INTERVIEWS ACROSS THE CENTURIES
With Sappho, Isle of Lesbos, Asia Minor
630 BC-570 BC
– Part I
George
O night! You who commands all to sleep and silence so souls can
start their eternal converse. How I’ve always wished to have this soulful
dialogue with each one of the human family across space and time separating us!
Sappho
Ϝέσπερε, πάντα φέρων, ὄσα φαίνολισ ἐσκέδασ᾽ αγωσ,
φέρεισ οἴν, φέρεισ αἶγα, φέρεισ ἄπυ ματέρι παῖδα.
φέρεισ οἴν, φέρεισ αἶγα, φέρεισ ἄπυ ματέρι παῖδα.
Hail, gentle Evening, that bringst back
All things that bright morning hath beguiled.
Thou bringst the lamb, thou bringst the kid,
And to its mother, her drowsy child.
All things that bright morning hath beguiled.
Thou bringst the lamb, thou bringst the kid,
And to its mother, her drowsy child.
G- It’s here we will start our interview and the world will read.
S- Ἕγων δ᾽ ἐμαύτα
τοῦτο σύνοιδα
τοῦτο σύνοιδα
And this I feel myself..
Study of Sappho -- Simeon Solomon
Psappho was a 6th-century BCE poet from the island of Lesbos who Dioscorides called the "10th Muse." She was the 1st to write from the viewpoint of a specific persona. The Athenian lawmaker/poet Solon asked to be taught a song by her "so that I may learn it and then die," and during her life she was the most commonly depicted poet on Attic red-figure vase paintings. A century or so after her death the playwright Ameipsias wrote a comedy about her, and she was the subject of at least 5 others. Platon cited her in his "Phaedrus." Silanion sculpted a bust of her in the 4th century BCE. In the 1st century BCE Gaius Valerius Catullus translated and adapted some of her verse into Latin, adopted the 4-line Sapphic stanza (which she was alleged to have invented, and which was later adapted in English versification, as in John Tranter's "Writing in the Manner of Sappho": Writing Sapphics well is a tricky business. / Lines begin and end with a pair of trochees; / in between them dozes a dactyl, rhythm / rising and falling, // like a drunk asleep at a party. Ancient / Greek — the language seemed to be made for Sapphics, / not a worry; anyone used to English / finds it a bastard.), and addressed his lover in his poems as "Lesbia." However, later Latin writers began portraying her as a lesbian, though among the Greeks she was regarded as a promiscuous heterosexual. She probably composed some 30,000 lines of poetry but most of it had disappeared by the 9th century. (Around 1550 Gerolamo Cardano claimed that archbishop Grēgorios Grēgorios of Constantinople, the most accomplished rhetorical stylist of the 4th century, had her work destroyed, and later in the 16th century the Huguenot scholar claimed that pope Gregorius VII had ordered their destruction in 1073.) Her "Ode to Aphrodite" and some fragments have survived, equaling about 650 lines; more than 1/2 of them are found in only 10 fragments, and some fragments only contain 1 word. Until 1879, only ancient quotations of her work existed, but parchments and potsherds with her work began to be found until as recently as 2014.
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