Ten Greatest Poets – Sappho, Tenth Muse (Postscript)

My June 9, 2018 post about Sappho relates that of her estimated 10,000 lines of lyric poetry, most of what is extant exists only in fragments and that but one complete poem, “Ode to Aphrodite,” remains.

On June 24, 2005, The Guardian reported that the missing lines of one poem, titled by scholars Old Age or Tithonus, had been recovered from the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy.

The report implied that we are now gifted not with one but with two complete Sappho poems.

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It was found in the cartonnage of an Egyptian mummy, the flexible layer of fibre or papyrus which was moulded while wet into a plaster-like surface around the irregular parts of a mummified wrapped body, so that motifs could be painted on.

Last year two scholars, Michael Gronewald and Robert Daniel, announced that a recovered papyrus in the archives of Cologne University had been identified as part of a roll containing poems by Sappho.

Researchers realised that parts of one poem corresponded with fragments found in 1922 in one of the great treasure troves of modern classical scholarship – the ancient rubbish tips of the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus.

The completed jigsaw is today published in an 1,500-word article with commentary and translation in the Times Literary Supplement by Martin West, emeritus fellow of All Souls, Oxford, a renowned translator of Greek lyric poetry, described by the British Academy as “on any reckoning the most brilliant and productive Greek scholar of his generation”.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jun/24/gender.books

—“After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho,” The Guardian (June 24, 2005)

A polished English translation of the poem by J. Simon Harris was published on July 6, 2018 in The Society of Classical Poets website.

OLD AGE by Sappho

Original language Aeolic Greek

Translated by J. Simon Harris

Hold on, little girls, to the beautiful gifts of the violet Muses,

and cling to your love of the clear sweet lyre, that lover of music.

My skin was once supple and smooth, but now it is withered by age;

my hair had been lustrous and black, but now it is faded and gray.

My heart grows heavy; my knees, too weary to stand upon,

though once, they could lift me and dance, and could leap as light as a fawn.

I grumble and groan on and on—and yet, what else can I do?

No woman has lived without aging, no man has eternal youth.

They say that Tithonus was held in the rosy arms of Dawn,

who carried him off to the ends of the earth, so her love would live on.

Though charming and young at the time, and despite his immortal wife,

he too would succumb to old age in the end of his endless life.

Yet, thinking of all that I’ve lost, I recall what maturity brings:

the wisdom I lacked as a youth, and a love for the finer things.

And Eros has given me beauty not found in the light of the sun:

the passion and patience for life that so often is lost on the young.

https://classicalpoets.org/2018/07/06/a-translation-of-sapphos-old-age-poem-by-j-simon-harris/

—“A Translation of Sappho’s ‘Old Age Poem’ by J. Simon Harris,” The Society of Classical Poets, July 6, 2018

Doubts have been raised about the authenticity of the recovered Aeolic text.

The article in the link below, for example, raises technical objections but is somewhat inconclusive.

https://archive.chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/3401

—Jürgen Hammerstaedt, “The Cologne Sappho: Its Discovery and Textual Constitution,” Center for Hellenic Studies: Harvard University, March 11, 2011

Recently, claims about the original provenance of the recovered papyrus were retracted, raising more doubts about the authenticity of the salvaged text.

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In the years following the publication of the poems, many concerns were raised by scholars about why the manuscript remained unavailable for study, and why documentation concerning its acquisition had not been made public. It was said to belong to a London collector who preferred to remain anonymous.

In the now-retracted article, first published in 2016, it was stated that the papyrus manuscript on which the Sappho poems were written had been recovered by the staff of the London collector from cartonnage – ancient Egyptian papier-mache, often used to create funerary masks. According to this account, this particular piece of cartonnage, perhaps once used as bookbinding, had been formerly in an American collection, and eventually purchased legally by the collector in a Christie’s auction in London in 2011. When the cartonnage was dissolved by the collector’s staff and the individual sheets teased apart, the Sappho poems were revealed. Crucially, the artefact in question had been, according to this account, taken out of Egypt before 1970, the year a Unesco convention on cultural heritage was widely adopted. Strict Egyptian laws govern excavation and trafficking of its ancient artefacts.

A privately circulated Christie’s brochure was revealed in 2019 containing some images of the recovery process described in the article, but the photographs, when analysed by papyrologists, led to yet more questions about the account’s credibility.

Small fragments of the same Sappho manuscript ended up in the private collection of the American billionaire evangelical Green family, who fund the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. After concerns raised about the legality of a number of artefacts in their possession, museum officials investigated these small fragments of the Sappho manuscript and announced that they had been purchased in 2012 from a Turkish dealer, Yakup Eksioglu, without appropriate documentation. Eksioglu said last year that he was the source of all the Sappho fragments. He called the story of the recovery from cartonnage bought at Christie’s a “fake story”. The Green family has repatriated their portions of the Sappho manuscript to the Egyptian state, along with thousands of other artefacts found to have been wrongfully acquired.

According to the statement from the editors of the retracted chapter, “The repatriation of the Green Sappho fragments has restored these papyri to [their] rightful owner.” The main part of the papyrus manuscript, they said, “remains problematic, not only because its provenance is tainted but also because the papyrus … is inaccessible. We sincerely hope that it will also be made available to the academic community soon and its acquisition circumstances fully explained”. They have not, they say, seen any evidence to suggest that the manuscript is inauthentic.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/25/doubts-cast-over-provenance-of-unearthed-sappho-poems

—“Doubts cast over provenance of unearthed Sappho poems,” The Guardian (March 25, 2021)

The jury is still out on the authenticity of the recovered text of the second allegedly complete Sappho poem.

Head of a Greek Woman