What We Know of Sappho

21–22 of 22 posts

Re: What We Know of Sappho

#21

Post by Rebelgecko » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 10:47 PM UTC

Jun8 wrote: post #8

Analyzing her "Midnight Poem" is a favorite pastime, there has been attempts by astronomers to pinpoint the date of this night, the latest I know is a paper from 2016 ( https://dhayton.haverford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Sap... ). From this paper, here's the poem in Ancient Greek and three translations: ἐδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ πληΐαδες μέσαι δε νύκτες, πα ὰ δ‘ ἔ χετ‘ ὤ α, ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω The Moon hath left t…

It's amusing to me to see the parallels between the analyses of Sappho's poems and the analyses of Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day"[1]

Both start out with the assumption that the events actually happened literally and exactly as they were narrated, and that the narrator isn't taking any poetic license with the chronology.

Then the authors bend or ignore certain facts to build their narrative (whether it's "we're gonna skip the details about the moon" or "we're gonna ignore the details about what was on TV because maybe Mr. Cube was watching reruns or an old VHS tape")

Then you have the counter-analysis where people vehemently decry the flaws of the initial analysis and assume that the original work was done by idiots who are overanalyzing the artistry, then a classic internet flame war develops and nothing is accomplished.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Was_a_Good_Day#Date_of_th...

Re: What We Know of Sappho

#22

Post by dorchadas » Thu, Dec 10, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

sramsay wrote: post #13

bjeds wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually a really cool subject and you can write a lot about it, but I can try to summarize. So Sappho lived over 2500 years ago. Obviously we don't have a complete manuscript of everything she wrote in original. What we have instead are various manuscript copies and copies of those manuscripts, many of which are corrupted, partially destroyed, wrong, fake or has other textual issues. Excluding the fake ones…

And just to add to the above . . . This is not a problem confined to ancient texts. If you read The Great Gatsby any time before the 1990s, you probably read a quite "corrupt" version of it. And, of course, there's Hamlet -- a textual situation so complicated, that some scholars have spent most of their careers trying to work it out.

If anyone is interested in this with Greek Manuscripts, Peter Adamson has an interview with Oliver Primavesi, who created a critical edition of De Motu Animalium that fixed quite a few old errors and is currently working on one for the Metaphysics using some newer manuscripts that the previous edition didn't use because they were considered too 'young', about it in his 'History of Philosophy Without any Gaps'. The episode right before the interview discusses Greek manuscripts during the Byzantine Empire and how they were copied and such, and various other historical aspects of manuscript design. Two of the more interesting episodes in a podcast filled with interesting things. Episodes 317 (manuscripts) and 318 (interview with Primavesi).

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