 Our guest this morning is Dr. Diane J. Rayor, Dr. Rayor's Professor Emerita of Classics at Grand Valley State University, Michigan. She has translated many wonderful classical texts, among which include Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Medea, The Homeric Hymns and the topic of our discussion this morning, SAFO, a new translation of the Complete Works. So Dr. Rayor, welcome to the show. How are you? Thank you. I'm doing fine and thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it. I'm honored to have you here. I love your translations. We're about to talk about a very fascinating figure, someone who is kind of a cipher. We've talked about cipher figures in the past such as Hepatia. SAFO seems to be one of these. So tell us a little bit about SAFO. How do we separate fact from legend in telling her story? So there are some things that we do know about SAFO and some people tend to emphasize the absences and there are many because what we have, what remains of her poetry is quite fragmentary. So we have to work within those limits, but we still have quite a bit. So it's not the blank page and it's not just all made up. We have what remains of her poetry. So SAFO thrived at about 600 BCE on the island of Lesbos and she wrote in the Eolic dialect. And so when we have fragments and poetry that survives in either quotations from various sources or on papyrus, it's clear that it's from a particular time period and from a particular place. One of the confusing things is that she had a contemporary male poet, Alcius, who of course wrote in the same dialect and at the same time. So sometimes people have to decide is this a SAFO or is this an Alcius? But so we have her surviving poems, we have ancient sources about SAFO, we have archaeological resources and we have the knowledge of the Greek language and culture of that time so we can put together those various pieces. So what we do know about SAFO, besides where she lived and when, is that she writes about her mother, she writes about a daughter and she writes about three brothers in the poems that are surviving. She also in her fragments, there are many women's names that are mentioned and we have a lot about what her audience was interested in. So let me make clear here that everything that SAFO wrote, as I've been saying it, it was all performed. So she was a singer-songwriter and she was famous in her time and ever after. So we have to think even poems that sound completely intimate and like a diary or a letter, these were all performed before an audience. So she would have performed before a same-sex audience of women in her community and everybody would have known her. So the poems were addressed to an audience who knew her, who knew her family. So they would need to be poems, songs that people were interested in. What are the topics people are interested in? Well, obviously love, right? And all her erotic poems and SAFO was most famous and always has been for her homoerotic poems are addressed a female speaker speaking about a female beloved. And so we have that and there are marriage poems, you know, ones that would have been sung before a mixed-sex audience at the occasion of marriages. There are hymns to the gods and those would have been performed at festivals. So lots of different occasions, both for more private settings and more public settings. And we can't really tell which is which. We can guess that some were probably performed by a chorus where she would play the lyre, some she would sing, some they would sing, perhaps they would dance to some. So we have odds and ends that we can pull together. She would have been married because everyone was, everyone would have been married then, that was just assumed. And her husband is mentioned, but clearly she didn't put him in a song because his name is actually just a joke. It's basically the little prick from the Isle of Man in Greek. So, you know, it's a joke. So whether she made the joke or people later made the joke, we don't know, probably more likely later. And her father's name also isn't mentioned. We know that because there's five different names given for his name, five different possibilities, right? So if she had actually sung about him, then we would have that or ancient sources would be able to cite that. So that just gives you a bit. Now, the second question is how do we separate fact from legend in telling her stories? So there's two things. One is that every time and place has seen Sappho in a different light. And so we all have our own Sappho's and even right now we all have our own Sappho's because we're picturing her in a certain way, right? Just like I'm picturing Sappho's drumming on her lyre and performing in a certain way, right? So we have to look at what is the evidence that we have from ancient sources and particularly from her poems themselves. We know for example that in a poem that we had part of it discovered about a century ago and then in 2004 another chunk was discovered, it's poem 58, where it just fits like a puzzle piece and just slots right into it from the torn papyrus. And this one has the myth of the goddess Dawn falling in love with the human tithonus and she asked for him to be immortal but forgot to ask for eternal youth to go with that. And so he ever after continued to grow old, kind of horrible and creepy. So we know from this and from other poems that Sappho included myths. One of the legends about Sappho is that when she was old, she gave up love of women and fell in love with the hot young ferryman and when he wasn't interested in her, she jumped off a cliff and killed herself. Okay, there is zero evidence for that from Sappho's time, from any of her surviving works and most scholars believe that that was a story, a quite misogynistic story and, you know, kind of homophobic story that was crafted maybe in 5th century Athens when they had a lot of body comedies about Sappho or later or it could have been that in one of Sappho's poems she told the story of Phaion and she told the myth and from there people took it as biography. And so we're walking kind of a delicate line because as you know, a song is not necessarily autobiographical, right? But it also has pieces of it. So when she talks about her family, we can assume that for the audience that knew her in Lesbos when she's mentioning family and friends, they're probably in the audience or known to the audience. And so that kind of thing we can take as more autobiographical. But they would also know if she was playing with them, right? And if she was using them and myths in different ways in her poems, like when she sings about the Trojan War in Helen in a couple poems that survive. So we know that she told stories and they're not all autobiographical, right? Just like we would assume a singer songwriter today is drawing on their life, but that they can sing about lots of different things that might interest their audience. And it brings up a great point just about Sappho's position as a poet, a writer. She's writing about things that she knows people around her know. It's about not just her life, but about her entire milieu, so to speak, her entire, you know, her friends, her family. She's singing about people she knows. And just getting back to how Sappho is reconstructed, I found it very interesting in the introduction to the text that there were four modern reconstructions of Sappho that dominate scholarship. Of course, we always have Sappho the teacher or Sappho basically the religious cult priestess, right? Sappho the banqueter. But when I found most interesting and I wasn't very familiar with was Sappho as chorus organizer, which I would assume that's where you fallen. And it makes the most sense to me after reading the introduction, because just the subject matter of her poems, she's working with a lot of young women, young women didn't really have a lot of outlets to get, you know, an education or things like that outside of a chorus. So it would make sense. Yeah. And actually, there's more possibilities, which is actually closer in line how I'm seeing it. I see Sappho as teacher as trying to diminish her work. Oh yeah, she was teacher and earlier it was kind of like of a finishing school or she was a priestess in even the chorus master idea. We don't know of the poems she has, how many of them were choral and how many of them were monody solo song. And everybody has a different idea about which poems were which. And so it's not clear. I tend to be a little more flexible even than Andre Lardinois who wrote the introduction. And of course, I checked through everything and, you know, edited what I didn't like to and all that. But I see Sappho as being a citizen poet. And so she's writing for her community. Sometimes she'd be performing for her group of girlfriends. And sometimes she'd be performing in a larger setting. Sometimes it would be choral. Sometimes it would be monody. And she wasn't just working with young women. We know some of them were young because of the word Parthenos, which means a woman ripe for marriage. It can be translated as maiden or virgin. But it more particularly means whenever a woman in that particular culture and time is usually married, that's a Parthenos. And so when she uses that word, we know it's young woman. Okay, but she doesn't always. And it could equally be age mates. And she uses the word age mate a lot actually. And so they could be women her own age. Sometimes she uses the word Pythos, where we get pediatrics, for example. And so she could be talking about young girls. And in fact, in the poem 58, it says, reveal the beautiful gifts of the violet-robed muses girls dancing to the song-loving voice of the sweet-toned liars. And so this is a poem that it, since we have the evidence right in it, that there's singing and the girls are dancing. This makes sense that this is one where she's singing and playing the lyre and the girls are dancing. We don't know that, but that's what the song says. So I think we need to just be really flexible because there's such a variety of poems. And they're doing different things. They're different meters. They're different topics. It's not just one thing. And so that's where I would expand out from that. And you mentioned the introduction. And I do want to say all my translations always include an introduction and notes, because not everything can fit into a translation. And I want my books to be able to be picked up by any instructor, any general reader. And they should have the advantage that I have of being, you know, I'm a classical scholar, but all the important information, I try to make sure they're in the introduction and notes. If I can't include it in the translation itself, then it'll be in one of those two places. And that's also where we can see where the sources are, where were these fragments found, you know, who quoted them, what are the sources? Both the Sappho translations and your Homeric hymns have great introductions. And the Homeric hymns have, I think most Homeric hymns have a glossary because there's just so many gods to keep track of, right? You know, just getting into your work as a translator, you know, the Greek language is very multifaceted. It conveys many different things. I was talking to Jackie Murray about this when we were talking about race and antiquity and Tim Whitmarsh's article on Black Achilles and how different words in the Iliad convey different things depending on the context. You know, something like xanthos can mean something very different depending on the situation. So just as a translator and dealing with these many different facets of the Greek language, what are the challenges in rendering into English, the work of Sappho? Every translation is a puzzle. The Greek word technae, where we get technology obviously, means both skill and art. And translation really is both of those because you have to, at least I believe you really, really have to know the language and the culture. You have to have the background. Some people will match translators with poets. So where you have a scholar and a poet working together. And that's a possible way of doing it. But I think you have to know the language deeply to be able to translate. So there's the skill of it, the knowledge that comes behind it and just the skill with words. And then there's the art. How can you turn poetry in one language into poetry in another language? Because if only we could just do tracing paper, right, where we could put down the original language and the target language, so English here, and it would come out, but it doesn't. There's also a magic to it where there's the Greek, there's the English, and what doesn't come across. And that's where I try to put them in the notes. I try as hard as I can to get as much as possible. But it is partly magic because language, there's so many things that even ordinary words come with their own baggage. For example, grass. When we think of grass, we think of maybe lawns or cultivated or yard grass, whatever it is. In Sappho's time, and all the archaic poets, grass was erotic. We just don't get that now. It was a sign of fertility because in Hesiod's theogony, when Aphrodite is born out of the sea, she steps onto the ground and grass grows up her ankles. So grass is a symbol of eroticism and fertility. So there's different things that are involved in that. Or one of the examples that I gave in my introduction is the Greek word poikilos. And that's one that's a really common word, even in the fragments that remain of Sappho's, where she uses this word poikilos. And this is where if you compare different translations, you'll see a lot of different choices because it means dappled like the sun filtering through leaves on the trees in a forest or the dappled spots of a fawn. So it can mean light filtering through. It can mean different textures like embroidery. It can be inlaid wood. So you have those different textures. It can be different colors. It can be a complex mind, you know, the poikilosness of a mind. There's all these different possibilities. So I've been translating Sappho a long time and I keep trying different words out. I've tried dappled. I've tried colors of many hues. I've tried inlaid wood and my very earliest one. I mean, I've tried a lot of things. And I decided on iridescent, which is in Sappho one, we get an example of this deathless Aphrodite on your iridescent throne while weaving Daughter of Zeus. I beg you not to break my spirit, oh Queen, with pain or sorrow, but come if ever before from far away you heard my voice and listened and leave in your father's golden home you came. Your chariot yoked with lovely sparrows, drawing you quickly over the dark earth in a whirling cloud of wings down the sky through mid-air suddenly here. And it continues from there. But the idea of an iridescent throne, that gets kind of the light and the color and the multiplicity of it. And besides the word is really beautiful. And I really work with beauty and sound a lot. But there's so many different possibilities for that word and all of them correct. So you have to decide for the particular poem for the particular author what makes sense. And so my process of translating is mostly listening. So I read the Greek over and over again. I read my English over and over again. I have other people read my translation over again. And so I can hear what's going on because this was all meant to be sung. So I try to get the repetitions of words, of sounds. There aren't rhymes per se, like no end rhymes in Greek. But so many of the words have either internal rhymes or end rhymes and repetitions and slow and fast. So I'm trying to capture as much of that as I can in every poem. So that's part of the challenge of putting Sappho's work into English. And there's a lot of other challenges, but that gives a taste. And I do have a note on translation in the book and also in the Montreal Review, where I was able to expand on that as well. I love the image you create of Aphrodite on her chariot. And she's being carried by these sparrows. It's a very beautiful image. Yeah, it's just amazing. And just getting to Greek, I'm by far not fluent in Greek, but I have studied the language. And one of the things that catches you off guard right away, just even as a beginner, is the word order and how you can convey relationships and things like that in word order in Greek that you can't necessarily convey in English. So you're right, it's just taking into account the relationship of words, of nouns and in relation to each other. It's all very complex. And the original author means something in their text that we don't necessarily see in the translation. So I think you convey it very well, especially, I would imagine Sappho's lyrics as very aesthetically pleasing and beautiful to match kind of the subject matter that she's talking about. She's talking about young maidens, she's talking about her friends. It'd be a very interesting setting for her to convey this. She's talking about friends she knows. You know, this is love between people, different kinds of love, obviously. So I think you made some great choices. In the introduction, you pointed out that Sappho's really been part of your lifelong academic journey. So I don't know if you could just touch upon that. I started taking Greek in college on a whim. One of my professors used it in class, and it was just so pretty to look at. And it sounds so beautiful. And so it was just kind of a whim. And then I just kept taking more. And by the time I was a junior in college, I had started reading Sappho in the original. And my professor asked me to translate this one poem of Sappho's that she said she didn't like the other translations of it. And so I love a good challenge. So I translated it was like, yeah, now I know what I'm doing with my life. I'm going to translate Sappho, I'm going to become a translator. So, you know, you might not think the most practical choice. But I went to, I translated 14 poems of Sappho for my senior thesis in college. And I went to graduate school to become a better translator. Fortunately, found out that I love teaching, because you don't make a living as a translator, unless you're very fortunate and translate famous works. So my dissertation was on translation. And my first book that included Sappho was Sappho's Liar. And I had 66 poems of Sappho's in that. And all the other Greek women poets in it. And then a selection of the male poets at the same time, so that there'd be some comparisons. But my goal was always to do a solo Sappho book. And so I just kept working with Sappho. So I have a lot of books with Sappho in it. But in 2014, there had been a couple new discoveries of Sappho poems. And so I wanted to include those. And I finally was able to have a publisher who was interested in me doing a solo book on Sappho. And then new things came out, which is why it was redone this year in a second edition, finally out in paperback. But yes, Sappho to me is just really fascinating, because she's talking about very directly women's love for other women. And we get glimpses of women's lives that we can't get from anyone else, because she's in a particular time and place. Most of what classicists read in Greek is written by men. And so it's like, what are their lives like? What are their interests like? Not filtered through male writers, but at that particular time. And also her language is so direct. It's not highfalutin. There's nothing pretentious in it. It feels like what we would sing today. So I tried to imitate that in kind of a plain, unvarnished way of translating it, because that's how direct the Greek is too. So yes, it's always been really part of my life from the time I was 20 till now I'm 65. So I've been doing Sappho a very long time in terms of Sappho. And in terms of her value to us, it's not just about Sappho herself, but she's giving us a snapshot into a unique community of people at a certain period in time that we'll never see again. There are things that intersect obviously with our modern world, but it's just fascinating to hear these conversations going on that are so familiar, but at the same time so unique to this place and time. I did want to mention that with the paperback, there's also a free audio recording. And anyone, maybe I shouldn't be saying this, but you don't have to buy the book, you can just download for free the audio recording. And the book and the audio recording are a little different. Because in the book, I imitate what we have in the papyrus and wherever there's a gap, you can see the gap, there's brackets, there's ellipses, there's space. In the audio recording, the way I asked Kate reading the professional narrator to do it is for the really fragmentary poems. Just read the words we have. So it's as if we're sitting in a coffee shop and we're hearing little bits and fragments of poetry, of conversation. And so it's a very different experience to hear it. And of course, it was meant to be heard. So I love having this combination of the very precise accurate print edition with the notes and all of that. And then the experience of just hearing it as a performance. Because everything Sappho did was a performance for her community. And community comes through so strongly in her work. She says, for example, I will sing this beautifully to delight my companions and the Greek is female companions. And there's just this joy in beauty in different kinds of beauty in community and the joy in living. So I try to get that across because that's so very much in Sappho's poetry. I just want to thank you for these wonderful translations. I really enjoyed reading them. And I also felt it was important to get to the bottom of who Sappho actually is as a person in an objective historical sense. And from what we can glean from her poetry as opposed to pop culture conceptions, like she's like Cleopatra kind of Hepatia type person. And we can project things onto her that aren't necessarily there. It's very important to see the person for who they actually were and what they bring to the table is very important and unique in itself. So thank you, Dr. Rare. I appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate being on.