Poetry of Sappho

In Poetry of Sappho painter Julie Mehretu has created prints for her first artist book, one of Arion’s most beautiful and ambitious publications. Twenty prints by Mehretu alternate with pages of poetry in Greek and in English. Four additional prints with hand coloring are presented in portfolio. The new English translations were commissioned for this edition from poet John Daley and classicist Page duBois.

Sappho is the supreme lyric poet of antiquity. Celebrated by Plato as the “Tenth Muse”, she left a literary monument comparable to the other precious ruins of the ancient world. As with its time scarred architecture, mutilated statues, and partial inscriptions, what remains of her poems are fragments of a vanished whole, and all the more resonant for being so. The only woman whose poetry has come down to us from antiquity, Sappho wrote more than two and a half millennia ago, a century after Homer, but before the great age of Greek drama and philosophy. Her subject is not war and the state, but individual emotion and the enjoyment of beauty, expressed in unforgettable images. The theme of lost civilizations implicit in Sappho made the ancient Greek poet a fruitful subject for Mehretu.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Julie Mehretu is one of the most admired artists working today. An Ethiopian-American painter known for her densely-layered abstract images, she lives in New York City and works there and in Berlin. She received the 2005 MacArthur Fellowship.

Julie Mehretu has made twenty double-page prints for the book, to be viewed between the facing pages of Greek texts and English translations, alternating throughout. The printmaking process began with the artist scratching the emulsion side of negative film with an etching needle. Light passing through the lines allowed the negative to serve as the direct matrix for a polymer platemaker. The plate, of thin steel, with raised plastic areas for the image, was then mounted on a magnetic base, making the printing surface the same height as type for letterpress printing. The linear effect is that of an etching, though the print is relief, not intaglio. The artist used different gauges of etching needles so that the line width varies and a layering effect is created. For some images, Mehretu drew with pen and ink on mylar over proofs of the images created with the scratched negatives to add yet another layer with a different linear quality, drawn rather than scratched. These elements are heavier yet and seem to rise above the surface of the etching-like imagery.

Mehretu is interested in lost cultures, in the remnants of artifacts of earlier civilizations. Plans of settlements and architecture underlie the surface of her works. Here she seems to unearth fragmentary manuscripts, and the marks are often quite calligraphic. They are poetic statements, graphic expressions of an ancient undecipherable literature that expresses human concerns as relevant today as they were in Greece over two thousand years ago. Mehretu’s art reminds one of Kandinsky’s abstractions and their enduring appeal over a century.

In addition to the prints in the book, Julie Mehretu has made four additional prints, images not in the book, that are offered as an extra suite in a portfolio. Three of the four have been hand colored. These prints are somewhat larger and on heavier paper than that used in the book and are individually signed and numbered, suitable for framing. The suite of prints is more limited than the edition of the book. Ten percent of the book edition is accompanied by the portfolio.

The binding has a portion of an image from one of the Mehretu extra prints on the front and back covers that looks like shorthand writing or hieroglyphics.

NEW TRANSLATION

Page duBois is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Sappho Is Burning, Out of Athens: New Ancient Greeks (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and the Representation of Women in Antiquity and Many Gods: The Persistence of Polytheism.

John Daley is a widely published poet and the author of the collection Not Guilty (2005). A trial lawyer in Southern California, he specializes in the defense of prisoners facing the death penalty.

When Andrew Hoyem contacted the eminent classicist Stephen Glass at Pitzer College to ask for the name of a Sappho expert, he recommended fellow classicist Page duBois, who agreed to write an introduction. In conversations with her husband John Daley, Hoyem learned of their shared interest in certain contemporary American poets, particularly Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. Hoyem then proposed that Daley and duBois make new translations of poems and fragments that they would select, drawing on their respective skills as poet and Greek scholar.

The author reexamines the legends attached to Sappho’s life, such as her being a prostitute, a teacher of girls, a political exile, a suicide, a victim of mistaken identity (the “two Sappho” theory), establishing what contemporary historians believe to be the biography. Professor duBois explains the factors that made the unthinkable possible – for a literary legacy revered throughout the Hellenistic and Roman worlds to have almost perished by the end of the Middle Ages. She retells the chapters in the drama of its partial recovery, through translations in the Renaissance, and, in the twentieth century, from a new harvest of fragments on papyri in Egypt, preserved in a drier climate than the author’s native island culture. In taking up the most recent of these, the astonishing 2004 discovery of the “Cologne” papyri, accidentally found while unrolling the wrappings of a mummy in a German archive, duBois considers the changed meanings of the now fuller version of one of Sappho’s most wrenching verses, fragment 58, with its white-haired narrator lamenting the onset of age and the loss of beauty, yet posing, some say, the possibility of consolation. Now that more of this crucial Sappho poem is available to us, new translations are required. Daley and duBois’s translation is an important contribution, providing an artistic and scholarly rendition of the expanded poem.