The Story Behind Sappho Prompts

I never intended to write Sappho Prompts, my first full-length poetry collection. The project came to birth of its own accord. Like a growing child, the book assumed many forms before achieving adulthood. Even now, I sometimes suspect the contents might morph between the covers while I’m not looking.

The First Attempt

It all started with my first chapbook, Someone Else’s Earth, whose poems took shape by accident. I had stumbled upon If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Vintage 2003), Anne Carson’s English translation of the Sappho poems known at that time. Reading her translation, livelier than more traditional renderings, felt like making the shift from black and white to color, or from stills to moving pictures. Words came in response, as if I were answering an unexpected phone call. Both the words and the gaps in Sappho’s fragments captivated me. Poems spilled out from empty spaces that had gone silent. Soon I had a chapbook’s worth of poems, and the first publisher to which I submitted the manuscript accepted it for publication.

My astonishment and delight lasted only for a moment, until the technical details of publication intruded. My first task entailed seeking reprint permission for the translated words of Sappho I had incorporated into my poems. It felt strange and artificial to disentangle Carson’s and Sappho’s voices from mine because, in my writing process, all three sing in concert. Yet the distinctive beauty and inventiveness of Carson’s work demanded that her contributions be identified.

Communicating with a giant like Random House is not for the faint of heart. With no poetry publications to my name at that time, I felt like the cowardly lion approaching Oz. For weeks, I received no response to my request for reprint permission. When my deadline loomed for final manuscript submission, I renewed my request with Random House and conveyed the timeline’s urgency. Less than a week before my manuscript was due, I received their response: they refused. Stunned and speechless, I was forced to confront the reality that my project was dead. My entry into the world of poetry would begin in disgrace—I must break my contract.

Facing Defeat

Something in the poems wouldn’t let me go. It didn’t feel like the pressure of obligation; the words themselves compelled me. I sought another path. Knowing that Harvard University’s widely cited Loeb Classical Library had also published Sappho’ corpus, I contacted them and quickly received permission to use their translation in my manuscript.

Between the time I sent my reprint request to Harvard and the day I received their positive response, I began revising my poems, substituting Loeb’s translations for Carson’s. Two disturbing discoveries resulted: first, having been published before Carson’s book and before additional ancient manuscripts had been discovered, the Loeb version of Sappho did not contain all the fragments available to Carson. Some of my poems referred to fragments in Carson’s translation that were absent from Loeb’s version. This meant that I would be forced to eliminate several poems from the manuscript. The second discovery was even more devastating: my poems couldn’t survive the surgery. Excising Carson’s words and substituting Loeb’s simply didn’t work. My poems fell flat. I was right the first time—my project was dead.

My defeat sent me prowling around the house in spirals of preoccupation until my spouse, a well-established author and scholar of antiquity, offered a solution. “Why don’t you just translate it yourself? That way, you don’t need anyone’s permission.” I loved the sound of that last part but his proposal presented new obstacles. I had previously translated a fair amount of Hellenistic Greek but I had never worked with classical Greek, much less Sappho’s dialect, which had fallen out of the classical mainstream. More to the point, only three days remained before my publisher’s deadline.

Had more time been available for deliberation, I may well have reached the sensible conclusion that I faced an impossible task. But since my only alternative to producing my own translation was to throw away my opportunity for publication, I set to work and translated the fragments I needed for the chapbook. In most cases, I still preferred Carson’s more artful and erudite renditions over my own but at least the words were mine. Changing the translations also required me to revise all my poems. Still, I met my deadline.

Once I sent the manuscript out the door, I brushed off the dust and turned to a new project. That didn’t work and I should have known. It always happens this way with translation. The effort to render an ancient author’s words into English inevitably allows the Greek original to set its hooks in you. Enthralled by Sappho’s voice across the millennia, I started from the beginning and worked my way through her entire known corpus, which had expanded yet again since Carson’s translation was published. When I reached the final fragment, I felt like I always do when I read the last page of the Odyssey or the end of anything by Virginia Woolf—wanting more. So I started writing.

Writing Sappho Prompts

Sappho’s surviving lyrics supplied the initial impulse for the poems that followed. I felt at home in her musical context, her immersion in the natural world, her constant yearning for love and beauty, and the world of Greek myth. While attending to Sappho’s songs, I recalled the many women who have graced my own life. The surround-sound of those many voices brought me joy and gratitude but they muted mine. Unanimously, the beta readers of my manuscript’s multiple versions urged me to own and amplify my point of view. I found this difficult. I made many revisions but also balked at the task. Then and now, I think of Sappho Prompts as a chorus rather than a solo.

Choosing instead to listen ever more closely to Sappho’s ancient words, I dove deeper into the problems of translation. Sappho’s fragmentary corpus presents challenges beyond the usual decoding issues for papyrus documents and the obvious problems presented by fragmentary manuscripts: Sappho invented words unattested elsewhere in classical Greek. Unable to infer their meaning from fragments, lexicographers can only send a translator back to Sappho. When I consulted other translators’ results, I saw that Sappho’ meaning had eluded them, too. Free from deadline pressure, I took perverse pleasure in imagining other translators’ struggles to make sense of Sappho’s neologisms.

Translating Words and Pictures

Since my translation would serve the demands of poetry and not of scholarly argument, I made adventurous choices. In one instance (“Becoming I,” Sappho Prompts 11), I followed the sense expressed in a dramatic passage in Aeschylus. In another case where Sappho’s meaning remained elusive, I wrote a poem about the word’s puzzling implications. That poem became a finalist in one journal’s annual poetry contest (“Iokolpos.” Atlanta Review, no. Fall/Winter: 89; Sappho Prompts 38).

When all was said and done, a pile of scraps littered the floor—words and phrases from poems and translations that I loved but couldn’t fit into the manuscript. Once again, I found myself unable to close the book until I had incorporated these discarded bits that still held beauty and significance for me. I crafted the book’s last poem entirely from those scraps, in the form of a dialogue between Sappho and myself (“Cento Duet,” Sappho Prompts 57).

A final surprise presented itself with the task of furnishing the book’s cover art. Since I had never succeeded in untangling my voice from Sappho’s and other inspirational voices, I embraced the multiplicity. I created the cover image myself by drawing my own face multiple times by touch, blind. Closing my eyes and tracing its shape with my non-dominant hand, I translated its contours into ink marks with the other hand, then added watercolor, allowing the hues to blend. The overlapping lines and colors remind me of the many layers of verbal art that shape Sappho Prompts.

Having said all this, Sappho’s songs in their original form still ring in my ears. This journey might not yet be over.

On Not Translating Sappho

Let her words stand
as they were found—
those few that survived
antiquity’s torch and pillage
thanks to cartonnage paste,
desert sand, parchment flakes

that preserve her salt-splashed words,
gleaming wet color like reef fish.
In Sappho’s tongue, participles cross-dress
as verbs and nouns like the Aegean’s
rainbow wrasse who changes sex
as it swims—sharp as rock,
cold as a cave stream.

Dry papyrus conjures
the snare-twisting goddess
who visits would-be lovers
as a swoop of sparrows.
Sappho’s dead dialect
links color-words to contexts—
millet yellow, purple hyacinth,
black earth, the dawn-hues
of precious metals, violets
tucked in hidden folds, a headdress
twined in dill and clover.

Sappho’s honeyed adjectives, prepositions
on horseback, nouns crammed
with meaning. She needs
just one word to spread
spell-casting smoke, to voice

a girl’s hushed cry in fear of sex.
Her invented rhythms stir
the apple-scented breeze,
sing the surf-boom, the grief-sigh.

Her sea-language lights a fire
beneath the skin, spins
acquiescence to her fated death,
if only love comes first.
Let her darting lines
flash silver.