What We Know of Sappho
theparisreview.org
theparisreview.org
ἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ πληΐαδες μέσαι δε
νύκτες, πα ὰ δ‘ ἔ χετ‘ ὤ α,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω
The Moon hath left the sky;
Lost is the Pleiads‘ light;
It is midnight
And time slips by;
But on my couch alone I lie.
(Symonds, 1873–1876).
The moon has set, and the Pleiades;
it is midnight,
the time is going by,
and I sleep alone.
(Wharton, 1887: 68).
The silver moon is set;
The Pleiades are gone;
Half the long night is spent, and yet
I lie alone.
(Merivale, 1838: 226).
I can't make head or tails of this. Anyone have any idea what words are those?
Edit: I mean, it looks to me like we're missing some ρ's, say "παρά δ' ἔρχετ‘ ὤρα", as in "ώρα παρέρχεται" or something like that.
The poem is beautiful and the translations do its sophisticated simplicity no justice.
Thanks to the OP, by the way, for the astronomical article. I have tried to date the poem as well. And the imagery of the Nebra sky disk made me try even harder.
I was reading the blogpost linked by OP criticising the coverage of the paper (https://rogueclassicism.com/2016/05/16/problems-with-the-sci...) and it has an image of the poem as it's cited in the paper. Indeed, it says "δέδυκε" and "παρά δ' ἔρχετ‘ ὤρα".
I suspect someone tried to copy the poem from the original paper and left behind a few characters, because LaTex. Or in any case some kind of transcription error occurred and nobody noticed because, well, ancient Greek.
The language is tricky since Attic is only covered in introductory courses and this has sone non-Attic forms. For those of you who want to have a go in trying you hand at your own translation here are some short but useful notes (http://aoidoi.org/poets/sappho/sap-2.html). I had an earlier version of these notes that were longer, i.e. he pointed out the tmesis in Line 3.
There is only one point in this criticism that is not valid, there is no doubt that the Pleiades referred to the same group of stars as now.
Nevertheless, when dealing with Ancient Greek or Latin texts it is necessary to be aware that a very large number of names used for animals, plants, minerals, places and so on, were used with a very different meaning than today, so Darin Hayton had good reasons to be cautious in his criticism.
Unless one is careful to make extensive searches through the literature, it is very easy to reach wrong conclusions based on misunderstood names.
For example the poems of Hesiod have several references to "adamant", i.e. "diamond" in English, which are hard to understand by those who think that he referred to what is now called diamond.
In fact, Hesiod used the name "adamant" for nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy (collected from alluvial deposits of gold), so he appropriately mentioned it as grey material suitable for making a hard blade for a sickle that will cut anything.
Later Greek authors, like Plato used it with the same meaning as Hesiod. Pliny the Elder was the first author that mentioned the modern diamond, under the name "Indian adamant", together with the previously known osmium-iridium "adamant".
Both start out with the assumption that the events actually happened literally and exactly as they were narrated, and that the narrator isn't taking any poetic license with the chronology.
Then the authors bend or ignore certain facts to build their narrative (whether it's "we're gonna skip the details about the moon" or "we're gonna ignore the details about what was on TV because maybe Mr. Cube was watching reruns or an old VHS tape")
Then you have the counter-analysis where people vehemently decry the flaws of the initial analysis and assume that the original work was done by idiots who are overanalyzing the artistry, then a classic internet flame war develops and nothing is accomplished.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Was_a_Good_Day#Date_of_th...
I went down that rabbit hole a while ago and I found convincing arguments that the Sappho poems were fakes (though the Bible fragments are genuine but stolen). I can’t find the source again. I thought the Atlantic article explained it, but they stop at the Turk who provided them to Obbink. So I’ll settle for “likely forgeries”.
Finglass is a litte bit of a "celebrity" in 21st century classical studies: his works on for example Sophocles are very highly praised, and I have strong reasons to believe that his Sappho will be really good.
So Sappho lived over 2500 years ago.
Obviously we don't have a complete manuscript of everything she wrote in original. What we have instead are various manuscript copies and copies of those manuscripts, many of which are corrupted, partially destroyed, wrong, fake or has other textual issues. Excluding the fake ones (how do you know which are fake?) these manuscripts are corrupt, destroyed or wrong in different places. Some fragments are quotes from other manuscripts which in turn have the potential issues mentioned.
When preparing a critical edition, you basically collect all of these ancient manuscripts and try to figure out how they relate to each other, and based on what you know of the manuscript and the text you can relate them in a tree (imagine a git commit log with branches)... for example if manuscript B is copied from an earlier manuscript A. Then based on your skill and knowledge you use this limited information to try to figure out what the original manuscript said.
Apart from some old papyri, like the ones found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus, for many authors the oldest surviving manuscripts are often from around the 10-12:th centuary. So if you read Homer or stuff like that, it's been like 1700 years before the original and the oldest surviving manuscript used to base the critical editions used today. So who knows what was originally in the manuscript :-)
These critical editions are then what other scholars use when they translate these poems into English.
The fun part about reading the critical editions instead of translations is they show you what the textual issues are: often it's not obvious and controversial what a particular word should be in the text, if there are many possibilities that are equally likely. The translations will have to pick one interpretation of the text and stick with it, to not make it overbearingly complicated for people to read the works.
Edit: Two more things
(1) The most common textual corruption are related to word anticipation when you copy a text by hand. So say you're a 12:th centuary monk and you copy (by pen) a text, you will probably read a sentence, memorize it, and write it down in the copy you are working on. A common problem is if in a previous sentence you had to write down a word that is different but sounds like a word in the sentence you will now write: it's easy to accidentally write down the old word again.
(2) More nefarious: There are many instances when copyists remove or alter text for political or religious reasons.
This is not a problem confined to ancient texts. If you read The Great Gatsby any time before the 1990s, you probably read a quite "corrupt" version of it. And, of course, there's Hamlet -- a textual situation so complicated, that some scholars have spent most of their careers trying to work it out.
"Though trodden beneath the shepherd’s heel, the wild hyacinth blooms on the ground," is Wolfe's take on, "As on the hills the shepherds trample the hyacinth under foot, and the flower darkens on the ground."