International Gay & Lesbian Review

Sappho's Immortal Daughters

• Nonfiction
• Publication Date: 1995
• xi +187 pp.

Sappho Sappho
Say it sing it
Sappho Sappho
Read it write it

Yopie Prins's young daughter composed this ditty during her mother's absences writing the book; it is an engaging echo of the fascination Sappho holds for modern readers. Like other lyric poets of archaic Greece, Sappho has been obscured by time. Her surviving work is a small and fragmentary corpus, which includes only one complete poem, while the evidence for her biography is sketchy, partly mythical, and comes from sources written centuries after her death. These losses are tantalizing, for both literary and historical reasons. She was recognized as a great poet all through antiquity, and her surviving work has always been admired. The rarity of women poets in most historical periods would be reason enough to want to know more about her biographical and historical context, but CLGH Newsletter readers do not need to be reminded that she had the reputation of being a lover of women, and the word lesbian derives from the name of her native island. Many of Sappho's surviving poems are easily and naturally read as portrayals of erotic love between women; however, their cultural remoteness means there is room for legitimate doubts as well as homophobic wishful thinking. The ancient sources discussing this issue all date from many centuries after her death, and one of the most important, a poem attributed to Ovid, has clear elements of fiction and myth. This poem, written in the form of a letter from Sappho to Phaon, portrays the middle-aged Sappho desperate with love for the handsome young ferryman Phaon, no longer sexually interested in the troops of Lesbian girls who engaged her in the past, and preparing for a desperate leap from the cliff at Leukas, which will end in her death. Phaon is known from other sources as a figure of myth, a young lover of Aphrodite, endowed by her with magical and irresistible beauty.

Margaret Williamson's book, Sappho's Immortal Daughters, is primarily concerned with Sappho's poetry rather than her life; the title quotes a Hellenistic epigram in praise of Sappho which ends with the line “your songs, your immortal daughters, are with us still.” She gives an excellent, clear introduction to the problems of reading Sappho, and discusses several of the longer fragments in some detail. Her accounts of the legend of Sappho's life and the transmission of her texts assume no prior knowledge and are very readable and lucid; the book is accessible without sacrificing rigor. Discussion of Sappho's poems necessarily involves some discussion of her life and social context, because archaic Greek lyric is generally thought to have been composed for performance, and reconstructing the social context of this performance is an essential part of understanding it. Some of Sappho's poems were probably composed for performance by choruses of unmarried girls, and many scholars have seen this as the key to understanding Sappho's social and emotional life. Sappho is imagined as a chorus leader and educator of girls, falling in love with one girl after another and grieving when they go away to marry; the scenario recalls the hothouse world of Olivia, by “Olivia.” Williamson presents a sane and moderate version of this theory, which leaves room for some of Sappho's poems to address other adult women, and does justice to the probable political dimensions of Sappho's work. Her book was published before the best available discussion of Sappho's circle, Eva Stehle's chapter on the subject in Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Stehle argues that adult women are the usual implied audience in Sappho's poems.

Yopie Prins's book, Victorian Sappho, includes detailed discussions of some Victorian translators and imitators of Sappho, including the two women who wrote together under the name “Michael Field;” Prins gives a good account of their use of Sappho's fragments to create a space for lesbian writing. The book also has wider literary theoretical ambitions. Prins highlights aspects of Sappho's works and legend which make her a paradoxical, liminal figure, and shows how the ways in which they are played out in Victorian culture clarifies wider issues about the conceptualization of lyric and the image of the woman poet. Victorian Sappho is a lyric voice whose utterances are fragmented and lost, whose best-known poem (fr. 31) speaks in the voice of a persona on the verge of silence and/or death, who is usually represented in the moment of her suicidal leap, teetering on the brink or toppling over it. Prins's erudite and sophisticated analysis uses deconstructive and feminist strategies to show how the Victorian lyric voice, and Victorian women poets, have some of the same paradoxical, self-cancelling qualities. She also describes how some Victorian women poets consciously criticized the traditional image of Sappho from a feminist point of view. Her book is not directly concerned with the historical Sappho, but it is rich in insights into the ways in which Sappho has been imagined and read; it helps to explain some of the reasons why Sappho can evoke such longing and fascination.

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