paisan agrei, klorotera de poias
emmi, tethnakein d'oligo pideueis
phainomai …

It is a haunting shape. In Sappho's hands it plays release against restraint with unrivaled cunning: the poem runs from stanza to stanza like water pouring from basin to basin down a trout stream, twisting and flashing, unfurled and checked. As Charles Segal has observed, its very motion is the erotic persuasion, peitho, of which Sappho so often writes. Within each hendecasyllabic line the opening trochaic feet give way to the impulse which throbs forward in the choriamb, to be teasingly checked by the concluding bacchiac. … The halt teases because more often than not the sentence's propulsion launches us into the next line, sometimes through enjambment within a word: phonei-/sas (ll. 3-4), epirrom-/beisi (ll. 11-12). After three such hendecasyllables the adonic seems to dam up the current with its wedgelike, truncated shape and final pair of long syllables; but Sappho admits no such resolution, and spills her poem over barrier after barrier. Within this flow, the eddies of assonance and consonance complete the work of hypnotic enchantment. In its expansions and contractions this is a stanza fatally gauged to register the pulse of desire.

Can a living stream be translated? One of Sappho's finest interpreters, Swinburne, has testified:

To translate the two odes and the remaining fragments of Sappho is the one impossible task; and as witness of this I will call up one of the greatest among poets. Catullus “translated”—or as his countrymen would now say “traduced”—the ode of Anactoria—“Eis Eromenan”; a more beautiful translation there never was and will be; but compared with the Greek, it is colorless and bloodless, puffed out by additions and enfeebled by alterations. … Where Catullus failed, I could not hope to succeed.¹¹

Swinburne is here mourning the death of the original. To pursue the elegiac analogy, he has brought himself to that stage of grief which recognizes irreplaceable loss. But just as the work of mourning proceeds by rehearsal of the trauma and ritual self-mutilation to detachment from the deceased and acceptance of a symbolic substitute, so the work of translation repeats the destruction of the original, dismembers and ingests it as in the Thracian sacrifice of Orpheus or the rites of Dionysus, and finally offers its transubstantiated version as consolation for, and recognition of, loss. In the passage just quoted Swinburne was defending his free translation of Sappho in his poem “Anactoria”:

“That is not Sappho,” a friend once said to me. I could only reply, “It is as near as I can come; and no man can come close to her. … I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of hers, to express and represent not the poem but the poet. … Here and there, I need not say, I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of the effect: to bear witness how, more than any other's, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and grounds—how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves “all air and fire”; other element there is none in them.”¹²

We shall presently consider the fruits of such devotion; before that, we need to turn to her first translator, Catullus.

SAPPHO AND CATULLUS

51

Ille mi par esse deo videtur,
ille, si fas est, superare divos,
qui sedens adversus identidem te
          spectat et audit
dulce ridentem, misero quod omnis
eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi …
lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
flamma demanat, sonitu suopte
tintinant aures, gemina teguntur
          lumina nocte.
otium, Catulle, tibi molestum est:
otio exsultas nimiumque gestis:
otium et reges prius et beatas
          perdidit urbes.

Though Catullus seems to have written only two poems in the Sapphic meter, the extent of his debt to the poet of Lesbos may be judged from the name he gave to the woman he loved: Lesbia. The two Catullan Sapphic poems record stages in that affair. The translation of “Phainetai moi” can be seen either as celebrating an early, happy phase, substituting erotic rapture for Sappho's distress,¹³ or, as had been plausibly argued, as commenting ironically on the destructiveness of his love for Lesbia through allusion to supposed marriage elements in Sappho's poem.¹⁴ “Furi et Aureli,” Catullus' other Sapphic poem (Catullus 11), is a savage and lyrical farewell to the unworthy lover. However Lesbia is seen by Catullus in these poems, it is through a Sapphic lens which emphasizes, by contrast, Lesbia's Roman corruption.

This is not the occasion to pore, syllable by syllable, over the transposition from Greek to Latin; a few details will have to suggest the enterprise. Most tellingly, however, we can observe right from the start that Catullus has “lost it” (to use current parlance) with the very first word. Phainetai, from phaino (to appear), shares a root with phaos (light), and with the verb phao (to give light, to shine). The “appearance” Sappho indicates is no mere seeming or being seen, but something more on the order of our “epiphany,” an English cognate of phaino. It is used of the apparitions of deities. The man in Sappho's poem, keinos, that one, whoever he is who sits next to the beloved girl, blazes in the first stanza with a radiance reflected from Aphrodite, through the girl. It is an epiphany of Love, working upon the man and, beyond him, upon Sappho observing. We are confronted here not simply with a relative poverty in Latin and English verbs of seeming, but with an entirely different conception of the manifestation of the divine.

Another detail: Sappho's imeroen (l. 5). A long-drawn-out, caressing neuter adjective used adverbially (“and listens to you laughing enticingly”), it contains the words eros, and is charged with desire, with the dread and sacred power of love, to a degree that annihilates most dippy English substitutes and far outstrips Catullus' merely sensory dulce (sweetly). As if imeroen had not sufficient voltage, Sappho renews the charge in a phonetic echo, completing the line kai gelaisas imeroen, to m'ei man, whose sensuous alliteration and assonance can be savored even by the Greekless reader. A few final points: Catullus inserts a legalistic clause into line 2: si fas est, superare divos (if it is permitted, [he seems] to surpass the gods). It testifies to a peculiarly Roman attitude about men and gods, but it also slows up the poem, and a good deal is lost in line 6 in the replacement of Sappho's heart shuddering in her breast by the abstract sensus (general powers of apprehension).

What has Catullus salvaged? First and foremost, the stanza form, through which he knowingly pours his own poem. It was Catullus' muscular twining of sentences through lines and stanzas that mesmerized me years ago when I did not know the Greek. He has taken over, likewise, something of Sappho's vowel and consonant play, though his seems more programmatic and symmetrical: “flamma demanat, sonitu suopte” (l. 9). Where Sappho was entirely flexible, Catullus moves toward practices which will be codified in Horatian Sapphics, often making the fourth syllable of the hendecasyllable long, and ending a word after the fifth syllable. He does not have Sappho's radiance, but he grasps the simplicity with which she lists the medical symptoms of love, symptoms taken over from Homeric descriptions of shock and fear, the drama of war imported to the love chamber, epic into lyric. Where Sappho emphasized intimacy in stanza 1, Catullus insists on the recurrent nature of the scene with the rare adverb identidem (again and again) which appears in his other Sapphic poem, “Furi et Aureli,” in an obscene context. He misses the ring structure in her poem that linked the apparition (phainetai) of the rival man in line 1 through the sundering of her own body to a reunification of self in the strongly enjambed verb “to be” (emmi, l. 15) and felt apparition of self “I seem” (phainomai, l. 16). Where her poem went at this juncture is a wild surmise. Catullus seems to have omitted her remarkable fourth stanza, and his poem may or may not have ended with the famous otium stanza. If the otium lines did close his poem, as I sense they did, they set Catullus' passion in the typically Roman context of politics and empire at odds with private erotic life, and glance out again in the direction of epic.

That epic glance is given more scope in the “Furi et Aureli” poem. There Catullus addresses his two enemies as his “companions,” and charges them, in a torrent of bombast mimicking imperial rhetoric, with a simple message of farewell to his “girl.” After that calculated understatement, “non bona dicta” (not good words), explodes a stanza of obscene abuse which gives way to one of the most delicate of all Latin lyrics, the stanza recalling Sappho's cut flower:¹⁵

But she'd better not look, like last time, for my
love reviving. It's her fault it's fallen,
a flower at the rim of the meadow, touched
          by the plow passing.

Not surprisingly, the anatomy of love, and perhaps jealousy, in “Phainetai moi” has never lost its grip on the Western imagination. But the history of Sappho in English is by and large a sorry one. It is the story of the awkward adaptation of classical quantitative prosody to the English accentual-syllabic system.¹⁶ The faint presence of stress in Latin meter only complicates the problem further. John Hall, translating “Phainetai moi” in 1652, sensibly opts for a loose stress equivalent to Sappho's quantities, and gives tetrameters with a dimeter for the adonic. The poor man can muster almost no other poetic resources beyond his common sense, however: his instinct for the rhyming couplet wars with the shape of the stanza, his meter thuds, his vocabulary is trite; to top it all off he has misunderstood (wilfully perhaps) the gender relations in the poem, rendering stanza 2:

How did his pleasing glances dart
Sweet languors to my ravish'd heart
At the first sight though so prevailed
          That my voice fail'd.(17)

E. M. Cox's 1925 version exemplifies the mess that results when a quantitative system is clamped arbitrarily onto English. One line will suffice. The conflict between natural word stress and fictive quantity results in verse which, if pronounced according to its own system, sounds downright idiotic: “Peér of the góds ¦ the hăppieśt ¦ măn Í seém.”¹⁸ J. A. Symonds in 1887 was more successful in aligning English stress with the requirements of length; his version is hardly felicitous syntactically (“Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring / Waves in my ear sounds”), but his first line at least shows how an accommodation might plausibly be reached: “Peér of góds hé ¦ seéměth to mé, ¦ the blíssfúl. …”¹⁹ For an approach which ignores the Sapphic stanza but tries to approximate its simplicity and concision, we can turn to Mary Barnard's 1958 version:

He is more than a hero
He is a god in my eyes—
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you—he …(20)

Hers has the virtue of cleanliness, but it lacks the rhythm of expansion and contraction which sustains life in Sappho's form.

The twentieth century has in fact been rich in appropriations of Sappho's poem. In “Three Letters to Anaktoria” from Imitations (1958), Robert Lowell supplies in hyperbole, exaggerated assonance and alliteration, extraneous similes, and sheer gusto what he lacks in subtlety: the man sits next to the girl “like a cardplayer”; “refining fire,” filched from Dante's Arnaut Daniel, perhaps by way of Eliot, purifies the speaker's flesh in a discordantly Christian way; and Sappho's pale grass becomes blindingly verdant: “I am greener than the greenest green grass.” Basil Bunting, working freely from Catullus in 1965, turns the poem back to Sappho by imitating her ring structure: “O, it is godlike to sit selfpossessed / When her chin rises and she turns to smile,” he begins, and concludes the last stanza: “… I dissolve / When her chin rises and she turns to smile. / O, it is godlike!”²¹

Examples could proliferate endlessly. I indulge myself in one final instance. John Hollander's canny “After an Old Text”²² uses the fact of its being a translation and revision of Sappho as a figure for the speaker's nostalgia for, hence re-vision of, an old lover, with the pronoun “you” conflating Sappho and his own lost love. The final stanza runs:

This revision of you sucks out the sound of
Words from my mouth, my tongue collapses, my legs
Flag, my ears roar, my eyes are blinded with flame; my
          Head is in hell then.

I would like to close, not by nagging at the innumerable translations of “Phainetai moi” in English, but by penciling briefly a larger sketch of translation as an elegiac genealogy. I spoke of poetry as a family matter; a record of translations is a family tree. I want now to trace, through a series of elegies, a perpetuated acknowledgment of Sappho as lyric mother, and therefore of her progeny as siblings. At issue is the enduring life of poetry. The poems to bear in mind are Catullus' elegy for his real brother (“Multas per gentes,” poem 101), Baudelaire's Sapphic poems, Swinburne's “Sapphics,” and his elegy for Baudelaire “Ave Atque Vale.” Through these elegies, I suggest, we can sense Sappho, the lyric impulse, rising again and again like Hesperus from the waters of language, and perpetually lost; and we will sense translation in action as the blood pulse of our continuing, shared literary life, keeping time with the larger cycles of nature. I freely confess it: this is a myth. A working myth for a poet and translator.

BAUDELAIRE AND SWINBURNE

Baudelaire studied Greek as well as Latin in the lyçée, and was surely familiar with Sappho's “Phainetai moi.” But the Sappho reincarnated in Baudelaire is not a metrical essence, as she was in part for Swinburne. Rather, Baudelaire is haunted by the myth of Sapphic sexuality. In a number of poems, two of which were excluded from Les Fleurs du Mal by the censor in 1857, he celebrates an eros which has nothing to do with the Greek Sappho's frank and splendid pleasure. Baudelaire's lesbian love is consecrated, not as joy, but as deviance. Set in the ghoulish context of Christian damnation on the one hand, and of “natural,” socially useful, reproductive mating on the other, his lesbians are artists and outcasts in their pure search for beauty and sensation. “O vierges, o démons, o monstres, o martyres, / De la réalité grands esprits contempteurs, / Chercheuses d'infini …” (“O virgins, O demons, O monsters, O martyrs, great spirits contemptuous of reality, seekers of infinity …” from “Femmes Damnées”). Theirs is the true spirituality in, and against, a materialistic world, and, not surprisingly, they are associated with Baudelaire's cherished images of infinity: the abyss and the gulf, and their corollary, death: “—Descendez, descendez, lamentables victimes, / Descendez le chemin de l'enfer éternel! / Plongez au plus profond du gouffre, où tous les crimes …” (“Descend, descend, sad victims, descend the path of eternal hell! Dive to the depths of the gulf, where all crimes …” from “Femmes Damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte”). This gouffre has its analogies in Baudelaire's sense of Sappho's poetry: the nearest he comes to describing her verse is his evocation, in “Lesbos,” of the lesbian embraces where the imaginary cascade behaves rather like a Sapphic stanza:

Lesbos, where the kisses, like cascades
teeming and turbulent yet secret, deep,
plunge undaunted into unplumbed gulfs
and gather there, gurgling and sobbing till
they overflow in ever-new cascades!(23)

At issue for Baudelaire is not the survival of Sappho's poetry. His Sapphic poems suggest something of the hell created in French nineteenth-century society for homosexual lovers, but his true absorption is with his own deflected eroticism as a figure for art. For him, art is and must be profoundly anti-natural; it joins in holy alliance with a sterile eros and with death, with infinity and the soul, in opposition to the squalid claims of nature and literal fact.

Though he claims to be Sappho's sentinel keeping vigil on the Leucadian cliff, Baudelaire takes us far afield from Sappho's hyacinths and the “dew on the riverside gleaming.”²⁴ With Swinburne the inheritance is much more complex because it is expressed “genetically”—that is, in meter and stanza form. Sappho's strain is crossed, however, with the strong influences of Baudelaire and, at his worst, the Marquis de Sade. Before considering the fraternal relationship between Swinburne and Baudelaire, I want to address the matter of Sappho's more direct incarnation in Swinburne's poetry.

First, the meter. Swinburne's Greek was excellent and, more than excellent, it was passionate, so that he writes the Sapphic stanza naturally, translating long and short syllables to stress with an ease scarcely ever matched in English. I will now make a risky claim: that Sappho lives in English, not in any word-by-word reproduction of her texts, but in Swinburne's poems “Sapphics” and “Hendecasyllabics.” I would claim in addition that Sappho's rigor and subtlety saved Swinburne from his own worst propensities toward prosodic exaggeration, and that his finest poems, to which we do not sufficiently confess our gratitude,²⁵ are those disciplined by Greek. In “Sapphics” Swinburne has allowed himself to be possessed by Sappho's “visible song,” and his poem, in places, surges and pauses as delicately as hers down its streambed, its vowels and consonants as cunningly in play:

… and I too,
Full of the vision,
Sáw thě whíte ím¦plácăblě Á¦phrodíté,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
          Saw the reluctant
Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her …

(ll. 7-13)

I scan one line to show with what grace the stress corresponds to the Greek's requirements for length. In “Anactoria” the rhyming pentameter couplets make for a cruder versification. Here, however, actual translation of Sappho rises out of hyperbolic Sadean rhetoric, and so filially imbued is Swinburne with her spirit that those fragments from the “Hymn to Aphrodite” seem intrinsic to his own poem:

Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,
Imperishable, upon her storied seat;
Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,
A mind of many colors, and a mouth
Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed,
With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
Bowed down upon me, saying “Who doth thee wrong,
Sappho?”

(ll. 67-74)

Swinburne is straining to render the first lines of the ode “poikilothron athanat' Aphrodite / pai Dios doloploke”; literally, “Richly (dappled, intricate, with various colors) enthroned immortal Aphrodite, child of Zeus, weaver of wiles.” Swinburne has at least made incantatory what in Barnard seems blunt and curt, though clean (“Dapple-throned Aphrodite / eternal daughter of God, / Snareknitter!”), and in Davenport rococco (“God's stunning daughter deathless Aphródita / A whittled perplexity your bright abstruse chair …”).

Swinburne has taken from “Phainetai moi” the conceit of love as a pathology, “Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love” (l. 56); he has grossly exaggerated it with Sadean extrapolation that shies not from cannibalism: “Ah that my mouth for Muses' milk were fed / On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!” (ll. 107-8). For a modern reader such a passage can only be comic; nor is there much to be said in defense of the workaday verse. I pause for a moment, however, on the theme of cannibalism. For all its hysteria, the passage points back to primitive rites of communion associated with funerals, and may recall my elegiac emblem of translation for which Sacks provided the model. The erotic communion Swinburne solicits, an invitation to rather than a defense against death, is itself merely a figure for the poet's real communion with the spirit of Sappho, and, as such, is an elegiac act. At the end of “Anactoria” the poetic eros does fend off death, for it allows Sappho, resurrected through Swinburne, to assert the immortality of song:

I Sappho will be one with all these things,
With all high things forever; and my face
Seen once, my songs heard in a strange place,
Cleave to men's lives …

(ll. 276-79)

Communion with a ghost from antiquity is one thing; acceptance of the death of an immediate poetic forebear is quite another and more shocking matter. The loss felt is more urgent, as is the threat to one's own life and voice. The death of Baudelaire was, for Swinburne, such a shock, and one that elicited from him one of the majestic pastoral elegies in English, “Ave Atque Vale.” The title conjures up Catullus' farewell in elegiac couplets to his brother, and proclaims a fraternity between Sappho's lyric offspring: Catullus, Baudelaire, and himself.

Sappho, the mother, is immediately invoked in stanza 2:

Thine ears knew all the wandering watery sighs
Where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories,
The barren kiss of piteous wave to wave
That knows not where is that Leucadian grave
Which hides too deep the supreme head of song.

Peter Sacks has charted this poem with exemplary intelligence and learning. For my purposes, it will suffice to emphasize the way in which an elegy involves translation. In rejecting the traditional garland “rose or rue or laurel,” in favor of “Half-faded, fiery blossoms, pale with heat,” Swinburne is translating “Lycidas” into Les Fleurs du Mal. The poem proceeds to “translate” Baudelaire's own “translation” of Sappho: “Fierce loves and lovely leaf-buds poisonous …” (l. 25). Facing the death and, worse still, the silence of his brother poet, Swinburne is led to question whether poetry itself survives: “Thou art far too far for wings of words to follow / Far too far off for thought or any prayer” (ll. 89-90); note the lack of caesuras streamlining the distance. In this crisis, the poem attempts to assert poetic communion as the symbolic consolation proffered in traditional elegy: “… and not death estranges / My spirit from communion with thy song” (ll. 103-4); the whole lyric tradition appears as one long, shared lament: “Or through mine ears a mourning musical / Of many mourners rolled” (ll. 109-10). But this death and the impotence of Apollo and Aphrodite, poetry and love, seem to blight consolation: “… not all our songs, O friend, / Will make death clear or make life durable” (ll. 171-72). After much synaesthesia, the elegy seems to end in silence; the dead poet is not to rise as day-star or genius of any shore, and the figure of Sappho has blended into that of a more tragic mother: “And chill the solemn earth, a fatal mother, / With sadder than the Niobean womb …” (ll. 191-92).

The dead poet seems beyond the reach of poetry. This crisis corresponds to the moment in Moschus' lament for Bion in which “Bion is dead, and with him dead is music, and gone with him likewise the Dorian poesy.”²⁶ The work of mourning, that is, would be completely blocked, were it not for the translation of Catullus that opens the final stanza, and in its very nature as translation belies the silence of death which it asserts. As long as Catullus speaks through Swinburne, he is neither dead nor silent, and neither, in some sense, is Baudelaire: “For thee, O now a silent soul, my brother, / Take at my hands this garland, and farewell” (ll. 188-89). Besides being one of the noblest versions of the Catullus we are likely to get, Swinburne's closing echo ensures that Hesperus will once again rise from Okeanos, that Sappho lives on, transmuted, in her children, and that poetry will continue to voice us to ourselves.

Notes

1. D. A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection (MacMillan/St. Martin's Press, 1967), xxv.

2. Georg Luck, The Latin Love Elegy (Methuen, 1969), 26.

3. Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 3.

4. Ibid., 2.

5. Sacks, 26ff.

6. In the fourth Georgic, Virgil sets the defeat of Orpheus against the life-giving success of the peasant Aristaeus. Thanks to the narration of Proteus, Aristaeus is able to appease the vexed spirit of Orpheus and bring life out of death, reviving his beehive:

   When from the bellies, over the rotten flesh
   Of the corpses, bees buzz out from caved-in flanks,
   Swarm in heavy clouds to treetops, group,
   And hang in clusters down from the pliant boughs.

   (Virgil, The Georgics, tr. S. P. Bovie (University of Chicago Press, 1956, 4: 555-58).

7. For an elegant and clear-sighted reading of the passage, with particular attention to the anaphora “And now” and the ambiguous “he,” see Sacks, 116.

8. Gregory Nagy, “Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 77 (1973): 173-75.

9. H. T. Wharton, Sappho (John Lave, 1898, 4th ed.; repr. Libera, Amsterdam, 1974), 168.

10. Charles Segal, “Eros and Incantation,” Arethusa 7 (1974): 139-160.

11. Wharton, 34.

12. Ibid., 36.

13. C. J. Fordyce, Catullus, A Commentary (Oxford University Press, 1961), 218ff.

14. T. P. Wiseman, Catullus and His World: A Reappraisal (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 152-54. I am not convinced that we need accept Wilamowitz's theory of a marriage ceremony as occasion for Sappho's poem in order to sense that poem bitterly invoked by Catullus. The elemental drama of Phainetai moi, a happy couple excluding the former lover, suffices in my mind to charge Catullus' address to Lesbia with retrospective anguish. Yes, the symptoms he enumerates appear to be those of passion, not jealousy, since “ille” (ll. 1, 2: that man, any man is not as definite and particular as Sappho's “keinos … aner” (that man). In both poems, I think, attention focuses more on the painful mystery of love itself rather than on an interloper; and Catullus could be seen as recalling his own innocent, early passion only to underscore his disillusion by reference to Sappho's distress as well as to the destruction of whole kingdoms in the otium stanza. For further discussion, see Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford University Press, 1955), 20, 21, and Anne Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets (Harvard University Press, 1983), 229-43.

15. Wiseman, 146.

16. For a learned and lucid account of such efforts, see John Hollander's Vision and Resonance (Yale University Press, 1975; 1985), 59-70. It is an indispensable book.

17. E. M. Cox, The Poems of Sappho (Charles Scribners Sons, 1925), 34.

18. Ibid., 70.

19. Ibid., 72.

20. Mary Barnard, Sappho (University of California Press, 1958), 39.

21. Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1978), 119.

22. John Hollander, Spectral Emanations (Atheneum, 1978), 57. John Hollander, a rare doctus poeta, has written Sapphics with splendid ease throughout his career. The form has been for him a rich inheritance, allowing him serious spoofs of the modern relationship to Antiquity (“Making It” and “Epilogue: the loss of smyrna” in Town and Country Matters (Yale University Press, 1958), as well as a severely graceful meditation on love and representation, “The Lady of the Castle,” over which Sappho, the poet of Aphrodite, presides through the evocatory power of her stanza (Spectral Emanations, 54, 55). Sappho's form affords Hollander more than thematic resonance; he uses Sapphic enjambment, so often avoided by her translators, to the hilt: “My desire, my memory was so intelli- / gently caressing” (“A Thing So Small,” Harp Lake (Knopf, 1988), 80.

23. Charles Baudelaire, “Lesbos,” stanza 2, tr. Richard Howard, Les Fleurs du Mal (Godine, 1982), 123.

24. Guy Davenport, Archilochus, Sappho, Alkman (University of California Press, 1980), 93, a translation of fragment 42. Guy Davenport has brought the Poundian imperative of clarity to bear in his long and honorable engagement with archaic Greek poetry.

25. A notable exception is Jerome McGann, whose sprightly Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (University of Chicago Press, 1972) begins to repair the wrong.

26. J. M. Edmonds, The Greek Bucolic Poets (Harvard University Press, 1938; 1950; 1960), 445.