The New Songs Of Sappho

Exciting news for all you classicists out there:

Fragments of two previously unknown poems by seventh-century Greek lyric poetess Sappho have been discovered on an ancient papyrus. An anonymous private collector owned the papyrus, which dates back to the 3rd century A.D. He showed the tattered fragments to Dr. Dirk Obbink, a classicist at Oxford University, who recognized its significance and asked for permission to publish it. Dr. Obbink’s article will appear in a scholarly journal this spring, but an online version of one of the poems is already available via the Guardian. The first of the two poems mentions “Charazos” and “Larichos,” the names given to Sappho’s brothers in the ancient tradition. The second poem is a fragment of a piece about unrequited love.

Tom Payne, who provides a translation of the first poem, marvels at its integrity:

What we have of Sappho has often survived because ancient critics and philologists quoted her, so that we have a word here and a line there. (This has a musical quality of its own: Hugh Kenner called it “the poesis of loss,” and Anne Carson evoked these beguiling gaps in her 2003 edition of Sappho: If Not, Winter.) This poem comes with nine lines of another one, which would have been exciting enough on their own – they show Sappho using words typical of her other poems such as longing and desire, and addressing Aphrodite.

It’s also exciting to have something like a story.

It is a formula of sorts, and its wish that her brother sail back safely from his mission is a frequent trope in the verse of the stormy ancient Mediterranean. But it has an urgency that makes us sense the real Sappho. … And that’s why new glimpses of Sappho will always be thrilling. It’s not just that it’s new ancient poetry; it’s poetry that the ancients loved because it felt so new.

Laura Swift, elated by the discovery, wonders what else is out there:

There are thousands of unpublished papyrus fragments in university collections. Many of them come from Greco-Roman settlements in Egypt, where the dry sands preserved discarded books and papers that would have rotted in the damp soil of Europe. Still, it’s rare to find something as substantial and as well preserved as this new discovery, and papyrologists often have to satisfy themselves with a few tattered lines. Undergraduates studying classical literature are often told the depressing statistic that at least 90 percent of it has been lost.

The thread that connects us to the ancient past is incredibly fragile, and it could be broken each time a medieval monk decided not to copy a text, a fire or flood destroyed a precious manuscript collection, or a book failed to make it onto a school syllabus. But if this papyrus survived, who knows what other lost gems may be waiting in libraries, archives, or tucked away in basements or attics?

(Image of “Saphhos’ poem “An Old Age” (lines 9-20). Papyrus from 3 cent. B.C.” – not one of the newly discovered texts – via Wikimedia Commons)