I'll remember this if I ever need to write a paper on Sapphic verse.
interesting Jon, thank you

KS

On 18/10/2007, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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.)
>
> --
> ===================================
>
>    Jon Corelis     www.geocities.com/joncpoetics/
>
> ===================================
>