Sappho on the Potomac In a summer seminar, professor learns as much about 38 BELLA RMINE MAGAZINE teaching as about poetry By Frederick Smock brings to Sappho’s lines an intelligence and a creative intuition. Remarkably, only one poem of Sappho’s survives whole, and none in her own hand. The rest are fragments. Carson honors those gaps with lacunae in the text where the missing words would have been, and I found the many silences within and around the lines to be tantalizing – “an imaginal adventure,” in Carson’s words. We know so little about Sappho. (In the Dictionary of Lesbian Biography, the page for Sappho is left blank, so as to allow the reader to project his or her version.) Carson’s book of translations is titled If Not, Winter, which is a line from Sappho’s fragment 22. I break her title down thusly: If, because what little that remains of Sappho’s poems is so iffy (sometimes only quoted by others); Not, because it is a negation, beginning perhaps with the physical degradation of Last summer, I was invited to attend a weeklong seminar on ancient Greek lyric poetry at the Center for Hellenic Studies, in Washington, D.C., taught by Professor Gregory Nagy (“Naj”), head of the classics department at Harvard University. Why I was one of 18 professors selected from a wide pool of applicants, I do not know (I don’t even have a Ph.D.), though I imagine it might have had something to do with my being a poet; that might have been a kind of diversity that Professor Nagy desired. Most of us were generalists, not classicists, with a few theater people tossed in as well. In any case, I was excited by the prospect of being a student again, if only for a week. My books arrived in early July – Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho; Anthony Verity’s translations of Pindar; Robert Fagles’ translations of Bacchylides; and an anthology of these and more translated by Richmond Lattimore. I spent that month reading those ancient poets at Lakeside, where my wife, Olga-Maria, and I are members. It is an old limestone quarry that has been subtly transformed over the years into a first-rate swim club; appropriate to my assigned reading list, its copious stonework and flowerbeds lent an air of Mediterranean elegance. And so I passed a very pleasant mid-summer betwixt ages – the ancients in my hands, the lake before me and small airplanes puttering to and fro overhead. My greatest pleasure that month was reading Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. Carson is both a professor at Princeton University and a poet, and the author of Eros the Bittersweet, selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. She
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