“in the crooks of your body i find my religion” and other things sappho never said
this quotation has been going around recetnly as attributed to sappho, and as a classics student with a particular academic interest in everyone’s favourite tenth muse, I can assure you that this is not a legitimate fragment. one thing bothers me though – where does it actually come from? I’d like to talk a bit about that and about the way we talk about/represent ancient literature on the internet in general. if you have any interest in classics or even just the dark academia/literary aesthetic which so proliferates on this website, I strongly encourage you to read this.
all links to sources for this post will be in the comments because I’d really like people to see this and spread it around.
in the crooks of your body I find… made up fragments of ancient greek poetry?
as someone who has read carson’s if not, winter extremely thoroughly and has studied sappho in greek twice during my undergrad degree, I think I can safely say that there is no surviving fragment which could be translated, even loosely, like this. I’ve posted about it on twitter as well, and none of the postgrad students or academics who follow me have chimed in to say they recognise it. I can assure you that a fragment with such a sexual undertone in the context of religion would be extremely interesting to scholars, and I and others would have come across it in article after article if it was real. which it isn’t.
so where is it from? other dodgy-looking sappho attributions tend to be easily traceable, by a single google search, to a creative translation or similar. not this one! aside from goodreads (ugh), pretty much every result is from tumblr, with a few from other social media sites like instagram. it’s the title of a footballer rpf from 2015 over which, before I checked the date more carefully, me and my friend shared a moment of pure horror as we wondered if this was the source. but no – the earliest appearance of the quote on tumblr comes from a blog called themotherofrevelation, whose old url seems to be sublimesea. she posted the quotation on the 25th of december, 2014 – I ran a google search to see if the quote appears in any results before that date. it does not. the ‘sappho’ tag on themotherofrevelation’s blog is full of quotations and poems which she attributes directly to sappho but which come from the extremely interpretive ‘translations’ of john myers o’hara – but there’s nothing apart from in the crooks which seems to have no other source. the only real un-tumblr attestation of the line comes from is for my lover, she is fair: a sappho tribute, a poetry collection published by figroot press - but the only date I’ve found in connection with it has been 2017, and it also fails to ascribe the quotation to a particular fragment or translator. did this blogger completely make up a sappho fragment, then? or is it taken from a poem or translation so obscure that it has never found its way to the internet? if anyone knows anything or has any other ideas, please let me know!
sweet mother I cannot think critically about things I read on the internet
even if in the crooks does turn out to be lifted from some very obscure fill-in-the-gaps translation, it’d still be extremely bad practice to attribute it directly to sappho with no acknowledgement of the translator. and this, alas, is something tumblr (and probably the internet in general) seems to struggle with. one of the first things I came across in my hunt for the source of in the crooks was a tumblr blog called dailysappho. dailysappho posts a lot of fragments without any credit given to the translator, only to ‘sappho’. this isn’t great, but it’s one thing when the fragments are recognisable, quite another when it’s stuff like this:
this is from a poem which a lot of poetry websites also seem to attribute purely to ‘sappho’, but which comes from a translation from 1920 by arthur sanders way. It claims to be a combination of fragments 121, 123, 122 and 126. I can see bits of some of these fragments and possibly of others (who knows what notation he was using tbh) but it’s far from a close translation of any of them. sappho didn’t say this one either!
john myers o’hara seems to be a very common source for misattributed quotes – his collection, from 1910, is essentially a poetic imagining of sappho’s work, a completion of the fragments. one of his that I’ve seen around is “you are the breath of my body, the blood in my veins, and the glowing pulse of my bosom”, from ‘aphrodite’s praise’ which at a glance doesn’t seem to be based on any fragment I can easily recognise. this was posted by tumblr user violentwavesofemotion in 2014, and attributed to sappho with a link to o’hara’s text. that isn’t enough! not naming a translator directly causes widespread misconception, not to mention devalues the incredible work that translators do (if I do say so myself).
I’d like to clear up one more quotation and one more issue here – “now in my heart I see clearly a beautiful face shining back at me, stained with love.” this comes from a translation of sappho 4 by willis barnstone, but again, I’ve never seen them credited. the problem here is not that the words are not by sappho – she does seem to have written most of these words in the same poem, but each word appears at the end of a different fragmentary line, of which nothing else is preserved. some lines are missing altogether. the coherency of the quotation in question is willis’ creation - sappho did say these words, but she did not express this sentiment. the verb ‘I see’ isn’t even there at all. in a case like this, checking the translation with carson’s in if not, winter should give you a clear idea of the whereabouts of the lacunae and the liberties taken by the translator.
all in all – please credit translators, everyone – remember the confusion and drama caused by not to me not if it’s you (euripides’ orestes tr. anne carson) last year? that was largely due to people not crediting the translator and a lack of understanding of the relationship between translation and the nuance of the text.
I understand, of course, that it’s very hard to factcheck sappho because there is no recent, close-to-the-text translation available in the public domain. it’s even harder to find the original greek online, if not almost impossible. I’m going to post some resources in the comments as well and discuss them briefly here.
- there’s a pdf of anne carson’s if not, winter that’s been around for ages online and which seems perfectly safe. this edition contains almost all of the fragments discovered, with both a translation and the corresponding greek text. it’s an incredibly useful resource, but I would advise people not to take carson’s translations as absolute gospel, and especially not her edition of the greek text. there isn’t much of a commentary, either.
- if your university has access to the online loeb library, or if your library has physical copies of the loeb editions, those are great! the volume of sappho and alcaeus also has the greek with an english translation, and it will give you the context in which certain fragments were quoted by later authors (and so preserved for us).
- when I read and translate sappho, I use the commentaries and editions of denys page, felix budelmann, and david campbell. these aren’t very accessible, but I’m putting them here so that people know that such editions exist. check your libraries!
- perseus, the greatest online resource for reading ancient literature, does not have sappho. I’m putting a link to it anyway because it has a lot of other ancient texts and public domain translations. click on a greek or latin word and it’ll tell you what it means!
I also want to emphatically stress that I am not infallible in this situation - I made up a fake sappho fragment as a joke on the netflix subs of neon genesis evangelion a while ago, and failed to make it crystal clear that it wasn’t real. let the following be a lesson to you as it has been to me:
origamiaround
stormborns
gummygunk
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
