Poem of the Week 2014/13 (part 1)

Sappho: Fragment 104

Evening Star

Hesperos, you bring home all the bright dawn scattered,
bring home the sheep,
bring home the goat, bring the child home
to her mother.

from Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho, translated by Willis Barnstone (2006)

Time for another Sapphopalooza! Last time I did this, the only reaction I got was that the number of translations was kind of overwhelming. So this time, there are three entries: the first today, so you can take in the basic poem on its own; the second tomorrow, with 25 different versions and variations, done between 1893 and 2009; the third on Wednesday, in which several poems from the English-language tradition reference this poem in different ways.

When a poem is built on repetition, even slight variations can have a powerful effect. This fragment of Sappho's work survives because it was quoted by an ancient rhetorician named Dimitrios as a charming example of anaphora ("the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses"). This translation preserves the cumulative power of the repeated words "bring home" (as you shall see tomorrow, not all of them do). Though the strictest, most literal translations do not include the word "home," it seems implicit in the poem's sense of a comforting return, as the day ends, to an intimate and familiar place of refuge.

There's a wonderful balance to these few words, in which Hesperos, the brilliant star of early evening, ends what the sun's bright dawn started: the business of the day in the world outside the home. It is time for wanderers to return home. For of course these lines were written when people mostly had to conduct their public business when the sun was out; night might be broken by bonfires and torches, but their light didn't carry far enough to make the outdoors a particularly safe place to be. And of course in these lines the sheep and the goats are not mere pastoral decoration, but a major source of food, clothing, and wealth; they were what you sacrificed to placate the gods, and what you protected from marauding predators, human and animal. There is a sense here of gathering in the gently, sweetly domesticated products of Nature to a place in which they are valued and safe, which deepens touchingly when the final item is brought home: the child to her mother. The very bareness of the words – "the child home to her mother" – allows us to supply whatever emotion (care, anxiety, gentle love, expectation patient or eager) we would most connect to in such a situation. This translator subtly emphasizes the importance of the child over the sheep and goats, and the importance of the concept of "home," by putting the direct object in this one case in between the words "bring home": it's bring home the sheep and bring home the goat but bring the child home. And only with the child is there a mention of who is waiting at home.

Part 2 may be found here and Part 3 here.