specialagentartemis:

slips-of-sappho:

dog-girls-balls:

i got this book of sappho’s poetry only to find out it has translations that paint sappho as straight. like this absolute classic that every dyke knows by heart

istg i hate cishet academics so much.

There’s a lot of very interesting meta analysis around the translation of Fragment 102!

The Anne Carson translation also uses ‘boy’ (Fortunately she translates MANY poems as very Sapphic, still) The back of the book includes in-depth analysis of many of her translation choices. I don’t personally prefer with this one, but the reasoning

When looking into it, the word Sappho used for the object of her longing is παῖδος, paîdos, which is most commonly translated as “youth” because it’s not gendered. It can mean either a boy or a girl.
(There are reasons besides heteronormative assumptions for translating it as “boy”—though the word is not gendered, it’s cognate with a lot of words like puer that mean “son” so may have had a more masculine-as-default assumption (like a lot of European languages do), and when Sappho wrote about young women, the word she commonly used was παρθένος parthénos “young woman, maiden, virgin.” But paîs/paîdos it is not a gendered word and could be translated either way!) 

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Slips of Sappho

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Ahh, thanks for the shout-out!

Yeah, this fragment is really intriguing in its ambiguity, and has been approached in different ways by different translators and classicists. It’s something I’m increasingly interested in, Sappho’s use of the word “pais” (and its genitive form “paidos”) throughout her work. For example, in another poem, she uses “pais” to refer to her own daughter! So it’s far from cut-and-dry. Someday I will either find an article about that or write it myself, but for now, I can say about fragment 102 in particular, that a lot of ink has been spilled about these two little lines by different analysts from different backgrounds. And I think the popularization of one particular translation, the one by Diane Rayor that goes “slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl,” does a disservice to the ambiguity of the lines as well as the statement Rayor is making with her translation choice!

I happen to have two books about Sappho on hand, and this is what they say about it:

ALT

Introduction by Pamela Gordon to Sappho: Poems and Fragments, translated by Stephen Lombardo and edited by Susan Warden, 2002, p. xix. (This book uses a different numbering system for the fragments for reasons I’m not fully clear on, ignore that.)

ALT

ALT

from Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs: Configurations of Female and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric by Lyn Hatherly Wilson, 1996, pp. 118-119.

Two very different approaches to the fragment, but both use the assumption that “paidos” here should be translated as “boy.” Gordon problematizes Lombardo’s choice to do so; Wilson takes a different interpretation entirely. Simple heteronormative assumptions on the part of the translators almost certainly play a part, but it’s neither deliberate erasure nor complete obliviousness. However, many translations translate this word as “boy” in this fragment.

So Diane Rayor’s choice to translate “paidos” in the fragment as “girl” is extremely deliberate and pointed! She’s saying, you all are choosing to interpret the object of the speaker’s affections as a boy, but it is also equally correct to translate this word as 'girl.’ It’s pointed, it’s intentional, it’s a deliberate pushback against common translation practice to point out that the choice to say “boy” is making just as much of an assumption as the choice to say “girl.” And that point gets lost when the fragment is presented as an uncomplicatedly straightforward or objective reflection of what’s in Sappho’s original text - in either direction!