V
δηὖτε
Once again
A small word. Again. Once more. This time also. Desire does not always arrive as a first event.
The last room held a compound. This room holds a structure. Sappho’s songs come down as pieces: quotations in later handbooks, torn papyrus, a few poems nearly whole. The pieces still have architecture.
Ἔρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει
Once again limb-loosening Eros shakes me.
Sappho, fragment 130 Voigt. The same two lines as before. Now the first word of the event.
δηὖτε is not surprise. It is recurrence. In the hymn that opened the Alexandrian first book, Aphrodite is made to ask what has happened this time, whom to persuade this time, who wrongs Sappho this time.
Desire knows the shape of its own return.
Recurrence
δηὖτε
The lyric does not pretend this is the first shaking. Once again is already a theory of Eros: what moves us can move us more than once.
A third
Fragment 31
Someone sits near the beloved and hears her speak. The speaker watches. The body comes apart in sequence. Desire here has three positions, not two.
A measure
Fragment 16
Some say a host of cavalry, some of infantry, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. I say it is what one loves.
Some say cavalry.
Some say infantry.
Some say ships.
I say what one loves.
Ancient editors gathered the songs by metre. Book one held the sapphic stanza: three long lines, then a short close. We meet that architecture now as scraps. The edge of a papyrus is not, first, a metaphor. It is a physical fact.
That a cut can feel like wanting is a later noticing. The poem is incomplete the way a lover is incomplete: something is there, and something is not.
What remains when the rest is gone?
The fragment is not a failure of the song. It is the form in which the song still reaches.
Source
Voigt. Hephaestion for fragment 130. Longinus for fragment 31. The Oxyrhynchus papyri for fragment 16.
Support
Working English after the Greek, as elsewhere in this walk.
Limit
The triangle of lover, beloved, and the one between them is a modern reading of fragment 31. It is not the ancient apparatus.
Notes · 6
- The Alexandrian edition of Sappho arranged poems by metre. Book 1 held the sapphic stanza. Standard numbering follows Eva-Maria Voigt, Sappho et Alcaeus (Amsterdam: Polak & Van Gennep, 1971), in agreement for these poems with Lobel and Page, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
- Sappho, fragment 1 Voigt. Hymn to Aphrodite. δηὖτε appears in Aphrodite’s questions (lines 15–18). Quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Literary Composition 23, and by Hephaestion for the sapphic stanza.
- Sappho, fragment 130 Voigt (LP 130). Greek preserved by Hephaestion, Handbook on Metres. Working English by this publication, after the Greek.
- Sappho, fragment 31 Voigt. Preserved in Longinus, On the Sublime 10.1–3. English from Henry Thornton Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation (London: David Stott, 1885). Public domain.
- Sappho, fragment 16 Voigt. Priamel opening. Greek via P. Oxy. 1231. Working English by this publication, after the Greek: Some say a host of cavalry, some of infantry, some of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. I say it is what one loves.
- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), reads fragment 31 as a triangle of lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. A modern geometry. Not ancient evidence. Carson’s If Not, Winter (New York: Knopf, 2002) marks papyrus gaps with brackets.
Eve
Once again
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