Hrotsvita of Gandersheim, a "Strong Voice" in the Tenth Century

Hrotsvita of Gandersheim (23 November)

First, an explanation of why I am posting today about Hrotsvita and the relevance of 23 November.

We don't actually know the birth and death dates for Hrotsvita (or Hrotsvit, Hrotsvitha, or Roswit, among other variant spellings). She may have been born about 935 and she may have died about 975 or as late as 1002. But we do know that she was a canoness at the imperial abbey of Gandersheim and among her works is a life of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, "Otto the Great," who was born on 23 November 912. So there you go.

In his 1501 woodcut, 

Albrecht Dürer imagines Hrostvita,

on her knees, presenting her story 

of his life to the emperor, Otto, with

Abbess Gerberga looking on

We have no real evidence about Hrotsvit's family, although, given her place in Gandersheim, an important imperial family institution, she is likely to have been a member of a noble Saxon family. As her editor Katharina Wilson notes, "only daughters of the aristocracy were admitted to Gandersheim." 

The abbey became an extraordinary center for learning; in Wilson's words, it was "an oasis of intellectual and spiritual activity." It was also something of the all-female space we have seen before, a kind of "city of ladies": Gandersheim was a "free abbey," one in which Otto I "gave the abbess the authority to have her own court of law, keep her own army, coin her own money, and hold a seat in the Imperial Diet." 

In this remarkable setting, Hrotsvita received the kind of education, freedom, and support to produce a body of work, all of it composed in Latin: eight verse legends, six plays, and two epic poems. Several of her letters also survive.  

Hrotsvita organized her work into three books. The first contained her legends, prefaced by an introduction and dedication to her abbess, Gerberga. 

The second book contains the works for which Hrotsvita is best known today, her six comedies modeled on those of the Roman writer Terence. When I studied literature as an undergraduate and graduate, the "history" of drama that I was taught repeated the same story--classical drama was "lost" during the Middle Ages and not recovered until it was "reborn" in the Renaissance.

But Hrotsvita is the exception--not only was classical drama not lost, but here was a writer--a woman writer--composing original plays, based on the model of Terence, in the tenth century. 

The third book contains her two epic poems, the Carmen de gestis Oddonis imperatoris (Poem of the Deeds of the Emperor Otto) and De primordiis et fundatoribus coenobii Gandersheimensis (History of the Foundation of the Community of Gandersheim). There is also a shorter poem on the Apocalypse of St. John in this third book.

Here is the opening of her "Preface to the Legends":

I offer this little book,
small in stylistic merits, but not small in the efforts it took
to the good will of the wise
for correction and advice
at least to those who don't enjoy to rail
against authors who fail
but, rather, prefer to correct the work's flaws. . . .
However difficult and arduous and complex
metrical composition may appear for the fragile female sex,
I, persisting
with no one assisting
still put together my poems in this little work
not relying on my own powers and talents as a clerk
but always trusting in heavenly grace's aid
for which I prayed. . . . 

There are several excellent critical studies of Hrotsvita, but I recommend starting with her work, available in Wilson's Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: A Florilegium of Her Works.

Oh! One more thing--when Hrotsvita's works were discovered in 1494 and then published in Nuremberg in 1501 (the first edition contained several woodcuts, including the one by Dürer, above), she was praised as, you guessed it, a "tenth muse" and as a Christian Sappho. Sheesh.

Madeleine de Scudéry, "the Incomparable Sappho"

Madeleine de Scudéry (born 15 November 1607)

Ridiculed and satirized by many of her male contemporaries, Madeleine de Scudéry was, despite her critics, a wildly successful novelist whose works were quickly translated and published in England, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Madeleine de Scudéry

The daughter of a minor aristocratic family, Scudéry was orphaned at the age of six. She was raised by an uncle who provided her with an extraordinary education: in addition to reading, writing, painting, dancing, and music, he exposed her to the study of agriculture, medicine, and "domestic economy." On her own, seemingly, she learned Spanish and Italian and developed an interest in philosophy.

After her uncle's death in 1637, Scudéry left Normandy for Paris, where she joined her brother, the playwright Georges de Scudéry, who introduced her into the vibrant salon life of the city. Her "pretensions" in becoming a regular figure in the salons--and then in establishing one of her own--are what seems to be the source of the ridicule directed at her.

Or at least one source. She also dared to write, at first using her brother's name as her pseudonym. Her first two works, the historical novel Ibrahim, ou l'illustre Bassa (Ibrahim or the Ilustrious Basa,1641) and the series of angry orations delivered by famous women, Les femmes illustres, ou Les harangues héroïques (Illustrious Women or Heroic Harangues, 1642), were both published under Georges de Scudéry's name.

Her Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus (Artamène or the Great Cyrus), published in ten volumes (over two million words!!!) between 1648 and 1653 brought her fame and acclaim (and the subsequent ridicule).* The historical romance was set in ancient Assyria and featured fictionalized versions of her contemporaries, with Scudéry writing herself as Sappho. 

After 1653, the Scudéry siblings moved to the Marais, where Madeleine established her Saturday salon, which she called her "Société du samedi." There the group discussed many literary works, including those of Marguerite de Navarre. Among those who regularly attended was a writer whom we have met before, Madame de la Fayette. (Her work was also appreciated and praised by another woman we've met, Madame de Sévigné.)

She continued to publish fiction, both multi-volume novels and novellas, but Scudéry also published philosophical dialogues (such as Conversations sur divers sujets, [Conversations upon Several Subjects, 1680] and Conversations morales [Moral Conversations, 1686) and epistolary fictions, following the model of Ovid's Heroides, in her Lettres amoureuses de divers autheurs de ce temps (Amorous Letters from Various Contemporary Authors, 1641).

More recently, Scudéry's philosophical achievements have come to be recognized. In the introduction to his entry on Scudéry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, John Conley notes,

A prominent novelist, Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701) composed a series of dialogues dealing with philosophical issues. Primarily ethical in focus, her dialogues examine the virtues and vices proper to the aristocratic society of the period. They also explore questions of moral psychology, in particular the interplay between temperament and free will. In the area of epistemology, Scudéry analyzes the problem of certitude and self-knowledge. Theologically, she defends cosmological arguments demonstrating God's existence. Her aesthetic theory endorses the mimetic thesis concerning art as the imitation of nature but the individuality of artistic perception also receives attention. In her philosophical speculation, Scudéry stresses questions of gender; the relationship of philosophical theories to the condition of women receives substantial analysis.

Long framed by her critics as a pedantic précieuse, Scudéry has only recently attracted the interest of professional philosophers. . . . In the recent feminist expansion of the canon of humanities . . . the philosophical significance of her writings has emerged. Her literary corpus presents a novel version of the ancient philosophical method of dialogue; it also expresses original, sophisticated theories concerning the ethical, aesthetic, and theological disputes of early modernity.

For a wonderful introduction to Scudéry's diverse work, Jane Donawerth's Selected Letters, Orations, and Rhetorical Dialogues offers an excellent sampling. And if you're not up to tackling the two million words of Scudéry's Artamène, Karen Newman's The Story of Sapho offers a "self-contained section" of the historical romance:

The Story tells of Sapho, a woman writer modeled on the Greek Sappho, who deems marriage slavery. Interspersed in the love story of Sapho and Phaon are a series of conversations like those that took place in Scudéry's own salon in which Sapho and her circle discuss the nature of love, the education of women, writing, and right conduct. This edition also includes a translation of an oration, or harangue, of Scudéry's in which Sapho extols the talents and abilities of women in order to persuade them to write.

Madeleine de Scudéry died on 2 June 1701, at the age of ninety-three. To her friends, she was "the incomparable Sappho." (When they are not being described as a "tenth muse," women seem to be identified as a new Sappho . . . )

*When I was in graduate school, my professors went on and on about Samuel Richard's Clarissa, estimated to be 984,870 words long. Ha!!!!! Less than half as long as Artamène!

Sarra Copia Sulam, Poet in Seventeenth-Century Venice

Sarra Copia Sulam (16 October 1622)

As with several other posts, the date for this piece on Sarra Copia Sulam needs a bit of explanation.

Sarra Copia Sulam was born in Venice, one of three daughters of Simon and Ricca Copia, about whom very little evidence survives, except that Simon was a wealthy Jewish merchant, he and his brother Moses considered among the wealthiest Jews living in Venice. The brothers were brokers of maritime insurance. There is surviving evidence of the Copia family in Venice from the mid-sixteenth century. 

This portrait now thought to be by Antonio Laborio (c. 1660s)
is perhaps a copy of an earlier portrait
of Sarra Copia Sulam

Sarra Copia's date of birth is not certain (and I won't even begin to address the varied spellings of her name)--the year suggested for her birth ranges from about 1589 to 1601, the date accepted by Don Harrán, the editor and translator of a massive (almost 600 pages) new anthology of Copia's work.

Sarra Copia married a banker named Jacob Sulam about the year 1614 (though opinions vary on that date too). She gave birth to a daughter named Rebecca in 1615, but the child died at the age of ten months, and Sarra is known to have suffered a miscarriage in May of 1618. Sarra Copia Sulam died on 15 February 1641.

But between the years 1618 and 1624, Sarra Copia Sulam also managed to write, and that writing--her correspondence, her poetry, a religious manifesto--survives. 

As Harrán observes, "Seven years cannot be considered a life. But that is all we have for Sarra Copia Sulam": 

There are no documents for Copia in the years preceding 1618 and in those following 1624 until her death in 1641. Thus if she were born in 1600-1601, thirty-five years of her life remain uncovered. Yet the documents for 1618-1624 testify not only to the breadth of her activities but also to her impact on her surroundings.

Rather than posting about Sulam on the date of her death, however, I chose a date that relates to her life, or at least to her literary life--and that belongs to the remarkable seven-year period of creativity before she returns to silence and obscurity.

In 1618, after reading the epic poem La reina Ester, written by Ansaldo Cebà, a Genoese monk, Sarra Sulam began a correspondence with him that lasted until 1622. Sulam's last letter to Cebà is dated 30 April; before sending any letter of response, Cebà died on 16 October 1622--and thus the date for today's posting.

In his last letter to Sulam, dated 19 March, Cebà had written, "The days of my life are becoming shorter," and that he wanted to be able to "prepare to die properly." He wished to "become detached from the love of earthly things": "You are one of them by keeping me attached to the earth more than I would like."

(Cebà collected their correspondence and prepared it for publication; the work was published posthumously in Genoa in 1623.)

Having begun her literary exchange with Cebà in 1618, Sulam also established a salon, hosting a number of male intellectuals and writers. Among the men who were involved in the accademia she established in her home were a roster Venetian notables who praised her, not only for her beauty and hospitality but for her contributions to their discussions. The gathered intellectuals discussed philosophy and religion, read and exchanged poetry, and debated issues, among them the immortality of the soul. 

This latter inspired one of the members of the salon, the poet and priest Baldassare Bonifacio, to publish a treatise, Discourse on the Immortality of the Soul (Dell'immortalità dell’anima discorso), in which he claimed that Sulam did not believe in the soul's immortality, a belief basic to both Christianity and Judaism.

Sulam's reply was The Manifesto of Sara Copia Sulam, a Jewish Woman, in which She Refutes and Disavows the Opinion Denying Immortality of the Soul, Falsely Attributed to Her by Signor Baldassare Bonifacio (Manifesto di Sarra Copia Sulam Hebrea. Nel quale è da lei riprovate, e detestata l’opinione negante l’Immortalità dell’Anima, falsemente attribuitale dal Sig. Baldassare Bonifacio)--three editions were published in 1621.

Bonifacio wrote a brief reply and published all three pieces, bound together with a letter from Sulam to him. In this volume he accused her of not writing her manifesto, attributing her arguments to a rabbi.

Sulam sent a copy of her Manifesto to Cebà--who waited seven months to respond, and then only wished that she would convert to Christianity (which was, to be fair, a theme of all his letters to Sulam).

But by this point, public opinion--and the views of her literary "friends"--began to change. Further accusations of Sulam's literary theft and plagiarism followed, though she also had her defenders. Composed about 1626, the Notices from Parnassus (Avvisis di Parnaso) offered a "defense" of Sarra Copia Sulam in the form of a trial on Mount Parnassus before Apollo. 

This "evidence" offered in the trial includes several unpublished sonnets by (or attributed to) Sulam, but the most appealing defenses of her are "written" by some of the most notable women writers of Italy, including Vittoria Colonna, and another "by" Sappho of Lesbos. (The anthology, sometimes attributed to an otherwise unknown woman named Giulia Solinga, who wrote the dedication, was not published in Italian until the twentieth century.)

As Howard Tzvi Adelman notes in an extended essay about Sarra Copia Sulam:

As a Jewish woman writer who had both captivated and bested Christian clerics in public, Copia Sullam was an ideal target for accusations that would undermine her accomplishments as a woman and a Jew; they tried to make Christian men appear responsible for her attainments. Her defenders, however, saw Copia Sullam in the tradition of women writers of the Renaissance and created for her a distinguished panel of female defenders. Her Jewishness was noted regularly in their defense of her, but it certainly was not an obstacle to her receiving a fair hearing before Apollo.

Interestingly, Sulam neither mentions her Venetian contemporary Lucrezia Marinella nor is mentioned by her.

Today, you will find Sarra Copia Sulam's work in Harrán's anthology, Sarra Copia Sulam: Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice. The edition includes her correspondence with Cebà, as well as reference to her in his letters to various other recipients; the complete "controversy" over the immortality of the soul; the complete Notices from Parnassus; and all of Sulam's surviving poetry. 

Adelman's comprehensive essay from the Encyclopedia at Jewish Women's Archive is available by clicking here.

Marie le Jars de Gournay and the Writing Woman

Marie le Jars de Gournay (born 6 October 1565)

Marie le Jars was the first of six children born to Guillaume le Jars, a minor aristocrat living in Paris, and his wife, Jeanne de Hacqueville, whose family included noted jurists and writers. Her father purchased the estate of Gournay-sur-Aronde; after his death in 1578, the family suffered financial difficulties and relocated to the estate, thus adding "de Gournay" to Marie's name.

A frontispiece from Gournay's
collection of her work.

There were two usual possibilities for young women like Marie de Gournay--a religious profession (one of her sisters did become a nun) or marriage. While her mother planned an advantageous marriage for her daughter, Marie resisted and undertook a rigorous--and largely secret--self-education, focused on the classics and French literature.

For most of the centuries since her death in 1645, Marie le Jars de Gournay was known for her association with the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne.

It was Montaigne himself who referred to the young woman as his "fille d'alliance," his adopted daughter. In her novella, Le Proumenoir de M. de Montaigne, par sa fille d'alliance (The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne, by His Adopted Daughter (1588), Gournay addresses Montaigne in her dedicatory epistle as "Father."

As Gournay's editors note, the young scholar found in Montaigne "the reincarnation of the ancient sages" and an "impeccable patriarchal authority to sponsor her own interests against those of her mother--even, pretty clearly, a safely inaccessible substitute for the husband her mother would have chosen for her."

Their correspondence began after Marie read Montaigne's Essays in 1584. In 1588, she visited him in Paris, and he returned the visit, staying in at the Château de Gournay for three months. 

Gournay's mother died in 1591, leaving her in a very difficult financial situation, while Montaigne's death in 1592 left her in a difficult intellectual situation. Along with a younger brother and sister, she first moved into the household of the provincial governor of Cambrai before she relocated to Paris where she lived "in genteel poverty."

Then, in 1593, Montaigne's widow,  Françoise de la Cassaigne, asked Gournay to edit a posthumous edition of Monntaigne's works. Gournay spent more than a year working at Montaigne's estate, producing a new edition, prefaced by her own introduction, published in 1595. Subsequent editions enhanced and promoted Montaigne and his reputation.

But, in addition to her editorial work, Gournay produced verse and translations while she was living in Paris, as well as the significant works that have drawn new attention to her more recently: Égalité des hommes et des femmes (The Equality of Men and Women), first published in 1622, Apologie pour celle qui escrit (Apology for the Woman Writing), first published in 1626, and Grief des dames (Complaint of Women or The Ladies' Complaint), also published in 1626. Gournay continued to revise her work throughout her writing career, with final versions published in Les Advis ou les presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay (The Offerings or Presents of Demoiselle de Gournay,1641).

In The Equality of Men and Women, dedicated to Anne of Austria, queen of France (who would become regent for her son Louis XIV in 1643), Gournay argues that women's subordination is not "natural" but based on prejudice. Women have been denied their rightful place in society by men, who have reduced women by denying them an education. 

In arguing against women’s subservience and for their education, an education "of a kind equal to men’s," Gournay includes a history of women, citing a "vast number of . . . intellects, ancient and modern, of illustrious name" to support her view of women's potential and accomplishments. Her citations to support her arguments--drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Boccaccio, Tasso, and Erasmus--illustrate the depth of her education. (In her history of women, she notes the achievements of Sappho, Hypatia, and Catherine of Siena--but, although she knows the French Roman de la rose, she does not know Christine de Pizan.)

In The Ladies' Complaint, Gournay again addresses misogyny and education. "Blessed are you, Reader," she begins, 

if you are not of the sex to which one forbids all goods, depriving it of freedom. One denies this sex just about everything: all the virtues and all the public offices, titles, and responsibilities. In short, this sex has its own power taken away; with this freedom gone, the possibility of developing virtues through the use of freedom disappears. This sex is left with the sovereign and unique virtues of ignorance, servitude, and the capacity to play the fool, if this game pleases it.

In her Apology for the Woman Writing, Gournay writes to defend herself against the slanders that threaten her--that seek to undermine not only her income but, more importantly, her reputation. It is, her recent editors note, a "profuse autobiographical self-justification."

For an excellent biographical essay from the Encyclopedia of World Biography, click here. For John Conley's careful analysis of Gournay's philosophy, published at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, click here.

As the result of an amazing (and amazingly generous) digitization effort, you can "leaf through" a number of original editions of Gournay's works through the Bibliothèque nationale de France website by clicking here. For an excellent English translation of Gournay's works, see Richard Hillman and Colette Quesnel's Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works.

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron, "An Ornament to France for All Time"

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron (died 3 September 1711)

Born in Paris on 3 October 1648, Élisabeth Sophie Chéron was the daughter of Henri Chéron, a French miniature painter, enameller, and engraver.

Élisabeth Sophie Chéron,
self-portrait, 1672

She was trained in the art of painting in enamel by her father and proved a very successful pupil--by the age of fourteen, she had already begun to paint portraits.

She had also experienced conflict in her family--her Huguenot father was a strict Calvinist, and she had been raised in the reformed faith, but her mother, Marie Lefebvre, was Catholic. Despite her father's preferred religion, the young Élisabeth Sophie spent at least a year in the Benedictine convent of the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Jouarre.

It was in the convent that she began her work, painting portraits of some of her aristocratic classmates and of the abbess, Henriette Lourraine. In his discussion of Élisabeth Sophie, Norman Shapiro notes that, by the time she was sixteen, she had to "help support a family that was all but abandoned by her father."

Her training as a painter allowed her to do that, and she garnered further support by painting portraits of a number of the French nobility. Meanwhile, on 25 March 1668, Élisabeth Sophie confirmed a religious break with her father, abjured her reformed faith, and converted to Catholicism at the Paris Church of St. Sulpice.

In 1672, she was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, sponsored by the French painter Charles Le Brun.* Between 1673 and 1690 she exhibited her work frequently. She earned enough money that she could afford to send her brother, Louis, also a painter, to study art--for eighteen years. In 1700, she was provided with an annual pension of 400 livres by the French king, Louis XIV.

Although known for her portraits, particularly those produced with royal patronage, Chéron also produced paintings with classical themes, religious subjects, and landscapes.

A portrait either of
Madame Deshoulières
or another self-portrait

Élisabeth Sophie's religious training also introduced her to Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, which allowed her to publish Essay de pseaumes et cantiques mis en vers, et enrichis de figures (Psalms and Hymns Put into Verse, Enriched with Figures) in 1694, in which she paraphrased the biblical Psalms.

The volume was illustrated with engravings done by her brother, Louis. Chéron's psalms were set to music in 1699, the same year that she was elected to the Accademia del Ricovrati in Padua, where she was praised as "the Sappho of her time." (That damn "tenth muse" thing again!)

Among other work, she also published a book on the principles of design, Livre des Principes à Dessiner, in 1706, and another translation, this one of the song in the book of Habbakuk (published posthumously). 

While she refused many suitors, she married Jacques Le Hay, an engineer for King Louis XIV, in 1692. She died on 3 September 1711, and was buried in the Church of St. Sulpice, where she had celebrated her conversion. Above her tomb are a portrait and poem, which praises her for her "two exquisite talents, assembled anew" and describes her as the "ornament of France": "Nothing less excellent comes from her pen than from the grace of her brush."

In 1717, one more poem of Chéron's, this one a humorous narrative, was published, Les Cerises Renversées (Spilled Cherries).

There is no biography of Élisabeth Sophie Chéron, but there is a good account of her and her painting in Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race, as well as in the sources I link to, below. The most authoritative information is the SIEFAR essay which includes a comprehensive list of her paintings. (See the note below; the site is in French, however.)

The best account of Chéron's poetry is in Norman Shapiro's French Women Poets of Nine Centuries, which I've referred to, above. Shapiro also includes several English translations of Chéron's psalms.

Although there is not much information available about her, Élisabeth Sophie Chéron's sister, Marie Anne (1649?-1718), who married Alexis Simon Belle, was also a miniature painter.

*There is a great deal of conflict about the date of  Chéron's admission--Shapiro indicates 1672, a date confirmed in other sources, including the authoritative entry by Sandrine Lesly and Véronique Meyer at the SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l'Etude des Femmes de l'Ancien Régime) website, which documents Le Brun's nomination of her on 11 June 1672 and her election the following September. While the nineteenth-century General Biographical Dictionary (quoted above) is a fund of detail, it gives the date of Chéron's election as 1676; Clara Erskine Clement, in her monumental Women in the Fine Arts from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. (1904) says her nomination occurred in 1674.

There is similar "confusion" (or disagreement) about her marriage--with some sources indicating that she didn't marry until age sixty. 

Sibylla Schwarz: A German "Sappho"

Sibylla Schwarz (died 31 July 1638)

Born on 14 February 1621 in the German city of Greifswald, on the Baltic sea, the poet Sibylla Schwarz was just seventeen years old when she died. Her father, Christian, was the mayor of the city; her mother was named Regina. 

Sibylla Schwarz, from the
1650 edition of her work

Little is written about Sibylla Schwarz in English--and, I am sorry to say, I do not read German. Even with the help of Google Translate, there is just not much information to be had about her (at this time, at any rate). 

Her poetry, collected in a volume titled Deutsche Poëtische Gedichte (translated as German Poetic Verses), was published posthumously, in 1650, by a teacher. Included are sonnets about friendship and love, but her poetry also includes themes of war (she's writing during the Thirty Years War) and death. She also notes the jealousy of those who resent a woman writing poetry.

And, of course, like so many other women writers, she was compared to the poet Sappho, praised as the "German Sappho." 

The few works on Sibylla Schwarz are all in German. For the little I have included here, I'm relying on the now-classic Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature Throughout the World, published in 1992 and edited by Claire Buck. (Now out of print, but you can generally find a used copy. It's HUGE--there are more than 5,000 entries!)

Sappho of Lesbos: The "Tenth Muse"

Sappho of Lesbos (new poem published 21 June 2005)

Today's post on Sappho may seem oddly dated--but we know so little about the life of this renowned lyric poet, and we have no definite dates.

But on 21 June 2005, classics scholar Martin West announced the recovery of a "new Sappho poem" in the Times Literary Supplement: scholars had matched a newly discovered Sappho fragment with a previously identified fragment, the two together making a "new poem," though still incomplete, of about twelve lines. So I've used this date for today's post on Sappho.*

A Roman copy of a 5th c. BCE
bust of Sappho

The Greek poet Sappho was likely born around 620 BCE (dates range from 630 to 612), and she seems to have lived into the mid sixth century BCE--perhaps to around 550. 

All we really know about Sappho is found in her poetry--and even that is mostly fragmentary.

The great Library of Alexandria had nine books of Sappho's poetry, organized by the kind of metrical patterns in the lyrics. Today, only one complete poem survives, the "Hymn to Aphrodite," usually labeled as Fragment 1. Fragment 16, "Some Say," is about twenty lines.

Fragment 31 is perhaps my favorite lyric poem in the western canon. Here it is, in Mary Barnard's 1958 translation: 

He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes—
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you—he

who listens intimately
to the sweet murmur of
your voice, the enticing

laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast. If I meet
you suddenly, I can’t

speak—my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,

hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body  

and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn’t far from me.

                                                                       

And here it is, in Diane Rayor's, from 1991 :

To me it seems
that man has the fortune of the gods,
whoever sits beside you, and close,
who listens to you sweetly speaking
and laughing temptingly;
my heart flutters in my breast,
whenever I look quickly, for a moment--
I say nothing, my tongue broken,
a delicate fire runs under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, my ears roar,
cold sweat rushes down me,
trembling seizes me,
I am greener than grass,
to myself I seem
needing but little to die.

But all must be endured, since. . . .

Aside from Sappho's hymn addressed to Aphrodite and a handful of extended but incomplete poems, the remaining poetry is fragmentary, sometimes just a word or phrase. In modern editions, all of the fragments together number about 264. 

Just recently, another large bit of fragment has been recovered--its discovery was made  in 2014.

I've already had my little rant about Plato's reference to Sappho as the "tenth Muse" elsewhere on this blog--so I'll restrain myself here and just provide a link in case you want to see for yourself . . . We'll also see this "praise"--she's the "tenth muse"!--several more times, later in the year.

There's a nice overview of Sappho at the Poetry Foundation website. But, more important than reading about Sappho, read some Sappho today!!! 

Fragments of Sappho

*I used to be able to link to West's piece, but I can no longer find it online. Plenty of discussion is available if you google, but for now, I'll leave this link to a news article about the announcement available at The Guardian.