Sappho's lyre : archaic lyric and women poets of ancient Greece

233 Pages·1991·5.74 MB·English

by  Diane J. Rayor

SAPPHO'S
LYRE
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SAPPHO'S
LYRE
Archaic Lyric
and Women Poets
of Ancient Greece
TRANSLATIONS,
WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,
BY DIANE J. RAYOR
Foreword by W.R. Johnson
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1991 by
The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sappho's lyre : archaic lyric and women poets of Ancient
Greece / translations, with introduction and notes by
Diane J. Rayor ; foreword by W. R. Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-07336-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Greek poetry—Translations into English. 2. Greek
poetry—Women authors—Translations into English.
3. English poetry—Translations from Greek. 4. Women
and literature—Greece. 5. Sappho—Translations,
English. I. Rayor, Diane J.
PA3622.R39 1991
884'.01089287—dc20 90-48642
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 07 06
13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum
requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997)
(Permanence of Paper). @
For my mother and father
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Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xxi
Map xxiii
Introduction 1
ARCHILOCHOS
21
ALKMAN
31
STESICHOROS
39
SAPPHO
51
ALKAIOS
83
IBYKOS
91
ANAKREON
95
SIMONIDES
101
KORINNA
109
TELESILLA
117
PRAXILLA
119
ERINNA
121
ANYTE
125
NOSSIS
133
MOIRO
137
HEDYLA
139
MELINNO
141
Abbreviations 143
Notes 145
Select Bibliography 197
Numeration Table 203
Foreword
Thanks mostly to Horace, some of the spirit and much of the letter of Greek
lyric, though not the lyrics themselves, had both fame and influence in Eu-
ropean culture even before the Greek language and its extant literature were
recovered for Western Europe. Its favored motifs, its rhetorical strategies,
its dynamics of transition, modulation, and "sequences of aspects," its spec-
trum of appropriate masks and the plausible situations of sung discourse,
all the formal and thematic materials that Greek lyric poets had developed,
were passed on by Horace to his medieval heirs (admittedly in ways that the
Latin language and the Roman poet's genius had inevitably deformed and
transformed) and thus entered into the lyric traditions of Europe even be-
fore the fall of Byzantium and the return of Greek to Rome. Thus even
before the Renaissance something of Greek lyric had begun to be domes-
ticated, and during and after the Renaissance that process of appropriation
steadily flourished until, by the time Romantic Hellenism was in full swing,
Greek lyric was familiar to Europe, had come to seem to be not merely the
origin of Western lyric but also its enduring core, of its essence. There is
not a little truth to this version of the place of Greek lyric in the lyric of the
West, but that truth tends to obscure other aspects of Greek lyric that are
no less important for its appreciation.
The verses in this volume are distinct from other collections of lyric
poetry in numerous ways, but in two particular ways they are especially dif-
ix