Two new poems by Greek poet Sappho discovered on ancient papyrus....

[Rowdyboy]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10607569/A-new-Sappho-poem-is-more-exciting-than-a-new-David-Bowie-album.html

Two new works by the Greek poet Sappho have been discovered on an ancient piece of papyrus. James Romm writes at The Daily Beast that the poems were discovered when the anonymous papyrus owner ”consulted an Oxford classicist, Dirk Obbink, about the Greek writing on the tattered scrap…His article, which includes a transcription of the fragmentary poems, will appear in a scholarly journal this spring, but an online version has already been released.”

One of history’s most well known and admired poets, much of Sappho’s work has been lost to the ages. Prior to this new discovery, only one complete poem and portions of four others had been salvaged. Harvard classics professor Albert Henrichs called the discovery “breath-taking,” and notes that its “content is equally exciting.” The new work is the first time Sappho has been been found to refer to “Charaxos” and “Larichos,” believed to be two of the poet’s brothers. The second poem will sound more familiar to those of us who know Sappho as a writer of love poems; it’s addressed to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. Both poems are written in the meter that has come to be knows as a Sapphic Stanza.

Obbink dated the papyrus itself to almost a millenium after Sappho wrote. Romm writes, “It was not long after this time that texts written in Aeolic and other non-standard dialects began to die out in the Greek world, as the attention of educators and copyists focused increasingly on Attic writers. Sappho, along with many other authors, became a casualty of the narrowing Greek school curriculum in late antiquity and the even greater selectivity of the Middle Ages when papyrus scrolls were recopied into books.”

It’s thought that the papyrus came from Egypt, but nobody knows for sure. The black market for papyrus relics “means that many of them emerge not from archaeological digs but from souks, bazaars and antiquities shops.”

Here's one translation

Still, you keep on twittering that Charaxos

comes, his boat full. That kind of thing I reckon

Zeus and his fellow gods know; and you mustn’t

make the assumption;


rather, command me, let me be an envoy

praying intensely to the throne of Hera

who could lead him, he and his boat arriving

here, my Charaxos,


finding me safely; let us then divert all

other concerns on to the lesser spirits;

after all, after hurricanes the clear skies

rapidly follow;


and the ones whose fate the Olympian ruler

wants to transform from troubles into better –

they are much blessed, they go about rejoicing

in their good fortune.


As for me, if Larichos reaches manhood,

if he could manage to be rich and leisured,

he would give me, so heavy-hearted, such a

swift liberation.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

1. My dear Rowdyboy!

Thank you for alerting us to this wonderful discovery.

[Rowdyboy]

3. My pleasure....Glad to know there are others who appreciate history and poetry...

among many, many other things!

[malthaussen]

2. You dropped a line:

Last stanza reads:

"As for me, if Larichos reaches manhood,

if he could manage to be rich and leisured,

he would give me, so heavy-hearted, such a

swift liberation. "

(The culprit was the brackets around the second line in the translation: the formatter deletes the sentence)

-- Mal

[Rowdyboy]

4. I had no idea the brackets would do that...Good catch and thanks for letting me know why

Should be fixed now!

[malthaussen]

5. Neither did I.:)

But when I tried to quote the last line with brackets, I learned it.

I wonder why the line is in brackets in the translation, though. Often that means an interpolation. Since that line is pretty critical to the sense of the stanza, I wonder if Sappho used parentheses in the original. Did the Lesbian dialect even *have* parentheses?

-- Mal

[Bucky]

6. Why didn't she capitalize Twittering?

Also, probably a fraud, as it's WAY over 160 characters