By PAULO MARTINS*

Sappho's poetry survived through other authors, those same ones whose works reproduced, reinventing it, this same tradition.

As old as Western literature itself, erotic poetry has spanned the centuries, sometimes seen as a cultural byproduct, often clandestine, sometimes as a genre that arouses that somewhat embarrassed reverence towards classical texts – and this is no exception when it comes to Ancient Greece, lavish in the artistic manifestations of a culture that valued sensuality.

The most notable fact (and perhaps most embarrassing for some) is the realization that it was the poetry of a woman from the 7th century BC, Sappho of Lesbos – whose name, yes, gave rise to the terms lesbianism and sapphism – that inaugurated this long and rich tradition.

Not much remains of her work: the mercilessness of time has left us very few texts, and almost none have reached us in their entirety. What we have today are only fragments, ruins, traces of an innovative poetry that can only indicate or suggest or indicate the greatness of this poet.

Out of print in Brazil for a certain time, or scattered in some publications, the fragments of his poetry are now gathered in books such as Eros, Weaver of Myths, by Joaquim Brasil Fontes (2003); Sappho of Lesbos: Hymn to Aphrodite and Other Poems (2011) and Fragments of a Goddess: The Representation of Aphrodite in Sappho's Lyric (2005). In addition to Sappho's texts, these editions aim to make detailed analyses, unprecedented in the national literary scene.

Little is known for sure about Sappho's life. Born between 630 and 612 BC in the city of Mytilene, on the island of Lesbos, located in the Aegean Sea (off the coast of modern-day Turkey), she had to leave the island at some point for obscure political reasons and settle in Sicily, then a Greek colony. There, according to tradition, she gathered around her a group made up exclusively of women in order to worship, through music and poetry – which were inseparable at the time – in honor of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, mother of Eros, the boy god whom Latin tradition perpetuated under the name of Cupid.

It was in these rituals of celebration of the erotic and sensual that, by all indications, Sappho gave rise to this genre of poetry that would thrive, in its most diverse forms, to this day. And it is curious that this force, typical of the rare historical moments that mark the inauguration of an art, has survived through a “ruin”. The answer may have been given by Ezra Pound, who, by including it in an anthology, justified the act in The ABC of Literature: “I have placed the great name of Sappho on the list because of its antiquity and because so little remains of her work that it can either be read or omitted. If you have read it, you will know that there is nothing better.”

Ezra Pound specifically refers to the ode Poikilothron (Hymn to Aphrodite), one of the most sensual in literary history, and it is quite likely that it was from this that erotic literature was born, either by direct allusion or, in more uncertain cases, by pure coincidence. Its erotic nuance is not evident, except for the fact that it has as its center person poetic Aphrodite herself, mother of the weaver of myths, who is placed on a throne of colors and brightness, the poikilothron, from which we can see the mixture of colors (the poikilia or varieties) and characterized as a “weaver of plots”. The lovers’ plea is directed to her, so that the heart of the “I”, which speaks in poetry, is not bent before the sorrows and pains that the goddess weaves.

Not so subtle is the ode Take care of me (it seems to me), in which Sappho represents her love as a god, to whom she attributes unparalleled gifts – “this smile of yours that awakens desires” – and constructs epiphanies of love as a physical condition to which the lover is subject: “my heart in my chest trembles with fear the moment I see you”; “a furtive flame runs beneath my skin”; “my eyes do not see, my ears buzz”, “a cold sweat covers me”; “I am one step away from death”. It is worth remembering that this same ode would be revisited by the Roman Catullus in the 1st century.^o B.C^[1]

Regarding the homoerotic content of his poetry, another fragment is exemplary: “that I were dead, yes, // she would leave me, between tears // and tears, saying // “Ah, our bitter destiny, // my Sappho: I leave against my will”. But be careful: here it is necessary to react against the biographical reading, because this type of poetry among the ancients could or could not be a reflection of a condition experienced by the poet, and what Sappho’s text tells us may not actually be something from his own life. Which, however, does not invalidate the breadth of homosexual figuration.

But, if it is true that Sappho's poetry serves as an emulator of erotic poetry, it is also essential to say that it survived through other authors, those same whose works reproduced, reinventing it, this same tradition – sometimes distant from a certain vulgarism; other times, so close and, even so, an object worthy of the highest literature.

It is not unreasonable to include in this list such odd pairs as Sappho and Horace, Propércio and Florbela Espanca, Adélia Prado and John Donne, Paulo Leminsky and Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman and Manuel Bandeira, Ovid and Drummond, authors who excel in their ability to translate Eros into words, despite the fact that they are almost never authors limited to this theme alone, nor necessarily considered close to each other, since the distinction between the sensual, the amorous, the erotic and the fescenine among them is clear. However, it is worth saying that, in all cases, the child god and his mother preside over the poetic elaboration, and it is their metamorphoses that feed the arts of this kind.

In classical antiquity, much erotic poetry was written, and this is so true that a specific poetic precept was constructed around the theme, developing an immense range of subgenres – Horace in his Poetic Art (Epistle to the Pisons) thus asserts. For example, the Roman erotic elegy of Catullus, Ovid, Propertius and Tibullus is fundamental to understanding the erotic production of classical poets such as John Donne (1572-1631) in The Extasie (To the bodies, finally, let us return, / Unveiling love for all people; / The mysteries of love, the soul feels, / but the body is the pages we read.) or in Elegie: Going to Bed (Let my wandering hand enter/ Behind, in front, above, below, enter./ (…) My precious Mine, my Empire,/ Happy is he who penetrates your mystery), masterfully set to music by Péricles Cavalcante, translated by Augusto de Campos and recorded by Caetano Veloso on the album Transcendental Cinema.

But it is always good to remember that the reading of ancient texts fundamentally presupposes the separation between the poet, historically taken, and the subject of the poetic enunciation, even if sometimes named in the poetic statement. Many misunderstandings derive from this. Therefore, when we read Sappho, Propertius, Ovid, or even John Donne, we cannot confuse beforehand historical subject and person poetics.

A fact that can and should be disregarded when we are faced with contemporary, post-romantic and romantic poets, in whose works personal and idiosyncratic characteristics can be observed, which are marks of their singularity, but which are still themselves reconstructed as poetic material.

When Manuel Bandeira, for example, builds the beautiful Etching na Lyre of the Fifty Years, he gives the dimension of this proximity: “The black on white/ The comb on the skin:/ Bird spread out/ in the almost white sky.// In the middle of the comb,/ The bivalve shell/ In a sea of ​​scarlet. Shell, rose or date?// In the dark recess,/ The sources of life/ Bleeding uselessly/ From two wounds.// Everything well hidden/ under the appearances/ Of the simple etching:/ Of face, of flank,/ The black on white.”

In addition to recovering the elocution of the canon of erotic poetry, constructing what the ancients called “ekphrasis” (a descriptive procedure of a visual image, produced, most of the time, from the mental image, fantasy in Aristotle's terms in De Anima), Manuel Bandeira also prints a whole personal story/history that cannot be disregarded: in his poetry the impossibility of the realization of love and the sublimation of sex are evident. Not to mention the compositional simplicity that is the touchstone of this great work, demystifying language itself and associating it with its own simplicity, in a chess game whose subjects are life and poetry.

To speak of love and sex is to speak of humanity itself. In ancient times, it was the reflection of the human condition that should be observed in poetry as something possible, necessary and inevitable; in modern times, as a portrait of an individual condition that leverages the “poetic and historical self” to the core of representation and, therefore, to the center of existence. These two aspects are present in Sappho.

The first part of the archetypal point that is the work itself, today fragmentary and other, whose national commentators cited operate and which arises from the deciphering of the theme as a condition of life. Thus Eros – and not the Fates/Moirai, the ladies of man's destinies – is the one who weaves life. Life as myth, as discourse that represents the universal and loving condition of the man who survives, even in the face of the hardships that life imposes and in the face of the pleasures that the text and love provide.

* Paulo Martins is a professor of Classics at the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at USP. Author of, among other books, The representation and its limits (edusp). [https://amzn.to/4jMVAIY]

Note

[1] cf. https://aterraeredonda.com.br/o-livro-de-catulo/

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