Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians

A tricky issue has just hit the Greek courts. Some residents of the island of  Lesbos have just decided to resort to the law to prevent the "Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece" from using the word Lesbian in its title.

The idea is that the heterosexual female denizens of the island don’t much like the idea that when they claim they are Lesbian everyone assumes that they are gay. (It’s a claim that might be stronger, I think, if the appellants in this case were women, not men representing their sisters. .) But if they are successful in their suit against the Greek organisation, the plan is to try to outlaw “Lesbians" (as a word) worldwide.

The problem here is the sixth-century BCE Greek poetess Sappho (on the right): born and bred in Lesbos, she addressed some of the most passionate erotic poetry the world has known to fellow women. An achievement which in the ancient world  earned her the title “10th Muse”. Almost ever since Lesbos has been synonymous with Lesbianism (in fact since the 18th century in British English).

This idea of decoupling Sappho, female homoeroticism and the island of Lesbos seems to me about as mad as trying to white out William Shakespeare from Stratford on Avon.

In fact, Sappho is the sexiest thing to have come from the island in 3000 years. Why on earth jack in the commercial possibilities?

The competition for most famous islander is not great. Alcaeus was also a Lesbian, another early poet, who famously claimed to throw away his shield on the battlefield and walk (?run) away – so giving rise to a whole tradition of ancient poetic military refuseniks.

You might also think of Theophrastus, fourth-third century BCE scientist, who wrote a wonderful analysis of different character types called “The Characters”. Read my colleague Paul Millett on this.

In the modern world you might go for the poet Odysseas Elytis who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979. But that’s not quite the 10th Muse and, though his family came from Lesbos, he was actually born in Crete anyway.

So why on earth aren’t the Lesbians (islanders that is) celebrating Sappho and doing all they can to resurrect her poetry. Out of 9 volumes, only a handful of stuff survives. But more may be found. Only a few years ago another poem was discovered on an Egyptian papyrus. A nice middle-aged lyric about not having the knees to dance any more. A translation was published in the TLS.

Why don't the islanders buy into this, instead of complaining about the supposed sexual "insult"?

Comments

[Michael Igoe]

The usual moralistic ranting from some side or another. If I remember rightly, Latin used two forms of the adjective: lesbis (for Sappho etc.) and lesbius/-a for others. What's the fuss about? You can't deny the reality of the past. The same applied to Plato and many others. One of the most touching epitaphs I know was dedicated to a friend (or more) of his, Aster - by Plato himself, probably the composer of the verses.

Greek text: Wordperfect is especially good. Try 'insert' - 'symbols' - 'international' -'Greek'. This has even the archaic digamma and sanpi.

[Peter Taylor]

The easiest way to post Greek text is probably to install a Greek keyboard layout. Windows allows switching between installed layouts with Left Alt-Left Shift or via a flag icon in the system tray. You can find images of keyboard layouts with Google image search or tables showing the layouts on Wikipedia.

[Nick]

It is pure publicity seeking on the order of Victoria Beckham's ludicrous attempt to prevent Peterborough United from continuing to use their 100 year old nickname "the Posh".

[klimt]

'Gay' is a charming surname, inviting many a witty riposte to impertinent inquiries.

No, it's the Butts and Ramsbottoms of this world I pity - what on earth can one do with that!? :)

[StB]

Well, some words are like that. Take
for instance Vengerka in Russian, see

http://www.proz.com/forum/lighter_side_of_trans_interp/9722-how_do_the_dutch_say_%5Cdouble_dutch%5C_or_the_russians_%5Crussian_roulette%5C_more.html?start=30

[Nemo]

Actually, the people I feel sorry for aren't the Lesbians (as in Island of Lesbos), but the Gays (as in people who have the not terribly uncommon surname Gay or women who have the given name Gay). Some years ago there was a letter in the local newspaper from a man named Gay whose children were begging him to change the family name because of what they were experiencing at school. He didn't feel comfortable changing the family's surname -how many people would, really, but said he thought it likely his children would change their names on reaching adulthood. It sounds funny, but the letter was actually rather moving. I used to have a slight acquaintance with a woman whose middle name was Gay. I didn't know her well enough to ask how she felt about her name. She was born in the late 1950s so the "new" meaning of her middle name would have hit when she was about 10 or so. I suppose very few baby girls are given the Gay as a first or middle name these days.

[Lucy]

Richard: I think Ransome uses 'he' as a pronoun ... my memory is hazy, but I certainly remember thinking, 'hmm, I was sure Sappho was female'. Anyone have a copy we can check?

[Lucy]

Oh, Jane, hi! I think I've got a mental crossover with the retro-books thread on Alpha Mummy. I have a feeling (not read the books for some while!) that there were originally three or four pigeons used for messages, and that one at least was taken by a hawk. I don't think they suggested Sophocles was female - the strong impression I got was that the Noble Greek Poets were all, of course, scholarly men.

Sophocles goes on? No! I love Sophocles - comp. with Aeschylus and Euripides he was a positive blessing.

I was wondering, though - what do we know about the Greeks' ideas of gender and sexuality? (Big question, oops.) There was a Peter Hall production of the Bacchae a bit ago with the brilliant Will Houston as both Pentheus and Agave - no problem with male actors playing female roles. Did the Greeks think of gender and speaking voice in the same way that we do? Or would it be quite conventional for someone to speak as a lesbian despite being a man?

[Richard]

NB also that the first of the two links Tony Francis put up (the one for the picture of the new papyrus) has itself a further link to a text with extensive linguistic help from those selfless grammarians at www.aoidoi.org. This is a very useful site for linguistic help with Greek poetry. Here's a link for their text of the new Sappho (a pdf):
http://www.aoidoi.org/poets/sappho/sappho-58.pdf
Very handy for those who are not natural Lesbians (dialect-wise).
Aeolic metres into Latin: good luck! (Notice that I'm not getting inveigled into having a go myself!).
I need a look at a copy of Pigeon Post. Are we really sure that Sappho the Pigeon was male? I don't understand about Page thinking that Sappho 1 (poikilothron' athanat' Aphrodita...) was addressed to a man - it's addressed to Aphrodite! But he did say some quite odd things about Sappho (they look odd now...), and the bit of his book which treats the "was she/ wasn't she" (or "did she/ didn't she") question looks very dated now (he didn't come down on either side of the question). But then, since it was written in 1955, I suppose it would seem dated.
All best,
Richard

[Jane]

Lucy
Fascinating about the pigeons. Especially as they belonged to the Amazon party, not the Swallow party.
But why one of each, if not a definite conviction that Sappho was a male? Unless Ransome thought Sophocles was female; well, Sophocles did talk an awful lot, and going on and on is generally seen as an irritating female trait.

[Tony Francis]

The image of the Sappho-mummy wrapping is found:
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/sappho.new.html

Another Greek poem found in the chest cavity of a mummy appears to be different, and unrelated:
http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/geowissenshaften/bericht-13869.html

[Tania Winter]

People who write poetry are lible to have other nasty habits...

[rodm]

I seem to recall that one of Mary's predecessors at Cambridge, Denys Page, attempts in one of his books to prove that 'Poikilothron' Aphrodita' is actually addressed to a man - the thought that S was a Lesbian in anything but the geographical sense seemed to be too much for him!

[Michael Bulley]

To Richard: sorry I didn't spot your link to the poem the first time. I think I suffer from link-clicking phobia. But, if it's got people reading the poem and then maybe reading, or reading again, other poems of Sappho (can you say "others of Sappho's poems"?), that's all to the good. It's almost got me thinking of trying again to put "deduke men a selana" into any other language, particularly Latin, in the same metre. If Catullus could do it with "phainetai moi", why can't I? OK, I know why.

[Xjy]

Any chance of posting an image of the papyrus/papyri here for us??

[Mary]

It refers to Archilochus AS WELL. Both are part of the shield-throwing away tradition (..trope).

[Robert Ulery]

Surely your comment about Alcaeus refers to Archilochus instead!

[Michael Bulley]

Anthony Alcock is right. I'm good at proofreading, but not if I've typed the text myself. In line 4 there is an N missing: it should be "egenonto". In line 8, the third letter should be eta, not upsilon; the word is "agêraon". So, those of you who want to can copy it out and make the necessary corrections. In line 10, I've left the dots indicating uncertain text.

[Richard]

The poem really is printed in Greek on the website I posted a link to before.

Once more for luck:
http://www1.union.edu/wareht/story.html

In lower case, with accents, and without mistakes... And you can see which words have been supplemented to fill the missing bits of the papyri. Just one click away.

All best,
Richard

[Michael Bulley]

Thanks for managing to get the poem in Greek on the site. Hope Christopher Kelk, who asked for it, has returned to the site to find it. It looks OK, except for the very first letter, where the error is certainly my fault: it should be an upsilon, not a psi.

[anthony alcock]

Mary, the first letter has to be an "upsilon". Words in lines 4 and 8 (2 words) could do with improvement.

[Mary]

Here is M Bulley's Greek version -- in capitals, just as an archaic Greek might have seen it:

ΨΜΜΕΣ ΠΕΔΑ ΜΟΙΣΑΝ ΙΟΚΟΛΠΩΝ ΚΑΛΑ ΔΩΡΑ ΠΑΙΔΕΣ
ΣΠΟΥΔΑΣΔΕΤΕ ΚΑΙ ΤΑΝ ΦΙΛΑΟΙΔΟΝ ΛΙΓΥΡΑΝ ΧΕΛΥΝΝΑΝ.
ΕΜΟΙ Δ'ΑΠΑΛΟΝ ΠΡΙΝ ΠΟΤ' ΕΟΝΤΑ ΧΡΟΑ ΓΗΡΑΣ ΗΔΗ
ΕΠΕΛΛΑΒΕ ΛΕΥΚΑΙ Δ'ΕΓΕΟΝΤΟ ΤΡΙΧΕΣ ΕΚ ΜΕΛΑΙΝΑΝ.
ΒΑΡΥΣ ΔΕ Μ'ΟΘΥΜΟΣ ΠΕΠΟΗΤΑΙ ΓΟΝΑ Δ'ΟΥ ΦΕΡΟΙΣΙ
ΤΑ ΔΗ ΠΟΤΑ ΛΑΙΨΗΡ' ΕΟΝ ΟΡΧΗΣΘ' ΙΣΑ ΝΕΒΡΙΟΙΣΙ.
ΤΑ ΜΕΝ ΣΤΕΝΑΧΙΣΔΩ ΘΑΜΕΩΣ. ΑΛΛΑ ΤΙ ΚΕΝ ΠΟΕΙΗΝ;
ΑΓΥΡΑΟΝ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΝ ΕΟΝΤ' ΟΥ ΔΥΝΑΤΟΝ ΓΕΝΕΣΤΗΑΙ.
ΚΑΙ ΓΑΡ ΠΟΤΑ ΤΙΘΩΝΟΝ ΕΦΑΝΤΟ ΒΡΟΔΟΠΑΧΥΝ ΑΥΩΝ
ΕΡΩΙ Φ .... ΑΘΕΙΣΑΝ ΒΑΜΕΝ' ΕΙΣ ΕΣΧΑΤΑ ΓΑΣ ΦΕΡΟΙΣΑΙΝ
ΕΟΝΤΑ ΚΑΛΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΝΕΟΝ ΑΛΛΑ ΑΥΤΟΝ ΥΜΩΣ ΕΜΑΡΨΕ
ΧΡΟΝΩΙ ΠΟΛΙΟΝ ΓΗΡΑΣ ΕΧΟΝΤ' ΑΘΑΝΑΤΑΝ ΑΚΟΙΤΙΝ.

[anthony alcock]

Has Mytilene really become a name for the island ? Perhaps it comes under the category of "ethnoslander", whatever that's supposed to mean.
There is really not much doubt that poem is by Sappho, having already been identified by Grenfell and Hunt in their edition of the Oxyrhynchus fragments as belonging to Book 4. The metre is a strong indication and the use of the phrase "chroa gêras êdê" at the end of line 3 of the poem translated by West, which appears in a fragment published by Grenfell and Hunt no.1231 fr. 10, line 6, also identified as the work of Sappho. In fact, the Oxyrhynchus fragment continues for another 7 lines, but the Cologne fragment seems to indicate fairly clearly that the last word of the poem is "akoitin".
A comment about West's translation.
l.3 "chroa" is tanslated as "body" ([my once tender body] old age now [has seized], but I think "skin" would be much more effective: it is the soft skin that has become the victim of old age, as all of us beyond a certain age can see when we take small children for a walk and they give us their hand.
There is a slightly poignant irony about the place of discovery of the Cologne fragment: in the cartonnage of a mummy.
Finally, G. Greer: her best performances, in my view, were as the handmaiden to the magnificently lugubrious Jonathan Routh in Candid Camera in the early 1960s.

[SW Foska]

Paul: Romanian 'pasarica' = little bird = vagina.

[PL]

Apropos Greek characters, I see Gilles managed to display "ouzo" in that form (third post from bottom), so it evidently can be done. Please explain how.

Also please consider displaying the rest of the body-text in this blog in an ordinary body-text font with serifs (e.g. Georgia), instead of the hard-on-the-eyes sans-serif typeface you currently use. There is a widespread delusion that sans-serif characters, because they are simpler in form, are therefore easier on the eyes than characters with serifs. Except in very short texts of a line or two, the opposite is true. Anyone who doubts this should try reading a few paragraphs of this blog and then a few paragraphs of anything posted on, for example, www.newyorker.com. The sense of relief to the eyes will, I promise, be palpable.