Sappho

Sappho de Mytilène
“I served beautyWas it in fact for me something greater?” … Sappho

The first woman poet Lesbos, the great Greek island opposite Asia, 2,500 years ago…

From that time, from that island, we possess a treasure of radiant beauty and, more charged with emotion still than the most admirable object of marble or ceramic: some 650 lines, with cries of love, revolt and anguish, springing for the first time from a Greek mouth — and this mouth was that of a woman: Sappho.

But with the passage of time, her work has come to represent, even her name alone — the very existence of her work being generally ignored — the pernicious, and for some fascinating, mystery of forbidden love.

But she, the woman, the poet, where is she? Who is she? With her works torn to shreads, scattered and buried deep in the sands, in the night of Egyptian tombs, she was deprived of her poems, divested of all historical reality — modern authors have treated her as an imaginary poet born of legend.

But a journey or 2,500 years through works and arts, through customs and ideas, reveals that her glory was dazzling and she was the first modern poet.

Baudelaire certainly sensed it, although he knew only a few of her verses, and in welcoming her into the garden of his Fleurs du Mal did not wish to separate the lover from the poet. Despite the admiration that the ancients had for her, it is only in our time that Sappho can perhaps be completely understood.

It is not only the fragmentary form of her work which contributes to giving her the face of a modern poet. Even in their original state, the poems by the woman who really invented personal poetry were very short, between four and thirty lines and no one else in Greece was to follow this path which seemed too narrow for those used to epics, great odes or tragedies.

In this wonderful world of ancient literature, Sappho was the only feminine voice, the only vision of a woman thrown into the ancient world that we know only through men.

But by a strange coincidence this woman is a rebel; she says no! No to men who refuse women the right to love. No to the democratic tyranny which was to destroy the aristocratic society in which she was a leading figure (and it exiled her!) and no again, sometimes to the gods.

Sappho was finally the first in an often tragic line of people accused in the trials that morality imposes on genius. She was, in her works, burned and broken, as according to legend, Orpheus has been. But if one can tear to pieces the work of a poet as one can the body of a god, one cannot kill her voice.

from Edith Mora
“SAPPHO — THE STORY OF A POET”
Flammarion
Paris 1966
(from the French)
from http://travesti.geophys.mcgill.ca/~olivia/SAPPHO/

Jose Saramago

Written by Portuguese author Jose Saramago, the 1998 winner of the nobel Prize forLiterature, Blindness is a tale that takes us through the depths and heights

(excerpt)
The green light came on at last, the cars moved off briskly, but then it became clear that not all of them were equally quick off the mark. The car at the head of the middle lane has stopped, there must be some mechanical fault, a loose accelerator pedal, a gear lever that has stuck, problem with the suspension, jammed brakes, breakdown in the electric circuit, unless he has simply run out of gas, it would not be the first time such a thing has happened. The next group of pedestrians to gather at the crossing see the driver of the stationary car wave his arms behind the windshield, while the cars behind him frantically sound their horns. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one word but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind. 

I am blind. Somebody please help me, I am blind! Imagine the feeling. One moment you are fine, going about your daily routine. You’ve left work early, hoping to catch your wife at home. Suddenly, your vision is filled entirely with a white luminescence. Not the darkness one would normally associate with blindness, but a whiteness. You panic. What is happening to me? Where is my home? How can I find my way home? A stranger offers to drive you to your apartment, then offers to stay with you as you wait for your wife to arrive. You refuse, fearful. After leaving you at the door of your home, the stranger steals your car. The day progresses and others are struck blind, just as sudden and without warning as you were. Your wife. The car thief. A policeman. The blindness spreads rapidly. An emergency is declared, and the first of those to lose their sight are rounded up and placed in an unused mental hospital, guarded by the military, left to their own devices, quarantined to prevent an outbreak of the epidemic, this “white sickness.” But it is too late. Soon, the entire city, perhaps the world, has gone blind. All except one. 

Blindness by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero(Translator) 

Published by Harvest Books 

ISBN: 0156007754

from michele

Received from michele concerning the previous post “tsunami-tristesse”:

Worth what? And to whom? We blog because we have to spit the words somewhere – sometimes we are just too full or sometimes the words are just too bitter. But in either case, we are unbalanced, out of perspective until the words are spattered like minute spiders on this field of white – and seeing that it is done we find our place again.

Is it going to “save nations or people”? We have no way of knowing for sure, but probably not. Will it save yourself, the writer, – to live and breathe and write and believe in a better world – one more day? Well, that’s what it does for me. And if you find it does that for you, then continue. Not for us, your readers. For yourself, the writer.I, too, feel as if I must do something.

But every tragedy evokes this feeling. It is the magnitude of this one – the shear horror of the insensitivity and power of nature – that makes the pain of this one so much more intense. Sometimes we do appear to be useless. But remember the effect of the single butterfly … we cannot know all that we do. We cannot believe it is more than it is, but we cannot discount that it is something to someone. Hang in there, stratos. (Would’ve sent this via email, but I can’t find your address anywhere.)

tsunami -tristesse…

Survivors are still emerging from the ruins left by the huge quake-triggered waves, which struck a week ago.

At least 124,000 people have been confirmed dead around the rim of the Indian Ocean, with Aceh in Indonesia worst-hit.

The UN has warned the final death toll is likely to be more than 150,000 – and may never be known.

I feel useless

new year (?)

another human illusion.
days and years are there, it is we that are absent.
humanity will live without us.

create!