A Vaguely Olympics Related Poetry Day

It was so funny listening to Bob Costas talking about the Greek island of Lesbos tonight on the Olympics broadcast. He totally skipped over the one question that had half of America giggling. i can imagine all the Beavis and Butthead imitations going on in living rooms across the country: "huh-huh... he said lesbos... huh-huh."

Yes, strictly speaking, a lesbian is what you call someone from Lesbos. So how did that word become transformed into a gay moniker? And what does that have to do with poetry day? Read on:

The most famous lesbian of all was the classical Greek poetess Sappho, who lived in the seventh century B.C. She ran a school for girls on Lesbos that was sort of the artistic hippie commune of its day. She was such a revered poet that people called her "the tenth muse."

Sappho wrote a series of beautiful lyric poetry that survives only in fragments. It was written on stone tablets, which broke over the years and many of the pieces are missing. The only thing left of much of Sappho's work is a line here and a line there, leaving only glimpses of some romantic and evocative poetry, now lost forever.

Some of Sappho's poem fragments have been interpreted as evidence that she was indeed a lesbian, in both senses of the word. Thus the modern meaning of "lesbian." Although there is still some dispute about whether Sappho really liked girls or whether it was more of a sisterly thing she was writing about.

Sappho's poems have consistently resisted translation into English in a way that reveals their beauty to the non-Greek speaker. Or so i'm told. i took Latin, not Greek in high school, so i'll just have to take the poetry scholars' word for it.

Mary Barnard's recent translation is very nice, although i'm not sure how faithful it is to the original. Today's poem is an especially pretty translation by Barnard, which seems to be from a more intact fragment.

Yes, Atthis, you may be sure

          Even in Sardis
Anactoria will think often of us
of the life we shared here,

          when you seemed
the Goddess incarnate
to her and your singing
          pleased her best

Now among Lydian women she in her
turn stands first as the red-
fingered moon rising at sunset takes

precedence over stars around her;
her light spreads equally
on the salt sea and fields thick with bloom

Delicious dew pours down to freshen
roses, delicate thyme,
and blossoming sweet clover; she wanders

aimlessly, thinking of gentle
Atthis, her heart hanging
heavy with longing in her little breast

She shouts aloud, Come! we know it;
thousand-eared night repeats that cry
across the sea shining between us

i think it's appropriate that this week's poem is a selection from Sappho, in honor of the Olympic Games in general and a couple of American gold medalists in particular who, perhaps unintentionally, paid homage to the spirit of Sappho the other night.