MetaFilter posts tagged with Sappho

The personal website of a retired classics professor

Kattullus — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:12:40 -0800

Humanities and the Liberal Arts is the personal website of former Middlebury classics professor William Harris who passed away in 2009. In his retirement he crafted a wonderful site full of essays, music, sculpture, poetry and his thoughts on anything from education to technology. But the heart of the website for me is, unsurprisingly, his essays on ancient Latin and Greek literature some of whom are book-length works. Here are a few examples: Purple color in Homer, complete fragments of Heraclitus, how to read Homer and Vergil, a discussion of a recently unearthed poem by Sappho, Plato and mathematics, Propertius' war poems, and finally, especially close to my heart, his commentaries on the poetry of Catullus, for example on Ipsithilla, Odi et amo, Attis poem as dramatic dance performance and a couple of very dirty poems (even by Catullus' standard). That's just a taste of the riches found on Harris' site, which has been around nearly as long as the world wide web has existed.

Embrace the Beast? You betcha!

FatherDagon — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:40:53 -0800

Gay Tea Party Witch Sex: Three tales of erotic political fiction (relatively SFW)

Elpenor - Home of the Greek Word

Kattullus — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:40:04 -0800

Elpenor - Home of the Greek Word is a site built around a bilingual anthology of all periods of Greek literature, but there's more, including ancient greek lessons, a collection of texts by non-Greeks about Greece, a gallery of Orthodox Christ icons and an online resource-guide on Byzantium. The site focuses mostly on the texts of antiquity but along with Archilochus, Orphica, Romanos Melodos and Sappho there are some modern writers, like the poets Cavafy and Papatsonis. There's a Greek nationalistic slant to the site but it seems fairly benign and easy to ignore.

Hot Sapphic Love (poem)

melmoth — Fri, 24 Jun 2005 03:28:05 -0800

New Sappho poem found. Combining a Cologne University fragment found in the cartonnage of an Egpytian mummy with a fragment from Oxyrhynchus has allowed the reconstruction of Sappho's fourth poem. The Oxyrhynchus papyri have been much in the news lately, what with the discovery of the earliest fragment of Revelations to give the number of the beast as 616 and the publication of several lines from Sophocles' lost tragedy The Progeny (scroll down). Infra-red imaging techniques may not be sexy, but Sappho sure is. After all, Plato said she was worthy of being considered not only as a poet but as a muse. Sappho herself is a palimpsest or a sort of cypher. We know next to nothing about her -- including whether she was lesbian or not. One thing's for sure: she almost certainly wasn't a schoolmistress.

Sappho: Poem of Jealousy (26 Translations)

y2karl — Sat, 02 Oct 2004 22:04:03 -0800

Are you not amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns, is irrational and sane, is terrified and nearly dead, so that we observe in her not a single emotion but a whole concourse of emotions? Such things do, of course, commonly happen to people in love. Sappho’s supreme excellence lies in the skill with which she selects the most striking and vehement circumstances of the passions and forges them into a coherent whole. Longinus, On the Sublime
Sappho’s poem of jealousy survives only because the ancient critic Longinus quoted it as a supreme example of poetic intensity--now Ken Knabb has put up 26 translations of it in the English at the Gateway to the Vast Realms , the literature and texts section of his Bureau of Public Secrets. And wait! There's more!

The Songs of Bilitis

plep — Tue, 02 Dec 2003 10:56:27 -0800

The Songs of Bilitis. 'First published in Paris in 1894, this purports to be translations of poems by a woman named Bilitis, a contemporary and acquaintance of Sappho. This caused a sensation, not only because finding an intact cache of poems from a completely unknown Greek poet circa 600 B.C. would be a miracle, but because of its open and sensitive exploration of lesbian eroticism. Actually Bilitis never existed. The poems were a clever forgery by Pierre Louÿs--the "translator"; to lend weight, he had even included a bibliography with bogus supporting works ... '
A new addition to the sacred-texts.com canon.

Cosima Rohilla Shalizi - Polymath & Ultimate Pantologist

y2karl — Fri, 21 Mar 2003 00:09:08 -0800

Truly that is a miracle of wonder surpassing the tongues of the eloquent, and far beyond the most cunning speech to describe: the mind reels before it, and the intellect stands abashed

Ibn Hazm
The Dove's Necklace

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, who contains universes: Notebooks, Pieces for the SFI Bulletin, The Bactra Review, Books and Other Texts I've Put on the Web, Poetry and not the worst links page I've ever seen. This is the worst home page ever, according to yankthechain. I'm very proud. He likes, among many others, Avram Davidson, Sappho, Jack Vance, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want? Now, is that a tagline or what?

Kenneth Rexroth, Sappho, and The Bureau Of Public Secrets

y2karl — Tue, 20 Aug 2002 23:44:06 -0800

The Bureau Of Public Secrets , Kenneth Rexroth and Sappho. It was while looking for this fragment of hers, translated by him--(Details within)