I thought I'd expand a little on my previous remarks on the printing
of Sapphics, which (since I garbled it twice before) I'll first repeat
for reference:
---------
Incidentally there's good reason to believe that the ancients thought
of the Sapphic stanza as consisting of three lines, the first two
shorter and a third which was lengthened by the addition of the
adonic, as opposed to the four lines (three longer followed by the
adonic as a separate short line) standard in modern texts'
layout. The idea of printing the adonic ending of the third line
as a final, fourth line, thus creating the familiar stanzaic shape of
three longer lines capped by one shorter, is due to scholarly
orthography which crept into the texts somewhere (someone's probably
written a history of this.) I think this orthography has pretty
fundamentally influenced modern perceptions of poems written in the
meter.
---------
OK, to expand on that last sentence, here as an example are the first
few stanzas from a translation I did, in an approximation of Sapphic
meter, of Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, which I usually print following
the standard modern line layout for Sapphics, thus:
---------
Aphrodite, immortal, enthroned in wonder,
Sky-daughter, webstress of schemes, I entreat you
not to break my spirit with pangs of anguish,
Queen, Lady, Mother,
but now come to me, if in the past you ever
also heeded me when I cried from afar, and,
leaving behind the golden house of your father
Zeus, you descended
borne in a chariot yoked to a flock of lovely
sparrows flying fast over earth's black richness,
thickly fluttering wings leading you a passage
through bright mid-heaven,
-------------
But Sappho and her audience almost certainly would have perceived
these strophes as something better represented by this pattern:
-------------
Aphrodite, immortal, enthroned in wonder,
Sky-daughter, webstress of schemes, I entreat you
not to break my spirit with pangs of anguish, Queen, Lady, Mother,
but now come to me, if in the past you ever
also heeded me when I cried from afar, and,
leaving behind the golden house of your father Zeus, you descended
borne in a chariot yoked to a flock of lovely
sparrows flying fast over earth's black richness,
thickly fluttering wings leading you a passage through bright mid-heaven,
---------------
To me, at least, the difference in impression given by the two layouts
is major. The first one tends to make the poem seem fussy, delicate,
intense, concentrated, a tightly constructed miniature. The second
gives an impression of being more dignified and discursive, of
stateliness; instead of being a miniature, it opens up into a majestic
procession. Or so it seems to me.
I wonder how different the impression Sappho makes on modern readers,
both in Greek and in translation, would have been if the latter layout
for her strophes had become standard instead of the former one.
(Maybe in the future I'll print my translation the second way. The
whole version is on line at
http://geocities.com/joncpoetics/translations/Sappho2.htm if anyone
wants to see it.)
--
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
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