If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho

"This is a collection of fragments of Sappho’s poems. They are so beautiful, I would recommend them to anyone. Yes, she is concentrating on the fragments so you might get three words and then a gap, which makes the poems even more tantalising and mesmerising because that which is left is so beautiful. Sappho has such wonderful lines. She writes “My child is like golden flowers to me”, and is the first person to talk about love being bittersweet, although she is actually more apposite because she says it is sweet and then bitter, which is how love often ends up. Increasingly we think that she was a priestess for the goddess Aphrodite and one of the things she was trying to do was to coach young girls in the story of the goddess and how important love is in all its aspects. She comes from the island of Lesbos, which is where we get the word lesbian. And there is no doubt that the poetry is very erotic in the way it describes girls. But you have to think of it as a completely different sexual landscape back in the ancient world. So it is also possible that she was just being very sensual. She writes about the landscape and the girls in a similar way. Well, I think it is because she has got all these young girls in her care where they write love poems to one another. They do describe one another in very erotic terms, so it is possible that they had some kind of sexual relationship. Yes, and you have to understand that all these girls were being trained to be good wives so it wasn’t this little lesbian enclave. And this was a stage of their sexual and social development. It is almost like they are learning about love with one another and then they go into heterosexual marriage after that."

"I don’t want to invoke the wrath of scholars everywhere by suggesting that Sappho was a synaesthete, but certainly I find that her work, or what remains of her work, expresses something very akin to synaesthesia. Obviously, there’s the issue of reading things in translation. I don’t speak the original Greek so have only read translations. We just have to trust that the translation is faithful to the original. It is so ancient that all that remains are a collection of fragments of lyric poetry which were composed to be sung to the lyre. I think there’s actually only one complete poem in there, Ode to Aphrodite, but the fragments in themselves are just beautiful – reflections on everything from marriage to old age, bees and chickpeas. It covers a lot of ground. “It is poetry and imagery and appeals to our senses by clustering smells, sights and sounds. I can taste and smell it when I read it” I find it an absolute feast. It appeals to our senses and is so evocative. Even when you’ve got a fragment – some are barely even fragments, they’re tiny shards, just a word or two – they are full of bare feet and tongues and desire and gold and all these things which just make your senses go crazy. They make mine go crazy. You’ve got all this sun and salt and sweat in the Aegean Sea and brides and bridegrooms and blossom of nectar and flowers and colours. I just think it’s extraordinary. That in itself isn’t synaesthesia. It is poetry and imagery and appeals to our senses by clustering smells, sights and sounds. I can taste and smell it when I read it. It’s fascinating that you picked that fragment. That is the one that I have the most powerful response to as well. In this translation it refers to sweet speaking and lovely laughter. I’ve read another translation, which says something like ‘Close enough to sip your voice’s sweetness, your laughter glittering,’ or something close to that. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else like it. There’s something in the way that it is laid out on the page and just these brackets or dashes where words are missing. There is one which I think just has the word ‘youth’ in it. There are nine or ten lines that are indicated as missing. It’s something that we still obviously think about today, however many hundreds of years later. It’s beautiful."